It was a sweltering April day when 70 Palestinian laborers squeezed into the back of a garbage truck, crammed between rotting waste and heavy trash bags, all clutching one desperate hope: to slip undetected across the border into Israel for a day of work that could feed their families. Thirty-seven-year-old Majd, a resident of Beit Furik just south of Nablus who asked to protect his identity, was among them. The unmarked crossing did not go undetected — Israeli forces stopped the truck at a West Bank checkpoint within minutes. For more than two hours, the men were left trapped under piles of refuse in the scorching heat, as soldiers processed their case. “At the beginning when they stopped us, we were afraid to go to jail,” Majd told independent outlet Middle East Eye. “Then when it took longer to get out, we were scared to die.” When they were finally pulled out, all were taken into custody. Majd, who had no prior convictions, was released the next morning and forced to walk home past Israeli settlements.
Majd’s terrifying journey is far from an isolated incident. It is the direct outcome of a cascading economic collapse in the West Bank triggered by Israel’s decision to revoke roughly 150,000 Palestinian work permits in the immediate wake of the October 7, 2023 attacks. As household savings evaporated over months of closures, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian breadwinners have been left with no option but to risk arrest, injury, or death to cross into Israel for informal work.
This current crisis did not emerge overnight. It is the end result of decades of structured economic control that has left the West Bank uniquely vulnerable to collapse, analysts say. When Israel first occupied the West Bank, initial access to Israeli labor markets pushed wages up temporarily, but the decades that followed brought a deliberate process of “de-development” that stunted the growth of local Palestinian agriculture and industry, leaving the territory almost entirely dependent on Israeli labor and revenue streams.
A 1984 United Nations report first documented this structural dependence: restrictions on local production, rigid controls on imports and exports, and the absence of a sovereign financial system eliminated most viable employment opportunities within the West Bank, forcing a growing share of the Palestinian workforce to commute to Israel for jobs. By the 1980s, one-third of all Palestinian workers were employed in Israel. To manage this flow of labor, Israel introduced a general exit permit system in 1972 that allowed relatively free movement for workers without case-by-case approval. That system was scrapped entirely in 1991, replaced by an individualized permit regime that shifted the default from free movement to requiring specific, often denied authorization. The completion of Israel’s separation barrier in the early 2000s further tightened control over movement, labor, and trade, according to Walid Habbas, an analyst with the Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies.
Israel has long weaponized this permit system as a political tool, freezing thousands of permits after Palestinian attacks and during the 2000–2005 Second Intifada. Economic control was further formalized during the Oslo Accords through the Paris Protocol, which gave Israel the authority to collect tariffs, purchase taxes, and VAT on goods imported to the West Bank on behalf of the Palestinian Authority (PA). These funds, called clearance revenues, make up roughly 70 percent of the PA’s total annual income — and like the permit system, Israel has repeatedly withheld or delayed transfers as political leverage against the Palestinian leadership.
“Treating the Palestinian economy as separate from Israel’s is misleading,” Habbas explained. “We are talking about a system in which Israel is dominating, and imposing severe restrictions in order to control and manage the Palestinians.”
In the months before October 7, one-fifth of the West Bank’s entire labor force crossed into Israel for formal work. After the attacks, Israel pulled both of its core economic levers at once: it revoked all work permits and froze all clearance revenue transfers. The dual shock rippled through every corner of the West Bank economy, even hitting Palestinians who never worked in Israel, according to Misyef Misyef, an economist at the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute. “The private sector is suffering and cannot sell their product because the purchasing power of the family is now very low,” Misyef told Middle East Eye.
Majd knows this collapse firsthand. For six years before the war, he worked construction in the Tel Aviv area, waking at 3 a.m. every day to cross the border and returning home each night. The work was exhausting, but it came with benefits, and he could save roughly half of his 7,000 to 8,000 shekel monthly wage to support his two children. Those savings kept his family afloat for the first year of the permit ban. When the money ran out, Majd had no local work options to fall back on. “I looked for jobs here [in the West Bank], and I couldn’t find anything,” he said. “When there is a pressure on you to provide, you have to think of a way.”
He twice crossed the separation wall illegally to work in Israel for weeks at a time, but unpermitted crossings have grown far deadlier since the ban. Even before the war, an estimated 50,000 Palestinians worked in Israel without permits, but current far-right Israeli policies have encouraged deadly force against undocumented laborers. Around 50 Palestinian workers have been shot and killed during attempted crossings, and Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has publicly stated that the shootings are “starting to bring the numbers down.” For his third attempt to cross, Majd opted for the garbage truck, after being told hiding in the trash would keep him out of sight of snipers. “No one sees you, so at least you don’t get shot,” he explained.
Nearly three years after the permit ban was implemented, there is little sign of a full reversal. Israel has restored just 7,000 permits for workers in industries it deems critical, leaving more than 140,000 formal laborers unemployed. The unemployment rate in the West Bank has skyrocketed from 15 percent pre-crisis to 30 percent today — a level Misyef says is unprecedented in modern global economies. Widespread joblessness has pushed the poverty rate to more than double its pre-war level, jumping from 12 percent to 28 percent.
Today, Majd and his family survive on the small income his father earns from a tiny herd of sheep, a far cry from the financially stable life they once had. Unsure if he will risk another crossing, Majd spends his days worrying about his children’s future. “What’s going to happen to them in the future? I am worried I am not able to provide what they need,” he said. “I am depressed from everything that happened. I have become like a dead body.”
