On May Day, Palestinian Workers Face Mass Arrest and Repression

Thousands of Palestinian workers have been arrested in sweeping campaigns since the genocidal war on Gaza began, the Prisoners’ Media Office said in a statement marking International Workers’ Day. The office called the crackdown unprecedented, surpassing anything seen during previous popular uprisings.

For decades, the occupation has targeted workers through arrest and persecution as one of its most entrenched policies, part of its wider repression across Palestinian society. It stripped workers of their rights and choked off their ability to earn a living with any measure of dignity. Many of the Palestinian prisoners who fought for the freedom of their land and people come from the working class.

Since October 2023, these campaigns have sharply escalated. Workers from across the occupied Palestinian territories have been swept up in mass arrests under a collective punishment policy, and the crisis facing Palestinian workers has deepened as arrests, torture, and abuse mount.

Gaza’s workers have borne the worst. Thousands were seized after October 7 while inside the 1948 territories for work, held in degrading conditions, and tortured. Most were eventually released. Some were killed. Others remain forcibly disappeared. The occupation refuses to reveal their fate.

The occupation has also stepped up arrests of workers entering the 1948 territories or occupied Jerusalem without permits, using the infractions to justify beatings and prolonged detention. These campaigns run alongside the continued isolation of Palestinian towns and governorates from each other, the expansion of illegal settlements, and the seizure of Palestinian funds. Palestinians are denied their most basic rights.

The office called on international human rights and humanitarian organizations to open an independent investigation into the occupation’s escalating crimes and to end what it described as unprecedented abuses against prisoners. International institutions, it said, must act against an occupation system shielded by global powers that have shown no regard for humanitarian law or the demands of free people worldwide.