Gaza's children forced to work for a pittance amid war-torn ruins
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Version 0 of 1. On a dirt road, concertinaed slabs of concrete and wire drape from flattened buildings, next to the only remaining housing that was not blown apart in the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas. A tall, neglected social housing block stands decrepit here in the northernmost point of the Gaza Strip. Two small boys shuffle between the ruined buildings with a plastic bucket, their tiny fingers working through the rubble. Aziz Rantasi, six, collects jagged pieces of cement shaped vaguely like stones. The fingernails on his tiny calloused hands are black. A pre-teen boy pulls up on an old bright red BMX bicycle. Aziz cranes his neck to look in awe. “I have never ridden a bike, I’d really like one,” he says. Related: Gaza aid worker: we have stopped feeling anything – in pictures “The man buying stones will close soon so there’s no time for playing on a bike. But there are two things I wish for in life – a black bike and collecting stones.” Palestinians Aziz and his brother Abdul Fatah, eight, are paid five shekels, or 50 pence, for every 50kg they labour to gather. If they can find five cement bricks that are intact they earn 15 pence. Between them they make barely £5 a week, working on four or five afternoons after finishing school at 11am. The brothers are rubble collectors in Beit Hanoun, one of the areas worst hit during the 51-day conflict in 2014 that left 2,200 Palestinians and 73 Israelis dead. Aziz and Abdul Fatah are just two of the estimated 104,000 children forced into labour in the occupied Palestinian territories. Gaza is believed to have the highest unemployment rate in the world; today nearly half of the adult population are without work. While a lot of the rubble has been cleared from the nearly 100,000 homes that were destroyed or damaged in the last war, there is still material around that is being collected and ground down into cement, which is in short supply after tunnels were closed between Egypt and Gaza. The economy began to crumble after 2005, when Israel withdrew Jewish settlers living in the strip. By 2006, Hamas, the Islamist militant group, had won the election in Gaza and seized control from Fatah, the leading secular Palestinian party. Israel then severed ties, blockading Gaza by air, land and sea. Unemployment climbed and today, after three wars in just six years, the economy is now on its knees. More children have been forced into work as a result of the last war as many lost one or both parents; or their parents became unemployed, injured, disabled or sick and were unable to work. Aziz and Abdul Fatah have a sick father. Diab Rantasi, 42, has untreated diabetes, so he is prone to seizures and losing consciousness, which makes it difficult for him to work. Their 10-year-old brother, Hamzah, has cerebral palsy. He lies buried in dirty, fluffy blankets inside the family’s three-room house and barely leaves it. Another brother, 18-month-old Fares, has had one of his eyes removed because of cancer – he is now in remission. The family of eight live in a converted storage space in the al-Awda Towers, built by the former Fatah government to house Gaza’s poor, but ignored and left to rot by the current Hamas government, which pays a bare minimum to the impoverished. The family say they receive 1,500 shekels (£250), from the Hamas government, approximately every three months. With no heating it is colder inside the Rantasi house than outside as winter creeps in. There is a pungent smell of urine. The bathroom has no running water, or a shower, and just a hole in the ground for a toilet. With Gaza’s daily power cuts the family are lucky to have electricity for up to eight hours a day. When it is on they can pump water into a storage tank outside for drinking and cooking, but the water has been deemed by the World Health Organisation to be 95% polluted and unsafe to drink. The family cannot pay for desalinated water to be delivered, like most Gazans. There are no windows and the kitchen leaks, and tiles have worn away, exposing bare earth. In one corner sits a new white refrigerator, in another a washing machine, recently donated to the family. The refrigerator is bare. Aziz and Abdul Fatah arrive home from school and change. They can’t afford uniforms so they wear jeans, synthetic jerseys and broken sandals to school. Aziz is wrapped in a grey winter coat, a gift from his school. There is no lunch for the pair today because there is no food. By midday the boys are working in the nearby rubble and around their houses. “I have seen shrapnel from the rockets in the destroyed buildings, but I don’t think it’s too dangerous,” says Aziz as he picks up rubble. Aziz has lived through two wars, Abdul Fatah three. “I remember the rocket being shot into upstairs,” Aziz remembers. “I was inside the house. It felt like an earthquake when it hit our neighbours’ house. I was playing on my Dad’s mobile phone. The next day we left for the refuge. Our uncle took us on a horse and cart.” Abdul Fatah has a runny nose and broken sandals. He is quiet and says he gets tired collecting rubble, but thinks he has no choice. He leaves the house at 6am for school and works from 12 noon until around 6pm. “I give my father the money I earn to buy food. My favourite foods are chicken and fish, but we don’t eat them,” Abdul Fatah says. Children and young people are working across the Gaza Strip, from rubble collecting to working in factories and garages to street selling. Jamil Momen, 21, and his younger brother, Haisam, 15, live in Shati refugee camp. Jamil wants to study at university, but instead sells balloons and rides on a small lit-up electric car for children, to support his family. Haisam had to drop out of school to help support the family; he works eight hours a day selling balloons for the equivalent of 15 pence a piece outside parks, shopping centres and restaurants like Mazaj, in the centre of the Gaza Strip, where the cost of a dish of pasta is more than Haisam’s daily income of around £4. The minimum age for work in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is meant to be 15, and 18 for hazardous work, but it’s not enforced in Gaza. In the West Bank the Palestinian Authority (PA) only has jurisdiction over land known as Area A and B, but not Area C, which is under full Israeli military control. Many Palestinian children are taken to Area C to work on Israeli-owned farms; the PA is unable to send labour inspectors to these farms. According to the US Department of Labor there are no programmes to prevent or eliminate the worst forms of child labour. It found the PA had failed to ratify international conventions on child labour after it acceded to the UN Conventions on the Rights of the Child. The report, released in 2014 by the US Department of Labor (pdf), reveals children in Gaza were paid to smuggle goods through Gaza’s tunnels until they were closed in 2014. Children were also used to smuggle drugs from the West Bank into Israel it says. The report documents Hamas training children as young as 12 and one case in which a child was used as a human shield, another as an informant by Israeli forces in the last war. Dr Maher al-Tabbaa, a Gazan economist, said the reality of child labour in Gaza was perhaps one of the worst in the world. “Child labour will only be reduced if there is a proper social security for poor Palestinian families. There needs to be concerted efforts from all government institutions and private and civil society to fight the phenomenon of child labour to intensify awareness,” he says. Meanwhile Aziz and Abdul Fatah’s parents, Diab and Hanan, don’t know how long they will be able to afford to keep the boys in school; they may take them out so they can work full-time. They say sending their children to work is their only option. “What can a few shekels do at the end of the day?” Hanan asks. “They never reach 10 shekels a day,” says Diab, who adds: “I don’t support Fatah or Hamas – they don’t do anything for the population … We just crave a normal life, like anyone outside of Gaza.” |