Ripe
for Abuse
Palestinian
Child Labor in Israeli Agricultural settlements in the West Bank
Copyright
© 2015 Human Rights Watch
All
rights reserved.
Printed
in the United States of America
ISBN:
978-1-6231-32392
Cover
design by Rafael Jimenez
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Summary
International
Law Violations
Expanding
Settlement Agriculture, Restrictive Anti-Palestinian Policies
Palestinian
Child Workers in Settlement Agriculture
Flouting
Labor Laws
Recommendations
To
Israel
To
the European Union and EU Member States
To
the United States
To
Palestine
Methodology
I.
Background: Israel’s Control of Land in the Jordan Valley
Area
C
Land-Use
Restrictions
Restrictions
on Palestinian Agriculture
Settlement
Agriculture in the Jordan Valley
Subsidies
II.
Palestinian Children Working in Israeli Settlements
Palestinian
Middlemen
Exploitative
and Dangerous Work Conditions
Ages
and Hours of Work
Low
Wages
Health
and Safety
Exposure
to Chemicals
High
Temperatures
Handling
Heavy Loads
Work
Injuries and Lack of Compensation
Lack
of Access to Medical Care and Lack of Compensation
Impact
on Education
III.
Israel’s Failure to Protect Palestinian Children from Child Labor
Israeli
Labor Laws
Palestinian
Labor Law Protections for Children
IV.
International Law Obligations of Businesses and Third Countries
Acknowledgments
Summary
Hundreds
of Palestinian children work on Israeli settlement farms in the occupied West Bank,
the majority located in the Jordan Valley. This report documents rights abuses
against Palestinian children as young as 11 years old, who earn around US $19
for a full day working in the settlement agricultural industry. Many drop out
of school and work in conditions that can be hazardous due to pesticides,
dangerous equipment, and extreme heat.
Children
working on Israeli settlements pick, clean, and pack asparagus, tomatoes, eggplants,
sweet peppers, onions, and dates, among other crops. Children whom Human Rights
Watch interviewed said they begin work as early as 5:30 or 6 a.m. and usually
work around 8 hours a day, six or seven days a week. During peak harvest
periods, some children reported working up to 12 hours a day, over 60 hours a
week. Some children described pressure from supervisors to keep working, and
not to take breaks.
Although
international law, as well as Israeli and Palestinian law, sets 15 as the
minimum age of employment, many children told Human Rights Watch that they
began working at age 13 or 14. Even younger children work part-time, and one
boy interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that he worked together with a boy
who was only 10 years old.
The
work that children perform can be both grueling and hazardous. Some children
who work on settlement farms described vomiting, dizziness, and skin rashes
after spraying pesticides with little protection, and experienced body pain or
numbness from carrying heavy pesticide containers on their back. Many suffered
cuts from using sharp blades to cut onions, sweet peppers, and other crops.
Heavy machinery also causes injuries. One child said he saw another child who
was pinned under a tractor that rolled over. Another boy said he caught his
finger in a date-sorting machine. Children risk falls from climbing ladders to
prune and pick dates. Two children had been stung by scorpions while working in
settlers’ fields.
Temperatures
in the fields often exceed 40 degrees Celsius in summer (over 100 degrees Fahrenheit)
and can be as high as 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) in greenhouses.
Some children described nausea and other symptoms indicating they were susceptible
to heat stroke from working in such extreme temperatures. One boy told Human
Rights Watch that he had repeatedly fainted while working in a hot greenhouse.
None
of the children interviewed received medical insurance or social insurance
benefits, and the majority of those who needed medical treatment due to work
injuries or illness said they had to pay their own medical bills and
transportation costs to Palestinian hospitals. Three Palestinian children who
got sick or were injured while working and had to go home or to the hospital
said they were not even paid for the hours they had worked that day, much less
for the time they had to take off work.
To
research this report, Human Rights Watch interviewed 38 children and 12 adults
in Palestinian communities in the Jordan Valley who said they were employed to
work on settlement farms in the area, as well as teachers and principals in
those communities, Israeli and Palestinian labor lawyers, development-agency
staff and labor rights advocates. Children are a minority of Palestinians
employed on settlement farms, but most Palestinian children who work in
settlements do so in the agricultural sector. All of the children and adults
Human Rights Watch interviewed said they took the work due to a lack of
alternative jobs and because of the dire economic conditions faced by their
families – conditions for which Israel’s policies throughout the occupied West
Bank including the Jordan Valley, which severely restrict Palestinians’ access
to land, water, agricultural inputs like fertilizers, and their ability to
transport goods, are largely responsible. One 18- year-old said that he quit
school in Grade 10 because, as he explained, “so what if you get an education,
you’ll wind up working for the settlements.”
The
vast majority of the children working in settlements whom Human Rights Watch interviewed
said they had dropped out of school. Teachers and principals told Human Rights
Watch that children often dropped out around Grade 8, or age 14. Of the 33
children that Human Rights Watch interviewed who were then working full-time in
agricultural settlements, 21 had dropped out of schools in Grade 10 or earlier;
the other 12 dropped out of secondary school in Grade 11 or 12. Other children
worked part-time while still attending school, often at the expense of their
studies. “It’s very obvious which kids go to work in the settlements, because
they are exhausted in class,” said a school administrator.
All
the children Human Rights Watch interviewed said that they were working to
provide money for their families. When asked why children chose to work, a
Palestinian middleman who supplied Palestinian workers to settlers told an
Israeli human rights worker: “Ask [the children] if they have any bread in the
house.” Palestinian children and adults who work in settlements told Human
Rights Watch that they hoped the international community would pressure Israel
to end settlement agriculture and lift related restrictions on Palestinian
land-use, access to water, freedom of movement, and market access, and instead,
allow Palestinians to cultivate their own lands and to create an economic environment
in which they could support their children to stay in school and receive an education.
In some cases, Palestinian workers said that they worked on farmland that Israel
had, in violation of international law, confiscated from their own villages and
allocated to settlements.
Most
of the children and adults live in villages in the Jordan Valley. Some of the
children came from villages elsewhere in the West Bank, moved to the Jordan
Valley, and lived for months at a time in empty warehouses there, working in
settlements during the day, in order to save on the cost and time required to
travel from home.
Children
working in agricultural settlements earn very low wages. All of the Palestinian
adults and children whom Human Rights Watch interviewed earned far less than
the Israeli minimum wage, which was 23 shekels ($6.20) per hour for adults and
between 16 and 18 shekels ($4.30 and $4.86) per hour for children at the time
the research for this report was conducted. Most earned only 60 to 70 shekels
per day ($16 to $19), and some children took home 50 shekels per day ($13.50)
after paying for transportation to and from settlements to work; most workdays
lasted 7 or 8 hours, except during peak harvesting times.1 Military orders
issued by the Israeli military commander in the West Bank make provisions of
Israel’s domestic Minimum Wage Law applicable to Palestinian workers in
settlements. However, many children either did not know that Israel had a
minimum wage law or that the law’s provisions were supposed to apply to
Palestinians working in settlements.
All
the children Human Rights Watch interviewed said they were employed through unwritten
agreements with Palestinian middlemen working on behalf of Israeli settlers. Israeli
settlers’ practice of using Palestinian middlemen to hire Palestinian laborers,
including children, means that there is no work contract or any other documents
linking the children directly to the settler-employer. In practice, it is
extremely difficult for Palestinians who work in settlements to demand their
rights under Israeli labor law without such proof of employment. According to a
Palestinian middleman, workers are paid “in cash, [get] no pay slips, and there
are no [work] permits, so there is no paper trail to demand severance pay or
anything else.”
Most
labor disputes that Palestinian workers and middlemen described to Human Rights
Watch involved severance pay, presumably because workers demanding severance
pay have already lost their jobs and so have less to lose from making legal
claims than workers who are employed. Israel’s Minimum Wage Law – which is
applicable, via military orders, to Palestinian workers in settlements – states
that workers cannot waive their rights to minimum wages, but none of the
Palestinian children or adults interviewed said they expected or had demanded
to be paid minimum wages. The Palestinian middleman believed that if a worker
asked a settler-employer for a raise, “they’d fire you.”
International Law Violations
Human
Rights Watch found many examples of children working in Israeli agricultural settlements
in violation of international law as well as Israeli and Palestinian law. Both Israel
and Palestine are party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights, and to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which recognize the
right of the child to be protected from being exploited economically and
performing work that is likely to be hazardous or interfere with the child’s
schooling.2
In
addition, Israel is party to International Labor Organization (ILO) Conventions
138 and 182. Under those conventions, Israel has affirmed a minimum age of
employment of 15 (permitting “light work” for children of ages 13 and 14) and
agreed to prohibit hazardous work for any child under age 18. Israeli law
provides that a child may be employed only as an apprentice during the period
of compulsory schooling (up to tenth grade in Israel).
Children
of age 14 are permitted to work during the summer vacation, but only in
positions that are relatively undemanding and are not hazardous to their
health. Israeli authorities apply national laws to Israeli children in
settlements, including labor laws and education laws that make basic education
compulsory and free.
Israeli
labor courts and the country’s Supreme Court have ruled consistently that
Israeli labor law protections extend to Palestinian workers in settlements.
Israeli military orders have incorporated some domestic labor laws, including
the laws on minimum wage and “foreign workers,” which Israel applies to
Palestinians working in settlements in the occupied West Bank. However, Israeli
authorities have failed to enforce these laws and did not conduct a single
labor inspection in agricultural settlements in 2013, and few or none in other
recent years, since at least 2010. None of the Palestinian children working in settlement
agriculture whom we interviewed had ever spoken to an Israeli labor inspector.
According
to Israeli officials, the lack of enforcement is the result of a lack of
clearly allocated responsibility between the Israeli ministry of economy and
the Civil Administration, a branch of the military. Israeli officials have made
similar excuses for years. In reality, Israel has turned a blind eye to
violations of Israeli labor laws vis-à-vis Palestinian workers in the
settlement agricultural sector.
As
this report describes, Israel’s domestic laws on children and work generally
reflect its international obligations, and Israeli authorities have partly
acknowledged a responsibility to enforce their protections for the benefit of
Palestinians working in settlements, even as they fail consistently to do so.
However, we do not call on Israel to extend its domestic legal order, including
workers’ rights protections, into occupied territory. The international law of
belligerent occupation, applicable to the West Bank today, prohibits Israel, as
the occupying power, from extending the jurisdiction of its domestic laws into
Palestine as though it were the sovereign. Israel has unlawfully applied
domestic laws in occupied territory for the benefit of Israeli settlers, such
as laws on the establishment of companies.
Israel’s
civilian settlements in the occupied West Bank depend on its unlawful policies
of transferring its civilian population into occupied territory and
appropriating land and other resources there for the settlements. Israel is
obliged to dismantle the settlements, and also to prevent abuses against
Palestinians working in settlements, even though doing so would not mitigate
the unlawful nature of the settlements themselves.
