On the morning of October 7, Hamas fighters streamed into the quiet lanes of kibbutz Alumim, setting off on a rampage of killing and destruction. But most of their victims in the community weren\u2019t Israeli, or even Jewish, they were Thai and Nepali farm workers, sleeping in a dormitory right in the\u00a0militants\u2019\u00a0path. <\/p>\n
Some of the men limped, others\u00a0were pushed. Flanked by gunmen, the men were marched to their\u00a0deaths. <\/p>\n
Security staff watched helplessly on CCTV from just a few hundred meters away as the 23 men were massacred. <\/p>\n
Among the more than 1,200 victims of the Hamas attacks, Thais make up the largest group of foreign nationals. Most were workers on agricultural sites close to the perimeter fence that separates Israel from Gaza. Hamas freed a group of 10 Thais taken hostage on Friday but others remain captive. <\/p>\n
The violence has set off an exodus of foreign workers from Israel, with some 10,000 farmworkers estimated to have left since October 7, according to the Israeli government. <\/p>\n
For Israel\u2019s dairy and agricultural farms, that has posed an almost existential problem. Dairy cows need milking several times a day by specially trained staff, while the past weeks have been the harvest window for many crops. <\/p>\n
Without hands to work on the farms, crops and animals would have been left to die. Volunteers from across Israel have stepped in to prop them up, but much-needed foreign workers are still yet to return, and farmers fear that without guarantees of security, the future of Israeli farming near Gaza is impossible. <\/p>\n
No return<\/strong> <\/p>\n Wounded by shrapnel, he hid for two days on the farm where he worked along the Gaza border, before being rescued by Israeli security forces. Return is not an option for him, he said. <\/p>\n \u201cNothing is left there, and I am too afraid to go back.\u201d <\/p>\n Israeli farms\u00a0largely\u00a0relied on Palestinian workers up until the 1990s.\u00a0But\u00a0following the wave of violence during the\u00a0First Palestinian\u00a0Intifada,\u00a0or uprising,\u00a0and\u00a0the\u00a0ensuing Israeli crackdown on the freedom of Palestinians to work outside the occupied territories, Israel started to look elsewhere for farm labor. <\/p>\n Today, many farm workers come from poorer areas in Thailand\u2019s northeast, providing a cheap labor force for Israel. Strict conditions govern their work in Israel, keeping them on short contracts in manual work, with no right to raise families there. The farms around Gaza\u00a0employed\u00a0about 6,000 Thai workers before the war began, according to Israel\u2019s ministry of interior. <\/p>\n With no sign yet of a mass return of Thai workers, the Israeli government is looking to recruit some 5,000 workers from other countries, including Sri Lanka. <\/p>\n After the killing, a deep wound\u00a0<\/strong> <\/p>\n And the significance of agriculture in Israel is more than economic. <\/p>\n \u201cAgriculture and farming are an inseparable part of Zionism. Working the land is an important value among the people of Israel,\u201d said Lior Simcha, chief executive of the Milk Producers Association. <\/p>\n However, as Israel\u2019s economy developed, the country\u2019s citizens were able to take higher-paying jobs in different sectors, leaving agricultural jobs unfilled. <\/p>\n Farming in the dusty plains of southern Israel is almost ingrained in the national identity of the country. The frontier spirit of the kibbutz pioneers, who did much to establish large-scale agriculture in Israel\u2019s south, is a source of national pride for many in the country. <\/p>\n But those farmers require watertight guarantees of security for their work to continue and for their families to feel safe. <\/p>\n \u201cWe need to open the border to Egypt, (so) that all the (Gazan) people go to Egypt, live there. And we close the border, and we grow potato(es) all the way to the sea,\u201d he said from one of his fields. \u201cThis is the safety that we need to come back. And it\u2019s not going to happen, you know, two million people there, you cannot just throw them, shoot them, it\u2019s people.