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Article

10 Jun 2020

Author:
Rafeef Ziadah & Riya AL'Sanah, Jacobinmag

COVID-19 threatens the lives of Palestinian construction workers under the occupation

"Palestinian Workers Are Bearing the Brunt of the Pandemic", 23rd of May 2020 

...There are also more than 90,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel who work in construction...[But'  studies have identified a large pay gap between Palestinian workers and their Jewish Israeli counterparts, which reflects the division of labor within the sector itself, where Jewish Israelis occupy managerial, engineering, and planning positions, while Palestinians and (increasingly) foreign workers perform labor-intensive jobs.. .

The workers were coming back to crowded homes, putting themselves and their families at risk. In fact, apart from initial cases linked to the tourism industry, the great majority of cases in the West Bank (74 percent) have involved construction workers employed in Israel or those in close proximity to them. The first recorded COVID-19 death in the occupied territories was the mother of a Palestinian worker from East Jerusalem who was employed at a settlement Industrial Zone factory.