Palestinian
law makes 10 years of primary education compulsory and free for children, prohibits
employing children under 15 and employing children aged 15 to 18 in hazardous work
– such as using pesticides and carrying heavy loads. However, Palestinian authorities
lack the authority and capacity to enforce these laws in either settlements or most
rural Palestinian communities in the Jordan Valley where the children live,
both of which fall under Israel’s exclusive jurisdiction and control. In a
handful of cases, Palestinian authorities have arrested Palestinian middlemen
while they were traveling through areas that are under Palestinian jurisdiction,
and prosecuted them for hiring children to work in settlements and other
labor-law violations.
Expanding Settlement Agriculture,
Restrictive Anti-Palestinian Policies
Another
factor underlying abuses against Palestinian children in settlements are
Israel’s policies that severely restrict the traditional Palestinian economic
activity in the Jordan Valley – agriculture – while supporting settlement
agriculture. An Israeli military order revoked Palestinians’ role in planning
and zoning in the 61 percent of the West Bank under exclusive Israeli control,
including most of the Jordan Valley, but settlers enjoy a different, preferential
zoning regime and are represented on planning bodies. (About 30 percent of the
land area of the West Bank lies in the Jordan Valley and Dead Sea areas.) About
80,000 Palestinians live in the Jordan Valley, comprising almost 90 percent of
its population, but Israeli restrictions on the movement of Palestinians mean
that more than 94 percent of the Jordan Valley is off-limits to Palestinian
land use. By contrast, Israel has allocated about 86 percent of the land in the
Jordan Valley to the jurisdiction of settlement regional councils, which look
after the interests of the 9,500 settlers who reside in the Valley.
An
Israeli group critical of land use by Israeli settlements in the West Bank,
Kerem Navot, documented that even after Israel had allocated large tracts of
land to agricultural settlements in the Jordan Valley in the 1970s and 80s, the
amount of land cultivated by those settlements grew by an additional 16 percent
from 1997 to 2012; meanwhile, some Palestinians in the Jordan Valley pay rent
to settlers to use farmland that Israel unlawfully appropriated without
compensation and transferred to the settlements for free. The amount of water
provided to the Israeli settlers in the Jordan Valley by Israeli wells there,
operated by the Israeli national water carrier, is one-quarter of the water
supply of the entire Palestinian population of the West Bank. The World Bank
reported in 2013 that Israeli restrictions on Palestinians’ ability to irrigate
agricultural land and to export crops cost the Palestinian economy US $704
million per year, and that the Palestinian agricultural sector in the West Bank
in 2013 employed fewer people and generated less revenue than it had 15 years
previously. According to World Bank data, poverty rates in Palestinian
localities in the Jordan Valley are among the highest in the West Bank, at between
28.2 and 33.5 percent.
Israeli
restrictions on Palestinian land-use, freedom of movement, and market access, have
generated unemployment and poverty in the Jordan Valley and the rest of the occupied
West Bank, and left few opportunities for hundreds of Palestinian families
other than to send their children to work on the farms of illegal settlements,
where many of their parents also work. Knowing that families rely on the work,
Israeli settler employers exploit Palestinian workers, including children,
while Israel turns a blind eye.
Israeli
settlement agriculture benefits from labor abuses that keep employment costs
low. Settlement agriculture also benefits from Israeli planning and zoning
policies in the West Bank. For example, Israel has appropriated land and water
from Palestinians and transferred these assets to Israeli settlers, provided
subsidies to settlers that are denied to Palestinians, and implemented
restrictions on movements that hinder or prevent Palestinian farmers from
accessing markets. Such policies, which violate Israel’s obligations as the
occupying power to respect the rights of protected persons in occupied territory
and prohibit it from transferring its own civilians there, further impoverish Palestinian
families, leaving many parents to say they feel they have few alternatives to seeking
work in settlements and often sending their children to work there as well.
In
accordance with its obligations as the occupying power in the West Bank, Israel
should dismantle the settlements, limit its use of land, water and other
resources in occupied territory to what is strictly necessary for military
purposes, and lift unlawful restrictions on Palestinian access to those
resources.
Palestinian Child Workers in
Settlement Agriculture
The
Israeli government does not have figures for the number of Palestinian children
working in settlements; none of the children have written contracts, official
work permits, or other forms of documentation. The Palestinian Authority’s
Central Bureau of Statistics has not reported on the number of children working
in Israeli agricultural settlements; it should seek data on the issue of child
labor in settlements during a planned child labor survey to be carried out in
2015.3 A West Bank humanitarian
not-for-profit group that works in Palestinian communities in the Jordan
Valley, the Ma’an Development Center, estimates that during the summer season –
when the most crops need harvesting and children are out of school – up to
1,000 Palestinian children work in Israeli agricultural settlements.
Palestinian
children are apparently a minority of the Palestinian workers in Israeli
agricultural settlements, but the agricultural sector nonetheless appears
particularly susceptible to employing Palestinian children, because most
agricultural workers do not have documentation. Palestinians who work in
settlements in other sectors, such as manufacturing or construction, typically
work inside the settlements themselves. To be able to enter a settlement for
work or any other reason, Palestinians must obtain official Israeli permits. Settler-employers
apply to the Israeli military for these permits on behalf of their Palestinian employees,
whom the military subjects to security screening; among other information, the permits
list the Palestinians’ names, ages and employers. The Israeli military stated
in 2013 that it does not issue work permits to Palestinian children under 18.4
By contrast, all the children and adults working in settlement agriculture whom
Human Rights Watch interviewed said they work in greenhouses and fields on land
located outside the settlement gates – consistent with reports by Israeli and
Palestinian rights groups. Settler-employers are thus able to employ
Palestinians without obtaining the military permits, which could be used in Israeli
labor courts as evidence of violations of Israeli labor laws.
The
financial interest of settler-employers to keep labor costs low is served when
they fail to register their Palestinian employees with the Israeli authorities
– unlike Israeli employees, who are registered. Failure to register the
employees makes it easier to avoid the Israeli legal requirement to pay minimum
wage and other benefits to Palestinians. Agricultural settlements also employ
Israeli citizens, but so far as Human Rights Watch has been able to determine,
there have been no complaints by Israeli employees on agricultural settlements
indicating that they suffer widespread abusive practices similar to those faced
by Palestinian workers, or that Israeli children are similarly employed in violation
of Israeli labor laws, or work in similar jobs to Palestinian children.
Flouting Labor Laws
All
the Palestinian workers whom Human Rights Watch interviewed said settlers hired
Palestinian middlemen who take charge of supplying agricultural workers and
paying them in cash. None of the 50 Palestinians – including 38 children – whom
Human Rights Watch selected to interview during visits to Palestinian
communities in the Jordan Valley, who said they were employed in agricultural
settlements in the area, received contracts, pay slips, permits, or any other
documents required by Israeli law. Such documents would provide evidence
linking the workers to the Israeli-citizen employer on whose behalf they work. Without
them, it is extremely difficult for Palestinians working in settlements to
demand their rights under Israeli labor laws that apply to them, including the
minimum wage law.
Some
Palestinian workers, often with the help of the Israeli rights group that filed
the Supreme Court case, Kav LaOved (Worker’s Hotline), have sued Israeli
settlers, usually to obtain the severance pay legally due them when they were
made redundant. However, cases where Palestinian workers have pursued their
cases in court are rare. Even in cases where Palestinian workers can produce
evidence documenting their claims, many reach an agreement with their erstwhile
settler-employer and receive less than they allege they are owed. Several
Palestinian workers told Human Rights Watch that they feared to push for their rights,
because they were aware of cases of Palestinian workers who successfully sued
their employers, demanding their legal rights, only to find that their employer
then warned other settlers not to hire them, or their children. One Palestinian
man said that after two workers he knew had won court cases against settler
employers, “no one would hire them” or their sons; another agricultural worker
said he agreed to receive less severance pay from his employer than he was owed
by law, for fear that he or his children would be “blacklisted” from working in
settlements. The International Labor Organization, Israeli and Palestinian
rights groups have also reported the “blacklisting” by settlers of Palestinians
who seek their rights in court.
Third State and Business
Responsibilities
Other
states and multilateral organizations have criticized Israel’s unlawful
policies in the Jordan Valley, but without apparent effect. For example, the
International Labor Organization has repeatedly expressed concern about abuses
against Palestinian child workers in the settlement agricultural sector and the
lack of labor inspections, but this prompted no improvements. Israel has
continued to thwart efforts by internationally funded humanitarian agencies to
assist Palestinians in the area, and had issued demolition orders or orders to
stop construction work against 39 Palestinian schools, serving 4,500 students,
in areas of the West Bank under its exclusive control as of 2013.5 Meanwhile, foreign countries’ ongoing trade relationships with
Israeli settlements have helped to sustain settlement-based businesses, thus
undermining these governments’ humanitarian as well as political efforts to
support Palestinians and the Palestinian economy. Some European states are
among the main donors of humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in the Jordan
Valley, yet in 2012, the last date for which figures are available, European
countries imported goods and produce from Israeli settlements in the West Bank
estimated to be worth 15 times more than the goods they imported from Palestinians
in the West Bank and Gaza.6
Israel controls all
exports from Palestinian territory, and effectively requires most Palestinian
businesses to use Israeli exporters.
Israeli
law and practice does not distinguish settlement products from products made in
Israel, and Israel exports agricultural and other goods produced in settlements
located in the West Bank under the “Made in Israel” and “Product of Israel”
labels. Israel does not publish disaggregated figures for the export
destination of settlement-grown produce, but based on news reports, and
information from settlement and company websites, Europe is the main export
market, with some agricultural exports to the US by Israeli companies that work
in settlements in the Jordan Valley.
The
EU has moved to exclude Israeli settlement products from the preferential
tariff treatment provided to Israeli goods under the EU-Israel Association
Agreement. However, under a “Technical Arrangement” to the Agreement, Israel in
practice bundles settlement products together with Israeli goods for export to
Europe and claims tariff-free status for the entire shipment; the Arrangement
places the burden of distinguishing eligible Israeli products and excluding
ineligible settlement goods on European importers, who must do so by scrutinizing
the postal codes designating the origin of each batch. Seventeen EU member
states have issued advice to businesses that they needed to consider the legal,
financial and reputational risks of involvement with settlement trade, but have
not instructed businesses to end such trade. The US in practice continues to
grant preferential treatment to Israeli settlement products under the US-Israel
Free Trade Agreement. The EU offers trade incentives to developing countries
that take steps to combat child labor, but has not undertaken to restrict trade
in products made with child labor, including products from Israeli agricultural
settlements. The US Department of Labor maintains and publishes a list of more
than 350 products from foreign countries that are produced with the use of
forced labor or child labor in other countries, but has not included Israeli
settlement products on the list.
With
Israel showing no sign that it will abide by its international legal
obligations as an occupying power to dismantle civilian settlements in occupied
territory, it is incumbent on other states to take measures to ensure that they
do not contribute to or benefit from Israel’s continuing violation of
international humanitarian law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949,
and international human rights law.
The
Fourth Geneva Convention specifically prohibits the transfer of an occupying
power’s civilian population into the occupied territory, while several
international human rights conventions prohibit discrimination and guarantee
children’s rights.