\u201d <\/p>\n Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not\u00a0outlined\u00a0a defined, post-fighting strategy for Gaza, where\u00a0more than two-thirds of the 2 million\u00a0inhabitants are now internally displaced, and where\u00a0more than 40% of all housing units\u00a0have been either destroyed or damaged, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), citing the Ministry of Housing in Gaza. <\/p>\n Any\u00a0forced displacement of Gaza\u2019s population into Egypt would constitute a war crime and the United States has warned against Israel re-occupying Gaza. <\/p>\n A lifeline in the fields<\/strong> <\/p>\n Inbar\u2019s remaining foreign workers quietly motor up and down the rows of zucchini.\u00a0Nearby, some of his Israeli volunteers, chatting amongst themselves, stoop to gather up zucchini that lie splayed across the dirt, the result of a clumsily overturned cart. The contrast between the two groups couldn\u2019t be starker. <\/p>\n Inbar said the manpower shortage has already forced him to abandon his tomato crop. Without the volunteers, the zucchini would have met a similar fate, he said. Long-term, he doesn\u2019t know how he can keep his farm running at capacity without the return of foreign laborers. <\/p>\n At the dairy farm at Kibbutz Alumim,\u00a0where the buildings of Gaza City cluster the horizon less than 3 miles away,\u00a0the burned-out shells of barns and\u00a0the\u00a0skeleton of\u00a0living quarters where nearly two dozen Thai and Nepali workers were slaughtered\u00a0are a constant reminder of the violence of October 7. <\/p>\n \u201cThe foreign workers run the farm, they do all the milking,\u201d farm manager Stevie Marcus said of the working of the farm before October 7. <\/p>\n Today, four volunteers help him milk his herd twice a day. Requiring special training from a veterinarian to work with the animals, these volunteers are in short supply. <\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re doing the bare minimum we need to do, making sure they have food and clean water, milking them,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n Before October, the 350 cows were milked three times a day. After going days without food and care after workers fled following the attacks, the cows now only have milk for two sessions. <\/p>\n Standing among Inbar\u2019s zucchini, tech worker Avi Leibovich \u2013 volunteering on a day off from his day job \u2013 said he came to help Israeli farms survive. <\/p>\n \u201cWithout them, probably the markets will be empty,\u201d he said, adding: \u201cI don\u2019t think that this kind of industry can be relying only on imports.\u201d Foreign produce is one of the government\u2019s short-term solutions to the manpower crisis, boosting import quotas on milk and plant products. <\/p>\n He was laid-back about the risk of coming so close to Gaza while rockets do still occasionally streak across the sky. Volunteers have seconds to find shelter if the alarm sounds. <\/p>\n \u201cWe live in such an insane environment where this is okay. There\u2019s a war zone,\u201d he said, admitting that he hadn\u2019t told his mother where he was. <\/p>\n After the October 7 attacks, fellow farm volunteer Mei\u00a0\u2013\u00a0who didn\u2019t want to give her last name \u2013 had ferried soldiers and civilians around Israel\u2019s south in her car,\u00a0helping\u00a0however she could. <\/p>\n The ferocity of Hamas\u2019 attacks sparked calls for immediate revenge among many Israelis. And the relentless bombing of Gaza has been welcomed in some quarters. But on\u00a0Mei\u2019s\u00a0long car rides, she soon grew uncomfortable with what she called the \u201ccelebration\u201d of the destruction in Gaza shared by some of her passengers. <\/p>\n She turned to picking vegetables, more comfortable with the thought that her days weren\u2019t supporting Israel\u2019s bloody campaign in Gaza. <\/p>\n For feeding people, unlike helping them fight, posed no moral qualms for Mei. <\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s no question about it,\u201d she said of her labor in the fields. \u201cIt\u2019s undeniably good.\u201d <\/p>\n\n On the morning of October 7, Hamas fighters streamed into the quiet lanes of kibbutz Alumim, setting off on a rampage of killing and destruction. But most of their victims in the community weren\u2019t Israeli, or even Jewish, they were Thai and Nepali farm workers, sleeping in a dormitory right in the\u00a0militants\u2019\u00a0path. Some of the <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":12088,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-12087","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}