Tensions mount as Palestinian labourers prepare to return to Judea and Samaria

The Berkleys live on a quiet street in Karnei Shomron, Samaria where almost every second house is undergoing necessary renovations. The homes, built in the 1980s when the town was first established, need weatherproofing, plumbing and basic upgrading.
Before the current Hamas war, Palestinian Arabs flooded the neighbourhood each morning–building, pouring concrete, laying stone and tiles. Now most of the houses stand half-finished, waiting for somebody to finish the job.
The Berkleys were not happy to hear the announcement that 8,000 Palestinian workers from Samaria and Judea would be allowed back to work in Jewish communities.
“It’s not that we don’t welcome our neighbours finishing their homes,” explained Gordon Berkley. “After what happened on Oct. 7 down south, we just don’t want Palestinian workers back in our neighbourhood.”
Although some neighbours have managed to procure Israeli workers, with so many men drafted to the Israel Defence Forces for reserve duty, there simply isn’t the manpower to complete all the abandoned projects.
Before Oct. 7, each morning between 200-400 non-Israeli Arab construction, sanitation workers and cleaners from towns all over the periphery of Samaria showed up at a checkpoint just outside the burgeoning town.
The checkpoint, manned by the Karnei Shomron security department and the army, only let in workers with permits who received special clearance from Israeli security services. Non-municipal workers were supposed to be accompanied by an armed security guard or a private citizen licensed to carry a weapon.
After the Oct. 7 massacre, intelligence revealed that many of the workers who were permitted into Israel from Gaza had methodically mapped out homes in Israeli communities facing the Strip and passed the information to Hamas terrorists. Some even took part in the massacre and the looting.
Many of the villages surrounding Karnei Shomron are hotbeds of the Hamas extremist Palestinian Islamic movement.
Before the war, 193,000 Palestinian workers worked throughout Israel, noted Dr. Michael Milshtein, head of the Palestinian Studies Forum at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University.
Of this number, 30,000 worked in Samaria and Judea and 17,000 came from Gaza. Most of these workers, 97,000, were employed in construction and the closure effectively closed down the industry all over Israel.
Immediately after the war, the number of permits issued was reduced to almost zero except for a few who were urgently needed in industrial and agricultural facilities. Milshtein pointed out that some Palestinian workers had been picking avocados for the last 30 years.