Given
the widespread, discriminatory abuses against Palestinian children in Israeli settlements
that this report documents, as well as Israel’s continuing violation of international
law as it relates to occupation, foreign states where businesses are domiciled that
trade with Israel, should insist that Israeli authorities and exporters clearly
distinguish between products that derive from settlements and those produced
within Israel. States that enter into trade agreements with Israel should
instruct businesses domiciled in their jurisdictions not to import agricultural
or other products that derive from Israeli settlements and to formally certify
their compliance with this requirement. Businesses should not provide products
or services that support Israeli agricultural settlements.
Recommendations
To
Israel
• Prohibit all settlers from employing
Palestinian children, whether directly or through middlemen, for work in
violation of international law, in particular, any employment of children under
the age of 15, or employment of children under age 18 in hazardous work.
• Impose penalties on employers or
contractors who illegally employ children.
• Lift unlawful restrictions on
Palestinians in occupied territory that contribute to Palestinian poverty and
unemployment, and to the vulnerability of Palestinian children to rights abuses
on settlement farms and dropping out of school, including restrictions on
Palestinian freedom of movement, access to water and electricity, and land use
such as for agriculture, housing, and educational facilities.
• Abide by its obligations as the
occupying power and dismantle civilian settlements in the occupied West Bank.
To
the European Union and EU Member States
• Revise the “Technical Arrangement” of
the EU/Israel Association Agreement to require Israel to exclude agricultural
settlement products from shipments of Israeli goods eligible for preferential
tariff treatment.
• Instruct European importers to cease
imports of agricultural settlement products. To the United States
• Revise the US/Israel Free Trade
Agreement to exclude agricultural settlement products.
• Instruct US importers to cease
imports of agricultural settlement products.
To
Palestine
• Improve enforcement of laws on
children’s free and compulsory education and prohibitions on child labor in
areas where there is Palestinian jurisdiction, including by disciplining or
prosecuting middlemen when the Israeli abusers fall outside of Palestinian
jurisdiction.
• Seek membership in the International
Labor Organization (ILO), and ratify ILO Convention 138 on the Minimum Age for
Admission to Employment and ILO Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child
Labor.7
• Continue to press foreign governments
to cease imports of settlement agricultural products.
To
Businesses Active in Israeli Settlements
• Cease activities in the Israeli
settlement agricultural sector, including providing equipment or services, and
exporting or marketing agricultural produce.
Methodology
Human
Rights Watch conducted preliminary interviews for this report in Palestinian communities
in the Jordan Valley in 2011, and then returned to conduct principal interviews
from March through July 2014. A researcher and research assistant interviewed 38
Palestinian children (under 18 years old), and 12 adults, all of whom worked at
the time in the settlement agricultural sector in the Jordan Valley, as well as
5 adults who did not work in settlements but whose children did. Of the 38
children, 30 said they began working in settlements before age 15; 20 of the
children were younger than age 15 at the time of the interviews. The youngest
child interviewed who was working in a settlement was 11 years old; the
youngest child working full-time in a settlement and who had dropped out of school
was 13 years old at the time of the interview. Human Rights Watch also
interviewed three Palestinians employed as “middlemen” by settler-employers to
provide Palestinian workers; three primary and secondary school teachers, three
school principals, and two guidance counsellors; two Palestinian trade union
representatives; the director of a Palestinian youth sports club; the mayors of
five Palestinian communities; two doctors and two pharmacists who had provided
medical treatment to or had prescribed medicines to Palestinian children who
worked in settlements; and a labor lawyer.
Researchers
identified approximately half the interviewees at random by asking residents of
Palestinian communities located near settlements in the Jordan Valley where
they worked and their ages, and by contacting other children whom the
interviewees identified.
In
other cases, Palestinian teachers and community leaders helped identify
interviewees. Approximately half the interviews were conducted in one-on-one
settings, while the others were conducted in settings with others present, such
as in school offices, youth centers, and private homes. All interviews were
conducted in Arabic with a translator. Human Rights Watch advised all
interviewees of the purposes of the research, that they could terminate the
interview at any time if they wished, and that they would derive no pecuniary or
other direct benefit from assisting Human Rights Watch with this research.
In
some cases, Palestinian interviewees requested that Human Rights Watch not
publish their full names, for fear of being fired by settler-employers. This
report identifies all children and most adults who were interviewed by a single
initial and does not include identifying details.
In
this report, “child” and “children” are used to refer to anyone under the age
of 18, consistent with usage under international law.
Human
Rights Watch also interviewed researchers and field workers of non-governmental
organizations, including Kav LaOved, an Israeli workers’ rights group that provides
legal services to Palestinian as well as foreign workers; the Ma’an Development
Center, a Palestinian humanitarian group; the Jordan Valley Solidarity
Campaign, and advocacy group; and staff in the Jericho office of the
Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions. Human Rights Watch met with
Palestinian authorities and sought to meet Israeli civil and military
authorities responsible for labor law enforcement in the West Bank, and
provided questions to Palestinian and Israeli authorities based on preliminary
research. Israeli officials did not respond to requests for meetings or written
questions.
I. Background: Israel’s Control of
Land in the Jordan Valley
The
Jordan Valley covers about 30 percent of the West Bank, extending from the 1949
armistice line in the north to the Dead Sea in the south, and from the Jordan
River in the east to the eastern slopes of the hills that run through the
middle of the West Bank.8
The river, which
originates in the Sea of Galilee or Kinneret in northern Israel, runs south through
the West Bank and flows into the Dead Sea, and forms a natural and political boundary
between the West Bank and Jordan. The valley is mostly arid and receives little
rainfall. In summer, temperatures there can exceed 45 degrees Celsius.
About
80,000 Palestinians live in the Jordan Valley, of whom an estimated 22,000 live
in the city of Jericho, the largest population center in the area.9 Since
Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, it has established 40 settlements
(including settlement “outposts”) in the Jordan Valley, in violation of the
prohibition in international humanitarian law against an occupying power
transferring its civilians into occupied territory.10 About 9,500 Israeli
settlers live in these settlements.11 The majority of the land used by the
settlements is cultivated with date palms, field crops, and produce grown in
greenhouses.12
Israeli
military orders designating areas near the Jordanian border as closed military
zones have effectively prohibited Palestinian access to the Jordan River since
1967.13 Israel also controls the water
aquifer beneath the arid valley and has granted extraction rights over the
valley’s aquifer to the national Israeli water carrier, Mekorot.14 Israel prohibits new Palestinian water extraction in the Jordan
Valley under the terms of the Interim (“Oslo”) Agreement, and Palestinians
there depend substantially on water allocated by Mekorot.15 The Palestinian Authority pays the government of Israel for the
water; Israel deducts payments from tariff revenues that it collects on imports
to and exports from the Palestinian Authority areas of the West Bank. Settlers
in the Jordan Valley receive an average of 300 liters of water per capita per
day, while Palestinian access varies dramatically, from almost 200 liters per
day for residents of Jericho to as little as 20 liters for residents of
pastoral Bedouin communities.16
Overall, the World Bank
reports, “water withdrawals per capita for Palestinians in the West Bank are
about one quarter of those available to Israelis,” and declined by 35 percent
from 1999 to 2007, while actual domestic use of water is about 50 liters per
capita per day – lower than the daily minimum of 100 liters recommended by the
World Health Organization.17
According
to the World Bank, agriculture contributed over 14 percent of Palestinian West Bank
GDP in the mid-1990s, but fell to only 5.1 percent in 2011; meanwhile, even as employment
in the Palestinian agriculture sector nearly doubled from 1995 to 2011, “productivity,
or output per worker, declined by half” in that period, due to restrictions imposed
by Israel.18 The Bank projected in 2013 that
Israeli restrictions on irrigating agricultural land “notionally available” to
Palestinians in the West Bank – excluding some 187 square kilometers of land
taken over by settlements – and on the export of crops by Palestinians cost the
Palestinian economy US $704 million per year.19
The
amount of agricultural land cultivated by Israeli settlements in the West Bank
grew by 35 percent from 1997 to 2012, according to Kerem Navot, an Israeli
group critical of settlement land use.20 The World Bank conservatively
estimated in 2013 that “the potential agricultural value of the settlements’
land used for agriculture is at least USD 251 million.”21
Area C
Israeli
policies in the West Bank are based substantially on its limited delegation of authority
over parts of the occupied territory to the Palestinian Authority (PA) under
the terms of the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement (the final “Oslo
Accord”).22 The majority of the 2.7 million
Palestinians in the West Bank today live in “Area A” – cities and towns
comprising about 18 percent of the West Bank, over which the PA has authority
over both civil and security affairs – and in “Area B” – villages and rural
lands comprising 22 percent of the West Bank, where the PA has civil but not
security powers. Israel retained exclusive control over all security and civil
issues such as land use and building permits in about 62 percent of the West
Bank, which the Oslo Accord designated as “Area C.”23 About 300,000 settlers as well as 300,000 Palestinians live in
Area C.
The
40 Israeli settlements in the Jordan Valley are located in areas designated as
Area C. Although the 9,500 settlers in the Jordan Valley make up about 11
percent of the region’s population, Israeli authorities have zoned and
allocated 86 percent of the entire Jordan Valley (1,467 square kilometers) to
the control of two settlement “regional councils”: the Jordan Valley Regional
Council and the Megilot Regional Council in the northern Dead Sea region.24
About
87 percent of the land in the Jordan Valley is classified as Area C.25 An estimated 18,000 Palestinians live in 68 communities located
in parts of the valley that are designated as Area C.26 Israel designated an
additional 7 percent of the Jordan Valley as “national parks” in 2002,
rendering it unavailable for Palestinian agricultural or other use, in areas
that had been classified as Area B. Israeli forces destroyed 172 Palestinian
structures in the Jordan Valley in 2012, and 390 in 2013, on the basis that
they were built without the required permits.27 In one Jordan Valley village,
Jiftlik, Palestinian municipal officials showed Human Rights Watch records they
kept of 23 home-demolitions by Israeli forces from January 2013 to February
2014, in addition to confiscations of property including cars.28
Israel
requires Palestinians living in Area C to obtain Israeli military permits in
order to use the land in any way, such as for building or renovating homes,
animal shelters, roads, walls, wells, water cisterns, electricity pylons, or
solar panels; laying irrigation hoses; planting trees; ploughing land; or
grazing livestock. From 2000 to 2007, the military denied more than 94 percent
of Palestinian permit applications throughout the West Bank; it has frequently
demolished “illegal” construction, and fined Palestinians for illegal use of
lands, such as by confiscating sheep and requiring a fine per head of livestock
for their return.29
Land-Use Restrictions
The
Israeli military restricts Palestinian land use in Area C on the basis of
multiple, overlapping land designations, such as “state land,” “military firing
zones,” and “nature reserves.” These land-use restrictions effectively limit
Palestinian building to about 0.5 percent of Area C (approximately 1.8 square
kilometers), much of which is already built up, according to Israeli planning
experts and rights groups.30 Israel designates much of the land within Area C
as “state land,” i.e., land where Israel does not recognize any individual or
collective Palestinian property rights.31 Israeli authorities registered areas
of the West Bank as “state land” if the Jordanian authorities had registered
them as state land before 1967, or if Palestinians could not prove individual ownership
according to onerous requirements; in documented cases, Israeli authorities accepted
military aerial photographs showing that plots of land were uncultivated at a certain
point in time as evidence that no Palestinian had a legal claim to it.32 Even
in cases where Palestinians could meet Israeli requirements proving land
ownership, some lost appeals against Israeli seizures and transfers of their
land on the basis that they could not prove that Israeli officials who made the
declarations did so in “bad faith,” as required by Israeli military orders.33
According
to Israeli military responses to information-disclosure requests by Israeli
rights groups, since 1967 the Israeli military Civil Administration division
allocated 0.7 percent of all West Bank “state land” (8.6 square kilometers) to
Palestinians; 8 percent (103 square kilometers) to Israeli settlement councils
and mobile phone companies; 12 percent (160 square kilometers) to Israeli
government ministries and national telephone, electric, and water utility
companies; and 31 percent (400 square kilometers) to the World Zionist Organization
(WZO), which establishes settlements.34
Israel’s
official policy is to establish settlements only on state land, where it
considers that Palestinians do not have legitimate private ownership claims.
