War stranded Gaza workers in Israel. How it dashed their dreams.
By Taylor Luck and Fatima AbdulKarim
RAMALLAH, WEST BANK- They pace the spartan hotel lobby, moving back and forth between the faux leather couches.
They all seem to be in a hurry, but with nowhere to go – holding phones, anxiously awaiting yet dreading the next call.
These unplanned guests – Palestinian residents of Gaza who were working or getting medical care in Israel when the war erupted – showed up at this three-star Ramallah hotel in the middle of an October night with little more than a change of clothes.
They do not know if their checkout date will be next week, next month, or next year.
Now stranded in the West Bank, these Gaza residents are receiving few answers but are finding rare solace in one another. Most decline to give their full name, to avoid running afoul of Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, or Israel.
“Our entire lives were turned upside down in an instant. We went from a dream to a nightmare, and we have no idea where we are heading next,” says Ahmed as he awaits a text update from his teenage son in Gaza City.
“Our bodies are physically in Ramallah, but our souls are in Gaza. We are lost.”
More than 12,000 Gaza Palestinians were working, living, or receiving medical treatment in Israel when Hamas attacked Oct. 7. As a gesture to relieve economic pressures in the besieged Gaza Strip, Israel had issued 18,000 permits to Gaza residents between 2022 and 2023.
Within hours of the attack, the Israeli government annulled all their work and residency permits and arrested several hundred.
The rest were unceremoniously dumped into the West Bank. Several thousand workers repatriated to Gaza during this past week’s cease-fire; today more than 4,000 Gazans remain stranded in shelters and hotels, separated from family members navigating missile strikes, food shortages, and damaged or destroyed homes as the war resumes.
Hotel Gaza
At the Retno Hotel at the edge of Ramallah, 100 Gaza residents awaiting the war’s end are in the lobby – always in the lobby.
On one November afternoon, the talk in the lobby is of loss – of homes, children, jobs – and needs, for food, water, and shelter back home and a clear future for them in the West Bank.
“You’re lucky your house lasted this long,” one woman says, consoling a shrieking woman who just received news her family home was destroyed.
Hanan, a mother of five who had been receiving cancer treatment in Israel and Jordan, returns to the lobby from a round of treatment at a nearby Ramallah hospital, yet all she can think about are her four young children trapped in Gaza.
“When your 5-year-old son calls you and tells you he feels like he is starving, he misses bread, and asks why you aren’t there to feed him, how do you think that makes you feel as a mother?” Hanan says. “Could you even think about putting food in your own mouth?”
“We cannot eat, we cannot sleep, we cannot rest. We are like the living dead,” she says.
Lost future
The chatter inevitably drifts to the promising future that might have been. A future, they say, that was robbed……..CONTINUE READING AT THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR