Laundry hangs from a fence outside a university campus in the Palestinian city of Jericho, at a makeshift home for more than 400 workers from Gaza. There are thousands more workers throughout the Israeli-occupied West Bank, including in the city of Ramallah.
Claire Harbage/NPR
RAFAH, Gaza Strip, and JERICHO, West Bank — News from Gaza comes in conversations in the hallway, over the communal sinks, between bunk beds, and texts and calls with relatives. For thousands of workers from Gaza who are stuck in makeshift shelters and camps in the West Bank, much of their world — including their families — is still 60 miles away.
On Friday, they heard about thousands of other laborers who were forced to return to Gaza on foot from Israel — dropped off several miles from the Israeli border with Gaza, wearing numbered tags on their ankles.
Some of those men, after returning to Gaza, told NPR they had been rounded up across Israel by the country’s security forces and detained following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, when militants stormed into Israel, killing around 1,400 people and taking an estimated 240 hostages, according to Israeli officials.
Basel Zrain, a worker from northern Gaza, has been separated from his wife and children for about a month.
Claire Harbage/NPR
Israel’s Security Cabinet said on Thursday, “Israel is severing all contact with Gaza. There will be no more Palestinian workers from…
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