However, according to official Israeli records compiled by an Israeli civil
society organization that opposes the settlements, about 21 percent of the
built-up area of settlements is located on privately owned Palestinian land.35
Restrictions on Palestinian
Agriculture
Israeli
prohibitions on Palestinian land use in the Jordan Valley are based on multiple
legal designations that Israel imposes on land, such as “state land,” in
addition to declaring its exclusive control of Area C. As well, the military
has assigned almost half of the land in the Jordan Valley to “military firing
zones,” and designated about a fifth of the land as “nature reserves.” These
designations frequently overlap: for instance, Israel has designated some areas
in the Jordan Valley as not only falling within the jurisdiction of a
settlement regional council, but also as state land, as a military firing zone,
and as a nature reserve.36
Israel
does not enforce the land-use restrictions it imposes on Palestinians on
Israeli settlers. In the Jordan Valley, for example, several agricultural
settlements are permitted to cultivate lands that are located within designated
military firing zones, which are off-limits for land use of any kind by
Palestinians.37
Israel
has reallocated West Bank land and water resources from Palestinians to
settlers, provided additional subsidies to settlers, and imposed additional
restrictions on Palestinians’ ability to cultivate their remaining lands, access
water, and build infrastructure such as agricultural roads, greenhouses and
irrigation systems.38
A
Palestinian community leader from the village of Sbeidat, a Palestinian village
of 1,800 people in the Jordan Valley, told Human Rights Watch in May 2014 that
residents were then cultivating only a total of 100 hectares of land, much less
than in the past: “Before 1967, we cultivated [300 hectares], but Argaman [a
settlement] took over [150 hectares], and we lost two water wells.”39 A Palestinian middleman who supplied agricultural workers to a settler
in Tomer said that the settler was cultivating land “taken from Majdal, close
to Aqraba.”40 The M. family, one of its members told Human Rights Watch, came
originally from Tammoun, near Nablus, but moved to Jiftlik in the Jordan Valley
when they were displaced by fighting in 1967. At first, they farmed land there
until it was taken over by Beka’ot, an agricultural settlement. Fourteen
members of the extended family had worked in Kalia, a settlement in the southern
West Bank, until they were fired without cause in 2010, family members said.
They were unable to find work with Palestinian farmers, whose own immediate
families do most of the work on their farms. The M. family owns no agricultural
land, they told us, and when they rented land to cultivate for one season they achieved
a profit of no more than 1000 shekels ($370).41
In
the Jordan Valley, Israel’s State Comptroller reported that the Israeli
military confiscated thousands of dunams of land (one dunam is a tenth of a
hectare) from Palestinian owners whom Israel determined were “absentees,”
because they had fled or been expelled from the West Bank in 1967. Military
orders required the military to safeguard this “absentee property” pending the
return of the owners but, in practice, the military has transferred “absentee”
land to settlements.42 According to a survey of official
Israeli land-use data conducted by an Israeli expert on the West Bank
settlements:
In
order to give the agricultural areas allocated to the settlements in the Jordan
Valley their [contiguous] bloc-like character, the Israeli authorities sometimes
coerced Palestinian landowners into signing land-swap […] contracts—i.e., to
receive lands that Israel had defined as “absentee property” in exchange for
their original land, which the state then transferred to the settlers. During
the [1990s], when some of the landowners, who had fled the Jordan Valley in the
aftermath of the 1967 War, returned and demanded their lands back, those who
had signed the […] contracts were left with nothing. […] At least eight
different settlements obtained part of their land through such contracts.43
Palestinian
municipal officials in Jiftlik, a Jordan Valley community with 5,000 residents,
told Human Rights Watch that Israeli authorities had confiscated 85 hectares of
agricultural land from village residents who left in 1967 and allocated it to
the agricultural settlements of Masua and Beqa’ot.44
A
Palestinian humanitarian NGO reported in 2013 that Palestinian farmers
typically earn 50 to 100 shekels ($14.30 to $28.60) per day after expenses,
which, in some cases, include the cost of renting land from settlements. The
land lease usually consists of “an oral agreement between the Palestinian and
the Israeli settler […] with profits split 50-50 with the settler.”45 As settlement agriculture has grown, Palestinian agriculture has
declined. Agricultural lands under Palestinian cultivation in the West Bank
decreased by 30 percent from 1965, two years before Israel occupied the area,
to 1994.46 During that time, Israel enforced military
orders that regulated Palestinian agriculture in minute detail, and restricted Palestinian
access to markets for agricultural products.47 From
1994 to 2008, revenues from agriculture dropped from 13.3 percent to 5.7
percent of Palestinian GDP.48
In
addition, Israeli restrictions on Palestinians’ freedom of movement and the transportation
of crops harm Palestinian farmers’ ability to export any crops to Israel or further
abroad. Israeli checkpoints restrict four of the five roads into the Jordan
Valley; three of these checkpoints do not allow Palestinians to cross in their
own vehicles unless they previously obtained a permit to enter the Jordan
Valley, while the fourth generally allows Palestinians to cross only on foot or
in buses.49 Palestinians in the Jordan Valley, including
farmers seeking to transport their produce to markets in Palestinian towns and cities
outside the Jordan Valley, often have to take the longer, fifth road; these
additional transportation costs, in addition to added costs of delays at
checkpoints, cost farmers an additional 8.4 million shekels ($2.3 million)
annually, according to UN estimates.50
Israel
often requires security inspections of Palestinian produce at checkpoints,
which involves offloading produce from one truck, examining it, and re-loading
it onto a second truck.51
Such procedures increase
shipping times and costs, and break the “cold chain” of continuous
refrigeration that importing countries often require for fresh fruits,
vegetables, and meat products.52
By contrast, Israeli
settlement produce is typically inspected on-site, shipped to exporters located
inside Israel without unloading and inspection at checkpoints, and then
exported abroad.53 Israel also obliges Palestinians to
export all produce through Israeli exporters, whereas settlement produce is
inspected in settlement packing houses and shipped directly to Israel for
consumption on the Israeli market or export.
According
to a Palestinian trade union representative, Palestinian farmers in the Jordan Valley
exported dates and vegetables to Jordan and other Arab countries until 1988, when
Jordan relinquished territorial claims to the West Bank. “Now they only sell
inside the West Bank, and sometimes vegetables to Israel,” he said.54 A community leader in Sbeidat told Human Rights Watch that nearly
everyone in the village was employed in settlements or in local agriculture,
but that local farmers could not earn much money because “the Israelis undersell
us, they flood the market, or they stop us at checkpoints and ruin the crops.
It’s only local markets for us, no exports, not even to Israel, because it’s
too difficult to get the permits.”55
Palestinian
residents of the Jordan Valley said that Israeli controls over their access to water
limited the ability of Palestinians to engage in profitable agricultural
activity. Overall, more than 70 percent of Palestinian communities in Area C
are not connected to any water network.56 In
Fasayil, a community of 1,500 people, about 60 percent of the workforce works
in settlements, while the other 40 percent raise sheep, a municipal official
said.
We
don’t get enough water. We need to dig a new well, but that is not allowed. We
have a two-inch-diameter water pipe, but we don’t control when it is on, the
[Israelis] do. After the settlements came, our well, the Fasayil well, dried
up; it was near the settlement of Ma’ale Ephraim. From April through November,
we get less water because the settlements use more of it.57
A
community leader described a history of similar problems in the village of
Sbeidat:
Ten
years ago here, our wells dried up, because the settlements were using so much
water. We went to Mekorot [the Israeli national water carrier] and asked for
water, but they only offered to give us salty water. People would go with their
tractors and water tankers and steal water from the settlement pipes. This was
from 1994 to 2001. The Israelis were arresting people, there were police around
all the time because of water theft. In 2001 Mekorot started to give us 7 cubic
meters per hour. They put a restricting valve in the pipe, and every once in a
while people would break the pipe and remove the valve, to increase the flow.
Today, we get 17 cubic meters per hour, every other day. We get water for 24
hours, then the two other villages nearby [Marj al-Ghazal and Marj al-Naaje]
get it for 12 hours each. 58
Palestinian
children and adults who work in agricultural settlements told Human Rights Watch
that they did so because they had few other employment opportunities.59 A 2014 World Bank study found poverty rates from 28.2 to 33.45
percent in the Jordan Valley.60
Unemployment in the West
Bank stood at 19 percent in 2012.61
Unemployment in Israel (and
the settlements) in 2013 was 6.9 percent.62
Settlement Agriculture in the
Jordan Valley
Israeli
agricultural settlements were established in the Jordan Valley on land
confiscated from Palestinians by the Israeli military, and allocated to
settlements without cost or at nominal cost.63 Israeli settler-farmers also
receive 70 percent of their water from the Israeli national water carrier,
Mekorot, which extracts water from the aquifer lying beneath the Jordan Valley;
the other 30 percent come from the Jordan River and a ground-water reservoir.64
As of
August 2012, about 4,240 Palestinians held official Israeli permits to work in
the settlement agriculture sector, mostly in the Jordan Valley, according to
the Israeli military’s Civil Administration.65 Israel does not collect figures on
the number of Palestinians working in settlements who do not have official
permits, including children.66 Israeli and Palestinian rights and development
groups, and representatives of a Palestinian labor union, estimate that a total
of around 10,000 Palestinian workers are employed in agricultural settlements
in the Jordan Valley during the summer date-harvesting season.67
The
Israeli government does not publish disaggregated information about the total
value of Israeli settlement agriculture or exports of settlement agricultural
products to foreign markets. According to a 2013 report in Der Spiegel, in
total, “Each year, the settlers export some €220 million ($299 million) worth
of goods to Europe [including settlement produce], whereas the comparable figure
for the Palestinians is a mere €15 million ($20 million).”68 As noted, the
World Bank conservatively estimates the value of settlement agricultural
production at $251 million.69 According to the Jordan Valley Regional Council, “the
value of agricultural production in the Jordan Valley is about 500 million
shekels [$146 million] and the cultivated area is about 33,000 dunam [33 square
kilometers].”70
Crops
cultivated in settlements include 14 square kilometers of dates, of which more
than 80 percent are exported; 4.6 square kilometers of table grapes, with 70
percent exported; 3.1 square kilometers of bell peppers; and 3 square
kilometers of herbs and spices, which “comprise 40 percent of Israel's yearly
export,” the website states.
Subsidies
Israel
provides numerous subsidies to settlement agriculture, for which Palestinians
are ineligible. The full amount of Israeli settlement incentives is difficult
to identify from state budgets, although some settlement subsidies are
explicit.71 In 2009, for example, the government allocated 20 million shekels
($5.7 million) to the settlement division of the World Zionist Organization
(WZO) to develop settlement agriculture, particularly in the Jordan Valley.72
In 2012, the Israeli parliament’s finance committee approved 7.6 million shekels
($2.17 million) for the “Jordan Valley” and the “Binyamin” settlement regional councils.73
Overall, the amount of land that Israel allocated for agricultural use to
Jordan Valley settlements increased by 16 percent from 1997 to 2012.74
Agricultural
settlements that the Israeli government designates as “National Priority Areas”
are eligible for a variety of benefits.75 Most designated National Priority
Areas inside Israel proper are communities that receive a low ranking on
Israel’s official “socio-economic” scale (from 1 for the poorest and most
disadvantaged to 10 for the most affluent), but periodic government decisions
on which communities are priority areas have included many settlements
regardless of their relatively high socio-economic rankings.76
The
Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development supports settlements designated
as National Priority areas on the basis of the Law for the Encouragement of
Investments in Agriculture of 1980.77 Under the law, the ministry provides tax-exempt
grants for the establishment of an agricultural farm or factory, including the
allocation of the land, in the sum of 20 percent of the total costs, to
communities that the government designates as national “Priority Area A,”
including settlements (Article 24). The law limits the maximum total tax rates
for individual and businesses that own agricultural farms (Article 33).78
The
ministry provides an additional administrative grant, worth five percent of the
total investment, for “settlements of the [Jordan] Valley and Judea and
Samaria.”79 Familyowned packing houses in
agricultural settlements are eligible for Ministry of Agriculture subsidies,
and non-family packing houses are newly eligible for a 500,000 shekel ($142,850)
grant under the ministry’s development plan for 2014.80 In a May 2011 plan, which
has not yet been enacted, the agriculture ministry stated it would increase the
cultivated lands of settlements in the Jordan Valley by 130 per cent and
increase each settler’s water allocation by 20 per cent.81
An
Israeli agriculture ministry “subsidies brochure” describes the procedure by
which settler-farmers may apply to receive an “allocation of Palestinian
workers.”82 Another agriculture ministry document describes the laws and
regulations applicable to the “allocation [of water] to the Water Association
of the Jordan Valley.”83 By comparison, studies and surveys cited by
al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank, indicate that the Palestinian Authority
(PA) has spent little on agricultural development. A 2012 report found that the
PA had never allocated more than 1 percent of its annual budget to its Ministry
of Agriculture, while a 2007 study found that about 85 percent of that
ministry’s budget went to pay staff salaries.84
II. Palestinian Children Working in
Israeli Settlements
According
to the UN, about 24 percent of all Palestinian workers in Area C, including the
Jordan Valley, work in settlements, with the majority employed in agriculture.85 About 30 to 35 percent of Palestinian workers in settlements are
women; another 15 percent are under 18, and up to half of the children are aged
16 years or younger, a trade unionist and a labor rights lawyer who work in the
West Bank told Human Rights Watch in separate interviews, based on their
experience.86
The
International Labor Organization expressed in 2009 its “great concern” at
“child labor in Israeli settlements […] particularly in agriculture,” and cited
an Israeli estimate that 1,900 children worked in Israeli settlements
throughout the West Bank.87 Staff at a Palestinian humanitarian NGO that
conducts surveys on children working in settlements, the Ma’an Development
Center, estimated in 2014 that there were up to 1,000 children working in
settlements in the agricultural sector, although the number would fluctuate throughout
the year and be highest during summer, when schools are closed.88
In a
2004 survey on child labor, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics found
that from 3.8 to 6 percent of children aged 5 to 17 in the West Bank were working,
with the highest rate – 13.2 percent – in the Jericho governorate, in the
Jordan Valley.89 About 56 percent of the children who
worked were under 15 years old; of them, almost 49 percent worked in agriculture.
The survey did not disaggregate children who work in Israeli settlements, but some
of its results appear applicable to children who work in settlements: 71
percent of children work “due to economic need,” 51.4 percent to “assist
household projects,” and 19.6 percent to “increase household income.”90
Notwithstanding
substantial Palestinian poverty rates in the Jordan Valley, the settlement agricultural
sector attracts some workers, including children, from elsewhere in the West Bank.
Hashem Masarweh, a field worker with the Israeli workers’ rights group Kav
LaOved, said he visited a warehouse in the village of Al Ouja, north of
Jericho, in August 2013 and found 17 people from the village of al-Yamun, which
is near Nablus, outside the Jordan Valley, living there, including 5 children.
The
middleman drove up while I was there in a black Skoda and when I introduced
myself, he told me, ‘Ask the kids if they have any bread in their house.’ Some
of them said they had sick parents who couldn’t work, or they just hated
school. They said they were paid 60 shekels per day, but the middleman deducted
10 shekels a night for them to sleep in the warehouse, and 5 shekels to drive
them to the settlements. There’s more than one warehouse like that.91
Human
Rights Watch visited another warehouse in Al Ouja in February 2014, where three
men, aged 19 to 21, were living. The men said they worked in the nearby
settlement of Gilgal, and that four children, including a 14-year-old boy, had
lived with them at the warehouse until the previous month. There were still
seven mattresses on the warehouse floor.92
At
another warehouse in Al Ouja in April, Human Rights Watch found three men, aged
20 to 21, who said they had dropped out of school in the Grades 7 and 8, and
one boy, aged 17. The men were from al-Yamun, and the boy was from Nasiriyah,
another village near Nablus. The four said they worked in the Na’ame settlement
from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. six days per week for 70 shekels per day. 93 They worked in Na’ame from December to April or May, and worked
inside Israel during the rest of the year.
Palestinian Middlemen
Settler
employers do not contract directly with Palestinian agricultural workers, but
work through Palestinian middlemen, who are responsible for hiring,
transporting, and paying workers. Each middleman – whom workers refer to in
Arabic as a wasit, or in Hebrew as a kablon, or contractor – is typically paid
around 75 to 100 shekels ($28.50) per day by the employer, and in addition,
deducts fees of around 15 to 25 shekels ($4.25 to $7.14) from the daily wages
of each worker for whom he or she is responsible, in part to cover
transportation and other expenses.94 Some middlemen pay compensation to workers
who were injured or became sick on the job, but others do not, according to
Palestinian workers.
F.,
13, said he worked in Petzael on weekends, earning 50 shekels a day after his middleman
deducted a fee, or more when he worked overtime, sometimes starting at 5 a.m.
and working until 3 p.m.95
He told Human Rights
Watch: “The contractor came to my house and asked me if I wanted to work. Work
is better than school, my family needs me to work. There are six in my family,
three boys and one girl and my parents. I’m the oldest boy, and me and my
father work. My family wants me to finish school and also to work on weekends,
and I do too.”
Human
Rights Watch interviewed H., a middleman, who said he supplied 50 workers to a settler
in Tomer year-round, “and at the time of the grape season, it goes up to 70 workers.”
H. described his job:
In
total there are 500 Palestinians working at Tomer and about 50 or 60 Thais. I
work with one settler, which is normal. Under me are a few foremen, and I give
each foreman 20 workers to supervise. The settler gives me money to pay for
things, and I give him receipts, but he doesn’t butt in. He will go on vacation
and just leave it all to me. We get orders that I’m responsible for. The
settler will say, “We’ve got to fill 10 boxes [with produce] for Mehadrin or
Galil,” and I have to make sure they’re filled. If we need to buy pesticide or
something, then I go get it, from stores around here. We export to the US,
France, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, or we sell to Israel and the Palestinian
market.96
In
addition to these work duties, middlemen serve another purpose for their
employers: avoiding the need to obtain work permits for and provide pay slips
to Palestinian employees, who could use such paperwork as evidence in court.
Wael Natheef, a Palestinian labor union representative, told Human Rights
Watch: “In agricultural production the worker rarely has a permit. The
middleman, who is usually a worker ‘promoted’ from the workforce, will just
have a list with his work crew on it. If workers are fired they have no proof
of having been employed.”97
H. and O., another
middleman, said they were responsible for paying workers in cash; all of the
workers Human Rights Watch spoke to said they were paid in cash without any
documentation.
H.
said that some of the older workers who had worked under him for 10 years or
more had official Israeli work permits, “so they could go to court,” H. said,
but the younger workers did not. “There are no pay slips, and there is no
evidence,” he said.
Palestinian
middlemen who employ children to work for Israeli settler-employers also evade
Israeli laws that prohibit children under 15 from working, and that prohibit
children from working during school hours. While Palestinians who work in
settlement industrial zones or in the construction sector inside settlements
must obtain security clearances from the Israeli military to enter the
settlements, those who work in agricultural fields can go to work without such
permits. According to Z., 19, who has worked in settlements since he dropped
out of school in Grade 10, “if you work for a settlement, they check your huwwiya
[identification document], but if you work for a farmer, they don’t care.”98 S., who was 16 at the time she spoke to Human Rights Watch, said
she left school at age 13 because her family needed her to earn money. She
worked in Kalia, a settlement, until age 15, when she was fired, along with
other members of her family who worked in the settlement. S. did not know
whether Israeli labor inspectors ever visited her settlement, but said she hid
when on her way to work because of her age. “I would hide under the seats in
the [middleman’s] bus on the way [to Kalia] whenever we saw a soldier or
security guards, because [the middleman said] I was too young to work,” she
said. “Sometimes the soldiers stopped the bus and I told them I forgot my
identification card at home. They always let me through.”99 (Israel allows the Palestinian Authority to issue identification documents
only to Palestinians aged 16 and above).
In
some cases, middlemen “employ” their own children. L., 15, said he dropped out
of school when he was 13, in Grade 9, to work in Tomer, where he picked and
packed asparagus. “My dad is responsible for me, and for 4 or 5 other people.
He has 2 wives and there are 14 people in the family, and me and 3 of my
brothers left school to work.” L. said he earned 85 shekels per day – above
average – for a six-hour shift beginning at 5:30 a.m. and up to 130 shekels if he
worked until 4 p.m. The work required him to bend down low to the ground, which
gave him back pains, he said. “I used to spray pesticide but I got a bad
allergy in my eyes and had to get eye drops at the pharmacy, so now my dad
won’t let me use pesticide.”100
Exploitative and Dangerous Work
Condition
Ages and Hours of Work
Most
of the Palestinian children whom Human Rights Watch interviewed said they began
working on Israeli agricultural settlements at age 13 or 14. Children as young
as 11 work part-time, and one boy interviewed by Human Rights Watch reported he
had worked alongside a boy of only 10.101 Two
brothers told Human Rights Watch that they began working fulltime when they
were 13 and 14 years old. Now ages 16 and 17, they said that of the 40 people
who worked with their contractor, 15 were younger than they were, with the youngest
a boy aged 14.102 A 16-year old girl, who had left
school at age 13 to work, told Human Rights Watch that the majority of the 100
workers employed at the settlement where she worked were under age 17.103
I.,
from Sbeidat, began working during holidays and after school when he was 11
years old, and quit school to work full time when he was 13, he said.104 One
15-year old boy, M., said he dropped out of school at age 14 to begin working
in the settlements of Tomer and Petzael. Of the 20 Palestinians working with
him, he said five were under age 18, with the youngest aged 14.105 Eight of M.’s 30 classmates had left school to work in
settlements. “I work because my father died and my mother doesn’t work,” he
said. “I’m the oldest of seven children and the sole provider. This is the only
the way to make money.”
M.,
16, said that three of his eight co-workers were also 16 years old, and another
four were 14 or 15. The boys worked under different middlemen, but they all
worked from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m., with a half-hour break. 106 They earned 60
shekels per work day, after the middlemen’s deductions, and worked about 15
days per month, because frequently there was no work for them in the
settlement, M. said.
In
2011, Human Rights Watch interviewed three 13-year-old boys, two from Jiftlik
and one from Fasayil, who said they worked on weekends and after school. R.,
13, a Grade 8 student, said his eldest brother, who is 17, took care of him and
his two sisters and three other brothers because their father was in jail and
their mother was in Jordan. To help, R. worked with his grandmother picking onions
in Tomer from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m., and sometimes to 3 p.m., on Fridays and
Saturdays.107 “I take the onions out of the ground
and pile them up in one spot,” he said. “I cut them, either with scissors or a
knife. They spray the onions, not while I’m working on them, but they’re still
wet from the pesticide.”
A.’s
mother explained that she received permission from the middleman to have A.
help her. “I took him to help me finish a bigger area,” she said. “If you
finish up to 150 square meters of picking onions, that’s considered a day’s
work. I’m allowed to bring help, so that I can finish more, you get two days’
pay if you finish 300 meters.”108
Children
said they often work six or seven days a week, beginning at 5:30 or 6 a.m., and
finish at 1 or 2 p.m. During peak harvest periods, they may work eleven or
twelve hours a day. When interviewed in 2011, I. was 14, and working six days a
week, “sometimes from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. when it is very busy.”109 One 17-year-old boy said, “In dates, we work extra hours, until 4
or 5 p.m., three to four weeks a year for pruning, and during the picking season,
we have to fill up three trucks before we can go home, so sometimes we have to work
very late.”110
Children
are sometimes pressured to work without breaks. Fifteen-year old I. A., who dropped
out of school after Grade 8, said,
If
you sit down while you’re working with peppers or grapes the supervisor will
come and tell you to stand up and not take a break. We don’t get bathrooms – we
get permission from the supervisor to go out in the fields. They are always
yelling at us, not insulting us but saying, “Work faster, you’re too slow.”
There’s no respect for me there. The middleman will fire people in the morning,
without giving them their pay for the day, like if they damage the fruit for
example. You can’t switch middlemen, they would talk to each other and force
you to go back to the first one you tried to quit on.111
F.,
age 13, cut peppers and put them into boxes, sometimes working from 5 a.m.
until 3 p.m. He said, “They don’t want me to go until I finish. I have to do 10
rows of peppers a day. I wanted to leave one time but the supervisor told me,
‘No, you have to stay until you finish 10 rows.’”112
M.,
who said he would have liked to have become a teacher, said that 7 boys from
his elementary school class of 17 students had dropped out to work in
settlements before completing Grade 10. Three of his eight co-workers were 16
years old, and four were 14 or 15, he said. The boys worked under different
middlemen, and said they worked ten hours a day -- from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. --
with only a half-hour break.
Low Wages
The
average daily wage for Palestinians in the West Bank, not including workers in settlements,
was 87 shekels ($23.50) in 2012, the latest date for which figures are available;
in the governorate of Jericho, which is located in the Jordan Valley, the
average daily wage was 80.8 shekels ($21.80).113 In
Israel and the settlements, the average monthly wage was 8,971 shekels ($2,425)
per month, or around 407 shekels ($110) per working day, in 2012.114
Israeli
law provides for a minimum wage, which is periodically updated; by law, the minimum
wage for children under 18 years old is lower than the adult minimum wage. Israeli
military orders extend the minimum wage law – but not, as Israeli legal
scholars point out, crucial aspects of its enforcement mechanisms – to cover
Palestinians working in West Bank settlements.115 As of October 1, 2012 – the
most recent increase at the time the research for this report was conducted –
the adult daily minimum wage was 198.46 shekels for a worker employed 5 days
per week, and 172 shekels for a worker employed 6 days per week, or 4,300
shekels per month and 23.12 shekels per hour.116 For children under 16, the
minimum monthly wage was 3,010 shekels, or around 16 shekels per hour; for 16
year olds, the minimum monthly wage was 3,225 shekels, or around 17 shekels per
hour; for 17 year olds, it was 3,569 shekels, or around 18.5 shekels per
hour.117 Israel’s minimum wage increased on April 1, 2015, to 25 shekels per
hour, with children’s minimum wages set at between 70 and 83 percent of the
adult minimum wage.118
The
average hourly wage for the 38 Palestinian children working in agricultural
settlements in the Jordan Valley whom Human Rights Watch interviewed was around
10 shekels ($2.70), or 70 shekels ($19) per day, a figure consistent with
reports of earnings of such child workers by humanitarian and development
groups.119 Some children took home 50 shekels per day – an average of 6.25
shekels ($1.65) per hour – after paying for transportation to and from settlements;
another group of 10 workers, including 3 children, earned 65 shekels ($17.50) for
an 8 hour work day, or about 8 shekels ($2.20) per hour.120 Most children said
they earned 10 shekels per hour in “overtime” if they worked longer than 8
hours, usually during the date pruning and picking seasons. At some
settlements, settlers gave employees a 5- shekel-per-day raise for each year
they worked, but other settlers did not, workers said.121
S.
told Human Rights Watch that she received 68 shekels each day for a shift that
ran from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., and that she usually worked 7 days a week, but
sometimes was not required to work on Saturdays. “We carried buckets of
tomatoes that weighed about nine kilograms, and there were no bathrooms,” she
said. Workers were paid by the month, without pay slips, and they were not paid
for days when they failed to work because they were ill.
The
Israeli 1958 Wage Protection Law
compels employers to pay monthly salaried employees by the end of the month,
and to pay hourly or weekly workers every two weeks.
Employers
who delay payment for one week must pay the worker his wages plus a penalty of
5 percent and for every week of delay thereafter a penalty of 10 percent.122
Israel does not appear to have applied this law to Palestinian employees of
settlers.123
Some
Palestinian children working in settlements said they were paid late, or not at
all. Two 17-year-old brothers from the Aqabat Jaber refugee camp, near Jericho,
quit school when they were in Grade 9 and worked in Petzael, a settlement, for
two years, along with other child workers. “We left Petzael because [the
middleman] didn’t pay us for the last two months,” H. said. “We never got the
money.”124
Although
all of the Palestinian adults and children working in agricultural settlements
whom Human Rights Watch interviewed earned far less than the Israeli minimum
wage, most labor disputes that Palestinian workers and middlemen described to
Human Rights Watch involved severance pay rather than the minimum wage.
Israel’s Minimum Wage Law states that workers cannot waive their rights to
minimum wages, but as one Palestinian middleman stated, “you can’t ask the
[settler] for a raise, because they’d fire you,” whereas workers demanding
severance pay have less to lose, as they have already lost their jobs.125
According
to an ILO review of Israeli labor laws, Israel’s 1963 Severance Pay Law
entitles discharged workers – though not workers who resign – to severance pay
equivalent to one month of salary for each complete year worked, unless the
worker is discharged for a serious disciplinary violation.126
While
some Palestinians sued for severance pay, others were afraid to do so for fear
of being blacklisted, according to some of those who spoke to Human Rights
Watch. For example, H. said he knew of two Palestinian workers from Fasayil who
possessed official Israeli work permits who had sued their settler-employer in
Tomer in early 2014 for the severance payment due to them under Israeli law
when their employer made them redundant. “They won the lawsuits but now they
are on a blacklist and so are their children,” he said. “No one will hire
them.” Another Palestinian worker said he avoided going to court to demand his
full severance pay, and had made a “deal” with his employer instead, for fear
that his children might be placed on a blacklist.127 H.
said that middlemen who worked with other settlers in Tomer had told him about
“a new thing the [settlers] have come up with, where the settler has a paper
that all the workers will have to sign, that says they waive their right to
severance pay.” H. criticized that reported initiative but noted, “They
[settler employers] can fire us all whenever they want. They have an alternative
– they can get workers from Tammoun, or elsewhere outside the valley.”
In
2014, the International Labor Organization (ILO) reported “particular concern”
at the situation of “Palestinian women, men and children [who] are engaged in
seasonal agricultural work in Israeli settlements” in the Jordan Valley, and
described “an apparently coordinated practice by Israeli settlement employers
in the Jordan Valley of blacklisting Palestinian workers who have lodged
complaints of labor rights violations.”128
O., a
middleman in Jiftlik who previously worked for 11 years as an agricultural
laborer in settlements, said of settler employers and the middlemen who work
for them: “They pay in cash, no pay slips, and there are no [work] permits, so
there is no paper trail to demand severance pay or anything else.”129 Another
Jiftlik resident said he knew of workers who would be unwilling to go to an
Israeli labor court to resolve a dispute with their settler-employer. “When you
go to court they have to show permits, they can’t go with just their word. Plus
they have to pay money and provide documents,” he said.130
O.
said he had a contract with his employer: “I have a contract with him in
Hebrew, it says I’m responsible for making sure [the workers] are paid out of
the amount he gives me, and to ensure the work gets done, but it does not
specify a number of workers.” O. said he paid his workers 80 shekels per day,
“but because they have to get a car to take them to work, some of them take
home only 50 shekels a day.”
The
2014 ILO report cited “well documented practices of Israeli employers [in
settlements] circumventing legal obligations towards their workers,” including
“ploys to disguise the employment relationship, to avoid issuing payslips or to
conceal the actual number of hours worked, in order to evade minimum wage and
social security obligations.”131
Consistent with Human
Rights Watch’s findings, Oxfam reported in 2012 that none of the Palestinian
workers its staff interviewed that year in the Jordan Valley “received the benefits
that Israeli workers are entitled to by law, including holidays, overtime pay, transportation
costs, health insurance, sick pay, or payments from a provident fund.”132
Health and Safety
Children
described performing work on Israeli settlements that put their health and
safety at risk. They handle pesticides that cause nausea, dizziness and skin
rashes, and over the long-term, are associated with cancer, neurological
problems, and infertility. They cut themselves with sharp tools and work with heavy
machinery that can cause more serious accidents. They climb high ladders and
work in extreme temperatures that can cause heat stroke. Many of the children
Human Rights Watch interviewed said they were not provided access to medical
care or compensated for their injuries, and were refused sick pay for work days
lost to work-related illness or injury.
Exposure to Chemicals
The
majority of Palestinian children whom Human Rights Watch interviewed said they sprayed
crops with chemicals, as often as twice per week. Some carried canisters on
their backs, while others used hoses connected to tanks. Only two of the 16
children interviewed who said they worked with chemicals said their middleman
provided them with masks, eye protection, and gloves.133 Many others whose tasks included crop spraying described
suffering from symptoms that included dizziness, nausea, eye irritations, and skin
rashes.
