Ban on Palestinian workers grinds Israel's construction sites to a halt

Source: The Age

Tel Aviv: For Fadi Sajdia, a construction labourer from the West Bank city of Ramallah, the Muslim holy month of Ramadan should be a time of daily fasting and nightly feasting. But like 150,000 other Palestinians who worked in Israel until the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, he's out of a job.

"I'm the sole breadwinner in my family," Sajdia, 37, said. "Now we only buy essentials."

Across Israel, building sites are idle as a ban on Palestinian workers continues with no end in sight. It's turned the bellwether construction industry into an economic-crisis epicentre, offering a glimpse of what awaits both sides if the war in Gaza permanently ruptures their precarious ties.

A painful decoupling between the two economies has threatened a lifeline for Palestinian territories and left Israeli builders scrambling for labour abroad - a shift in the workforce that industry forecasts show will take a year, at best, to complete. More than two-thirds of Palestinians employed in Israel before the war worked in construction.