January 27, 2021 by New Unions
In cold blood, the Israeli occupation forces killed a 48-year Palestinian worker on Sunday morning, Jan. 24th near Tulkarm, north of Occupied West Bank.
Fuad Sebti, a 48-year worker from the town of Iraq at-Tayeh, east of Nablus district, is a father of four children. Fuad works in furniture transfer at Israeli corporations; but he has been unemployed for more than 20 days due to the COVID-19 economic crisis.
Encumbered with despair after being without any source of income to feed his children, Fuad chose the dangerous path to access his workplace; as he could not afford to pay the Israeli authorities the required fees to get a permit.
While he and a group of other Palestinian workers were trying to ‘illegally’ pass through the Apartheid Wall near Tulkarm, the Israeli occupation forces chased them in an attempt to ban them from entering. To stop them, the heavily armed Israeli soldiers started throwing toxic tear gas canisters over them.
This, in turn, has led to Fuad’s death. Doctors at Rafidia Hospital in Nablus said the autopsy confirmed that the death was a result of inhaling large quantities of toxic tear gas fired by Israeli forces.
Fuad was robbed of his children forever. His life was lost to Israel’s apartheid practices and systematic demonization and dehumanization of Palestinians.
Enough is Enough: End Israeli Apartheid
For its part, the Palestine New Federation of Trade Unions (PNFTU) strongly denounces the murder of Fuad. The PNFTU considers it to be a part of the systematic violence and the apartheid policies that Israel practices against Palestinians in general and Palestinian workers in specific.
The PNFTU reaffirms its call to trade unions across continents to support the Palestinian BDS movement; and to boycott Israeli corporations and illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. Only when holding Israel accountable for its crimes, it will abide by the international law and human rights.
Time is now for the international community, embodied in trade unions around the world, the United Nations, the EU, and human rights organizations to recognize Israel as an apartheid state based on the definition of apartheid in the UN Apartheid Convention (1973), article II as
“Inhumane acts… committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”
We are sub-humans at their checkpoints
The permit system Israel uses to control the movement of Palestinian workers at its corporations forces them to pass through military checkpoints. This might make it a bit less dangerous for Palestinian workers but never less humiliating while waiting at Israeli military checkpoints. If Fuad has got a permit to enter ‘Israel’ he would have been made wait hours at military checkpoints instead of attempting to ‘smuggle’ to his workplace.
At these checkpoints, Palestinians with permits are subject to different forms of humiliation. Every worker has to be scanned, and sometimes stripped of his clothes in front of Israeli soldiers before they are allowed to reach their destination of work inside ‘Israel’.
The dehumanization and humiliation of Palestinian workers at the checkpoints are another motive for many to choose an ‘illegal’ path.
Moreover, any Palestinian caught in a peaceful demonstration against Israel’s oppression are denied a permit to work at Israeli corporations. This, therefore forces many Palestinians with a history of involvement in protests to ‘smuggle’ to their workplace at Israeli corporations.
They loot our land and enslave us!
Palestinians never choose to work at Israeli corporations because no one likes to be enslaved at the hand of their colonizers. Rather, Palestinians are forced to work for Israeli corporations amid the Israeli policies that has de-developed Palestinian economy.
Over 150,000 Palestinians are forced to work at Israeli corporations. This number keeps rising as Israel continues its practices and polices of suffocating and de-developing the Palestinian economy. These policies are represented in the continuous Israeli pillage of Palestinians’ land and natural resources, including water; as part of the de facto and de jure annexation of the West Bank .
By this, Palestinians lose the main sources of income. They end up working as cheap labor in dire working conditions. It is the ill-treatment of Palestinians at Israeli corporations that made Palestine mourn the loss of about 48 workers during 2020. Most of these workers died while working in the construction industry, one of the most dangerous industries; therefore, it is exclusive to Palestinians rather than to Israelis to do this kind of work.
2020 was the most ruthless year as, on top of the dangerous working conditions, the COVID-19 has been another threat to the workers’ lives. Israeli employers were seen ‘dumbing’ infected Palestinian workers with the virus like garbage at the other side of the checkpoint.