Pesticides
widely used in agriculture include insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, fumigants,
and plant growth indicators. Some pesticides identified in agricultural settlements
in the Jordan Valley are organophosphates, which are neurotoxins.134 They vary in toxicity and enter the body primarily through the
skin, although they can also be ingested or inhaled. Although anyone who works
on a non-organic farm may be exposed to pesticides, pesticide handlers are at
particular risk, particularly if they do not use protective equipment.135
According
to the International Labor Organization, long-term pesticide exposure at low levels
has not been well-researched, but has been “associated with chronic health problems
in children, such as cancer and reproductive health problems.”136 A 2011 ILO report on children and hazardous work cites a study of
exposure to pesticides of children under 15 years old, which found the odds of
soft-tissue sarcomas to be increased by four times and the odds of developing
leukaemia by almost three times; and other studies “that show that young
people’s neurological development is affected by exposure to pesticides,”
potentially causing “lowered intelligence and behavioural abnormalities later in
life.”
Most
children interviewed by Human Rights Watch did not know the names of the chemicals
or whether they were pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers. According to O., a
Palestinian middleman, different crops require different chemicals. “Grapes
need Alzodef, for instance. Lots of guys have peeling skin on their faces
during grape season.”137
Alzodef is a cyanamide
pesticide. The European Union decided in 2008 to stop authorizing the use of
cyanamide in plant protection, due to health risks.138
An
adult who worked in settlements said he had sprayed Thionex on crops (a trade
name for endosulfan, an off-patent insecticide) and believed it was in common
use in settlements.139 The US Environmental Protection Agency stated in 2010
that it was phasing out endosulfan “because it can pose unacceptable health
risks to farmworkers.”140 The ILO noted in 2011 that “a cross-sectional study
among young working boys chronically exposed to the insecticide endosulfan”
found the boys “experienced complications in sexual development, including
improper testosterone production and delays in reaching sexual maturity when
compared with a control group of boys who were not exposed.”141 M., 16, said he left school in Grade 6, when he was 14, to work.
In the Tomer settlement, where he worked in greenhouses, M. said he sprayed
chemicals on crops two full days per week from a container of around 30 liters
he carried on his back. “I have a lot of back pain,” he said.142 He explained:
There’s
more than one kind of pesticide; one is strong, another is weaker. I wear
gloves, and when I use the strong pesticide I also get a paper mask. Decathlon
is one of them. You mix 30 liters of water and 100 centiliters of this. Basta
is the other one. We mix the two of them together for better effect, with
water.
Decathlon
is the trade name for an insecticide; Basta is the trade name for an herbicide.143 According to standards set by the US Environmental Protection
Agency, after spraying with Decathlon in a greenhouse, workers should not enter
the area for a period of 12 hours without special protective equipment.144 Labels for Basta state: “When opening the container, preparing
spray and using the prepared spray, wear cotton overalls buttoned to the neck
and wrist (or equivalent clothing) and a washable hat, elbow length PVC or
nitrile gloves and face shield or goggles.”145
M.,
an 18-year-old from a village near Jenin who dropped out of school in Grade 9 and
was living in a warehouse in Al Ouja when Human Rights Watch interviewed him,
said he normally wore a mask when spraying pesticides twice a week. He sprayed
once without a mask and required hospital treatment. “I got dizzy and couldn’t
stand up,” he said. “My stomach hurt and my eyes were red, so [the middleman]
took me to the hospital in Jericho. They kept me there for six hours before I
went home. I don’t know what was in the pesticide, [the middleman] prepared
it.”146
Two
brothers, aged 16 and 17, from the Aqabat Jaber refugee camp, said they worked
in the Petzael settlement seven days a week, from 5:30 a.m. to 12 noon,
spraying sweet peppers with pesticides and picking them, and digging trenches
for irrigation pipes. Neither had access to a protective mask or eye wear, they
said. The 17-year-old said, “When I spray, sometimes I feel dizzy and don’t
walk very well, but after 12 hours I am OK again.” 147
Another
pair of brothers, both aged 17 and also from the Aqabat Jaber refugee camp,
near Jericho, said they quit school in Grade 9 to work in Petzael.148 They
pick, clean and pack tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, herbs, and sometimes dates,
and spray vegetables using gloves but not masks. “When we spray peppers, we get
rashes, but they go away after a week,” H. said. “If we get sick and can’t
work, we are not paid that day.”
M., a
14-year-old from Fasayil, said that other workers sometimes “spray pesticides
on the peppers while I’m picking them. We get gloves to wear but not a mask.”
He earned between 60 and 70 shekels per day and said he gets “pains in my back
from bending over to pick the tomatoes and peppers.” 149
A
Palestinian trade union representative told Human Rights Watch that he knew of
six Palestinian women and a girl who had suffered eye problems while working in
the Beit HaArava settlement in 2011 after they picked cherry tomatoes that had
been sprayed, without gloves, and had then touched their eyes. He said his
trade union had advised them to sue the settler-employer but they declined to
do so for fear that this would result in their dismissal, he said.150
Two
17-year-olds and a 16-year-old boy from Sbeidat said they worked in Argaman,
and sprayed vegetables with chemicals every other week, but did not know the
names of the chemicals. They did not have protective gear and had rashes appear
on their hands and faces, which took two or three days to disappear, whenever
they sprayed, they said. They seldom sought treatment from a doctor, as this
would cost more than a day’s wages.151 In the three years that they had worked
in Argaman, they had never been approached by any labor inspector regarding
their exposure to pesticides and had not seen any inspector at all, the three
boys said, only security men from the settlement.
Three
boys from Fasayil – two 16-year-olds and a 17-year-old – said they had “thrown
up” after spraying pesticide from containers they carried on their backs.152 O., 16, who worked in the Tomer settlement on Fridays and
Saturdays, said: “I spray pesticide from a backpack. Our bosses [Palestinian
middlemen] tell us to be careful, but we don’t get masks, gloves, or other
clothing. I have had rashes on my hands, sore eyes, and I’ve thrown up after
spraying it. The boss tells us to go home until we get better.” Human Rights Watch
could not determine whether the boys had vomited due to the effects of exertion
or heat, or the toxicity of the chemicals, or other factors.
An
18-year-old, M., who worked for a different employer in Tomer, said he
undertook spraying but was not equipped with protective gear and clothing. “The
pesticide hurts our backs a lot, the packs are really heavy,” he complained.153
M.,
16, who said he left school at age 14 to work full-time in Tomer, worked five
days a week picking sweet peppers, herbs, and other crops, and twice a week
spraying crops while carrying a 30-liter canister of pesticide on his back,
wearing only gloves and a paper mask for protection. He said the canister was
heavy and he had “a lot of back pains.” He had gone to the hospital twice
“because of a rash on my skin.” M. didn’t know the name of the pesticide he
sprays, or the name of the settler on whose land he works. He said the settler
paid a Palestinian middleman to provide Palestinian agricultural workers, who included
two other 16-year-olds from M.’s village and a 15-year-old from elsewhere.154 Other children did not spray pesticides, but still described
ill-effects from exposure. Fifteen-year old I., for example, said, “Sometimes
they spray with pesticides while I’m working; I use my shirt to cover my mouth
and nose but I still feel itchy on my skin.”155 Israel
in 1992 adopted Labor Safety Regulations on workers who handle pesticides,
which it has not applied to Palestinian children working in settlements, which
prohibit children under 18 from working with phosphoric-organic pesticides.156
High Temperatures
Seven
Palestinian children told Human Rights Watch that they worked inside settlement
greenhouses where temperatures were stifling in summer.157 M., 16, who said he left school at age 14 to work full-time in
Tomer, where he earned 70 shekels for a seven-hour workday, appeared to have
suffered heat stroke in a greenhouse.158 He
said that he had fainted several times in May 2013 while working in a
greenhouse, where he sprayed, picked and packed peppers. “I couldn’t see,
passed out, and the middleman took me home,” he said. “I took myself home when
it happened the next day. On the third day, I took myself home, then to the
hospital in Jericho, where they gave me headache pills and said it was heatstroke.”
M. said that he fainted at work on five consecutive days and then was fired because
of his fainting. He told Human Rights Watch:
On
the sixth day, I went to a new employer. I got shots for a month, at the hospital
first and then they gave me the medicine to take to a clinic to get injections,
to help with heatstroke. I would pass out for 2 or 3 minutes. If it’s 40
Celsius outside, it’s 50 or worse inside the greenhouse in summer, which is
when most of the kids are working, because school is out.
In 2013,
M. started fainting again in June, and received daily injections for another
month.
Israel
in 1995 adopted domestic regulations on youth employment, which it has not applied
to Palestinian children working in settlements, that prohibit children under age
18 from working in temperatures below 4 degrees Celsius or above 40 degrees
Celsius.159
Handling Heavy Loads
Several
of the children Human Rights Watch described handling heavy loads.
Fifteen-yearold I. A., who dropped out of school after the Grade 8, said “I
like grapes because the boxes are only 5 kilos. But peppers are hard, the boxes
can hold up to 20 kilos or so.”160
F.,
13, said he worked in Petzael on weekends, sometimes starting at 5 a.m. and
working until 3 p.m.161 He told Human Rights Watch, “I cut
peppers and put them in boxes, then we have to move them, they’re heavy, around
three feet long and half that wide. My arms and the side of my back hurt. At
first I dragged the box of peppers but then the supervisor told me I had to
carry it.”
Several
of the Palestinian child workers interviewed by Human Rights Watch also spoke
of the physical demands they faced when spraying pesticides or herbicides.162
Yusef, an 18- year-old, who said he had dropped out of school at 14 to work at
the Tomer settlement, said he suffered from persistent backache due to carrying
a heavy spray container on his back.163 Saleh, a 15-year-old worker from
Fasayil, said he had dropped out of school in Grade 7, and told Human Rights
Watch,
My
shoulders are numb from carrying the backpack that I spray the pesticides with
– it’s a 15 liter tank. I spray for half an hour each time, then I refill the
tank. I need to do this 15 times before I’m done, on the days I’m spraying. I
don’t do it every day – the older guys spray every day.164
Israel
in 1995 adopted domestic regulations on youth employment, which it has not applied
to Palestinian children working in settlements, that prohibit children under
age 18 from doing jobs that require lifting objects that weigh more than 12.5
kilograms for boys, and 8 kilograms for girls, for a maximum of 2 hours per
day.165
Work Injuries and Lack of
Compensation
In
interviews with Human Rights Watch, children often described cutting
themselves, and some accidents that were more serious. A statistical survey of
work injuries among Palestinian children who work found that of all working
children, 79.1 percent reported an occupational injury in the last 12 months
(81.7 percent of boys and 73 percent of girls), and that 33 percent of children
who worked in agricultural production reported back pain.166 O., 16, who works in Tomer at weekends, said that he and other
workers commonly sustained cuts from using vine clippers during the grape
season: “We’ve all hurt our fingers like that. If it’s bad, you sit at home for
four days and don’t get paid, you wait until you heal so you can come back to
work. If you get sick and have to go home in the morning, you’re not paid for
the hours you worked that day.”167
Before
working in Beit HaArava two 17-year-old brothers worked for two years in
Petzael, with other child workers. In Petzael, H. recalled,
Anyone
who got injured on the job would have to wait there until the end of the day to
leave with the van, either to go home or to the hospital in Jericho. One of the
workers cut his finger off in an accident. They taped the finger back on and
made him wait for the end of the day. Another time, a small tractor flipped
over, and a boy was stuck until the Thai workers rescued him. If you were
injured, you would not receive any salary for the hours you didn’t work.168
Their
work conditions at Beit HaArava were an improvement over Petzael, they said, because
their current middleman would take workers who were injured on the job to the hospital.
