Palestinian workers are returning to Karnei Shomron in Samaria for the first time in 10 months after three local businesses sued the township, according to Sagi Hadari, deputy head of the Karnei Shomron Council.
The High Court ruled that the army should decide whether or not to admit workers to each business. So far, the army has ruled that workers can return to Basar Hashomron, a butcher and meat distributor, and is deliberating regarding two businesses, a commercial bakery and a garage, both located in the Maaleh Shomron neighborhood.
Prior to the Oct. 7 Hamas onslaught on southwest Israel, Palestinian workers hauled trash and gardening waste, cleaned streets and houses, worked for contractors, developers and supermarkets. Most building projects in the township have been frozen.
In response to the court’s ruling, residents plan to hold a protest on Monday.
Karnei Shomron Council head Yonatan Kuznitz ran in recent elections on a platform that promised to do whatever he could to keep the workers out.
“Despite the pressures and after difficult deliberations, I ultimately decided not to allow laborers into the settlement,” Kuznitz wrote in a letter to the public. “As a result, an administrative petition was filed against me personally and against the council in order for the court to order the council to bring workers into areas of the settlement, despite the council’s opposition.”
The High Court ruled that the municipality does not have the authority to decide whether to admit workers or not. According to the court, the authority is in the hands of the military and the council is only a conduit for forwarding a work request. As soon as an interested party submits a request to bring in workers, the council must forward the request to the army along with its position, according to the court.
“In recent days, several requests were submitted by interested parties. In response to this I sent a letter to the military with my objection to the entry of laborers,” Kuznitz wrote. “The military echelon examined the request and responded that there is a military permit to bring laborers to one of the business owners in the settlement, located close to the settlement’s fence, despite my objections. Currently, two more applications are pending, to which I objected. The army is examining them,” added Kuznitz.
He pointed out that Karnei Shomron is among the last of the localities to bring in workers and has done everything possible to ensure residents’ with security.
Deputy Council head Hadari said that following the court’s ruling, developers and contractors will likely follow suit, bringing even more Palestinian workers into the town.
In a chilling Facebook post, an IDF reservist who recently served in Azzun, the Palestinian town west of Karnei Shomron, wrote about a resident of Azzun that he had hired in the past and had glowingly recommended to others in town.
“As part of my reserve duty, it transpired that one of the detainees that our battalion stopped in Azzun was this former worker. He had participated in a course on fabricating explosives in Jenin, the terrorist stronghold,” he wrote.
“It’s hard for me to describe my feeling after learning that a terrorist has been walking freely within my home,” he added.
“Probably somewhere in Azzun someone knows about the layout of my house; where the dog is tied up and where the children’s rooms are. As someone who advocated coexistence and became disillusioned during the war, I now believe that bringing Palestinian workers into residential neighborhoods constitutes a danger,” the post concludes.
Before Oct. 7, Israel provided work permits for tens of thousands of Palestinians to enter Israel, including from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. According to reports, some of them carried out reconnaissance for the terror group in preparation for Hamas’s invasion of the western Negev.
Israel’s defense establishment believes that additional Palestinian workers—though fewer than before the war—should be allowed back into the pre-1967 lines to work to help relieve economic pressure and deny the Hamas terror group recruitment opportunities.
In January, dozens of Likud lawmakers, including Nir Barkat and Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli, signed a letter calling on the Cabinet to “say explicitly that no more Palestinian workers will be allowed to enter.”
“Besides our security obligation, we also have a moral duty—we are not responsible for the livelihood of those who support the murder of Jews in the Land of Israel,” added the missive, noting that some three in four Arab residents of Judea and Samaria hold favorable views of Hamas in the wake of its Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 people in Israel.