A.,
13, said he helped his mother pick onions in Niran, a settlement, on weekends.
“Last summer I helped my father work in Massua [settlement], shoveling and
moving fertilizers around,” he told Human Rights Watch. “That was better
because I cut myself once working with onions. We use retractable razor blades.
They just told me to keep on working.”169 I.,
from Sbeidat, said that he cut himself once and had to be taken to the hospital
in Jericho by his friends, but had to pay the costs himself. 170
M., a
15-year-old from Fasayil, dropped out of school in Grade 9, when he was 14, to
work in the settlements of Tomer and Petzael.171 In the date season, he said,
he was required to climb a ladder to a height of two to three meters, or use a
crane, to prune date palms and pick dates. “The date trees have a lot of
spikes, and once I cut myself and couldn’t work for a month,” he said. “I
wasn’t paid any compensation, because if you don’t work, you aren’t paid. If I
go to the doctor, I pay for it myself.” M. said he works six days a week and receives
time off during Jewish, but not Muslim, holidays.
Some
Palestinians described other working conditions that could be dangerous to underage
workers, particularly during long shifts. In Fasayil, two boys, aged 15 and 16,
who had both dropped out of school in Grade 9, said they worked “in the factory
building in Tomer” on a machine “that makes boxes for vegetables and dates out
of cardboard,” from 6:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.172 M.,
18, said he was injured while working on one of the machines in April, 2014.
“About 10 days ago I was working on a machine that folds cardboard into boxes,
and part of it has really hot glue, like 150 Celsius, and it got on my finger
and melted my skin off.” The middleman he worked under took him to the hospital
and paid him for the time he had already worked that day, Mohammed said.173
A
19-year-old woman who worked in Tomer picking cherry tomatoes recalled an
accident in 2011 when a 17-year-old boy “got his finger caught in the
date-sorting machine, and both the middleman and the settler said they were not
responsible.”174 Two workers, aged 17 and 18, said they knew people who had
been injured when they fell from ladders or platforms while pruning or picking
from date palms, which can reach 15 meters in height.175
Lack of Access to Medical Care
and Lack of Compensation
Israeli
labor laws applicable to settlers who employ Palestinians require employers to
pay for health insurance for their employees.176 The
employer should purchase insurance for health care costs arising from injuries
at work, and provide sick pay.177
None of the children or
other Palestinian workers whom Human Rights Watch interviewed had access to
Israeli health insurance. In some cases, children who had been injured or fell
ill on the job said that Palestinian middlemen had paid for their hospital
care, and in one case, a middleman paid a boy daily wages for 25 days while he
was recuperating from fractures to his hand caused by a work injury. In other
cases, however, children had to pay for their transportation to Palestinian
hospitals and their medical care.178
Of the Palestinian
adults and children Human Rights Watch interviewed, only one knew of a case of
an injured Palestinian worker receiving treatment in an Israeli hospital. He
said the worker in question, a man from Jiftlik who was injured and lost
consciousness when he fell from a crane while picking dates in the Massua
settlement, received treatment at Israel’s Rambam hospital.179
The
Ma’an Development Center reported in 2013 that while some 30 percent of workers
it surveyed said that they had been injured on the job, only two had received
“any compensation or paid leave days from their settler employers” or
middlemen.180
O., a
middleman, said that the settler he worked with in Tomer had asked him to
accept responsibility if any of his 16 workers was injured on the job: “My boss
last week wanted me to sign a paper saying if anything bad happened to my
workers, I was responsible. I refused.” 181 O. said he did not know whether the
employer had purchased insurance to insure the workers against work-related
accidents. Israeli law obliges employers to do so.182
A
17-year-old who worked in the Petzael settlement, for instance, said that one
of his coworkers was bitten by a snake – “they come out around the plants after
10 o’clock, when it gets hot,” he said – and the middleman took him to the
hospital. “The settler paid the cost to get him to the hospital, but refused to
pay for the three days’ rest that was required.”183
A
16-year-old boy who worked in Tomer said he was stung on his hand by a scorpion
in mid-2013. “I’m allergic to stings,” he said, “I went to the doctor, and had
to pay 250 shekels for the hospital care and 80 shekels for the taxi.”184 A 17-year-old boy who dropped out of school in Grade 8 also told
Human Rights Watch that a scorpion had stung him when he was at work in the
same settlement. “I felt it crawling up my back. It was beginning of the season
[in 2013] when we were hooking up the water hoses in the field. My friends took
me in an ambulance to hospital. It [the scorpion] was a big black one, about 5
inches long, so it was not so bad. The little yellow ones are bad: as soon as
they bite, the grave.”185
He was not paid for his
time off work, he said.
Impact on Education
The
high poverty levels of Palestinians in the Jordan Valley, exacerbated by
Israeli policies that support settlements and restrict Palestinian land use –
including for the construction of schools – and freedom of movement, result in
many children dropping out of school and finding work to augment their family
incomes.186 For many children, jobs in settlement
agriculture are the only option. Other children work in settlements part-time
and still attend school, but said they were often tired and unable to
concentrate. This combination of factors negatively affects Palestinian
children’s access to education and learning experiences while in school.
All
the Palestinian children who worked in settlements told Human Rights Watch they
did so to earn money for their families. A 15-year-old boy, I., who dropped out
of school after Grade 8, said he went to work because “my father had a car
accident and I’m the only one who supports the family,” including his five
siblings.187 I. said he earned 65 shekels per seven
hour work day – in Israel, the hourly minimum wage is more than 23 shekels –
and worked six or seven days a week.
The
Palestinian educational system comprises Palestinian Authority-run primary and secondary
schools, with around 75 percent of the 1.18 million students in Gaza and the West
Bank; schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees
(UNRWA), with about 20 percent of the students; and private schools.188 Under Palestinian law, education is compulsory and free for 10
years, from Grades 1 through 10, and free for secondary school education in
Grades 11 and 12.189
Overall
student enrollment in basic education – Grades 1 through 10 – increased from 81
percent in 1994-95, when the PA was established, to 98 percent in 2008-09, and students
who continued from basic to secondary education (Grades 11 and 12) increased from
65 percent to 91 percent in the same period.190 From 1997 to 2011, school
dropout rates in the West Bank for boys and girls aged 12 to 14 decreased from
5.8 percent to 1.7 percent, and from 26 percent to 20 percent for 15 to 17 year
olds, according to the Palestinian statistics bureau.191
A
2004 survey, conducted by Birzeit University and UNICEF, found that 30 percent
of working children were enrolled in school, whereas 70 percent had dropped out,
mostly 15- to 17-year-olds.192
Official
Palestinian statistics were unavailable for Jordan Valley schools, but
statements from principals, teachers, youth counselors and children indicated
that school enrollment and dropout rates may be worse there than elsewhere in
the West Bank.
The
Palestinian authorities have not adequately enforced the compulsory education requirement
in communities in the Jordan Valley, apparently due in part to lack of funding for
educational services and law enforcement. According to school teachers,
principals, and youth leaders interviewed by Human Rights Watch, many male
students in the Jordan Valley drop out of school before or during Grade 10, and
others fail to complete secondary school, in order to work in settlements. Of the
30 children whom Human Rights Watch interviewed who were then working full-time
in agricultural settlements, 18 had dropped out of school in Grade 10 or
earlier; the other 12 dropped out of secondary school in Grade 11 or 12. Five
other children interviewed by Human Rights Watch still attended school but worked
part-time in settlements, usually on weekends. Human Rights Watch interviewed another
10 men and 2 women aged 18 or older who worked in settlements, of whom 8 said they
had dropped out of school in Grade 10 or earlier.
The
principal of a secondary school in the Jordan Valley village of Sbeidat, whom
Human Rights Watch interviewed in 2011, said that during each school year, an
average of around eight boys dropped out of school, starting at around age 14,
or Grade 8.193 According to the school’s annual reporting, about 60 percent of
students completed Grade 12, he said, and “almost all of them are working in
the settlements.”194 Of the students who complete Grade 12, about 50 to 60
percent pass the standardized university entrance exam, called the tawjihi, the
principal said. “Those who go to university mostly attend the [tuition-free, Al
Quds] Open University, since otherwise […] they would have problems finishing
their studies because they cannot afford to pay tuition.”
The
number of school dropouts in Sbeidat has apparently increased since 2011. In separate
interviews in 2014, a teacher and a guidance counselor at the secondary school in
Sbeidat said that staff at the school, which then had 134 students, conduct
“counts” three times per academic year to identify children who have dropped
out: when school begins after summer vacation, and during the Fall and Spring
semesters. From September 2013 to May 2014, five boys had dropped out of grade
10, three from grade 11, and two from grade 12, to work in settlements; another
two children dropped out of school for other reasons, but “we were able to get
those two children to come back,” the guidance counsellor said.195 The students
who leave tend to have received low grades and also to come from poor families,
the teacher said.196
Due
to the economic situation of the families, the majority of children, in grade 7
and up, work after school. They leave school at 2 p.m., and some work until 7
p.m. Some go to help their families with their family gardens. If they didn't,
their father would need to hire someone, and so by doing things like picking
okra, they help save money and keep it in the family. Others go to settlements
like Argaman to work after school. The school principal said that he knew of
children who had begun working in settlements after school or on weekends,
accompanying another family member, when they were only 10 years old, who later
dropped out of school. 197 He described one case from 2010:
A 13-year-old
boy dropped out to work in Argaman [an agricultural settlement]. I talked to
his mother, father, and brothers to get him back in school. He left school to
work because his father is old and he needs to earn money for the family to
survive. He is now 16 and still works in Argaman. School staff work with
families of children who drop out to try to get the child back to school, but
with limited success, the Sbeidat school principal said. Children who drop out tend
to come from poorer families where the parents or older siblings have not
completed secondary school, he said.
All
the children Human Rights Watch interviewed who had dropped out of school said
they did so to help earn money for their families. M., 15, said he dropped out
of school in Fasayil in the Grade 5, “because there are 10 people in my family
and only me and my dad work.” He said he earned 70 shekels per day in Petzael,
but spent 20 shekels on the taxi to and from work.198
I.,
14, from Sbeidat, said that he worked full time in Argaman -- picking,
planting, packing and spraying herbs, while wearing gloves and a paper face
mask -- to help pay his older brother’s university tuition.199
F.,
17, and I., 17, from Sbeidat, said they had dropped out of school when in Grade
7, when they were 13; of 15 boys in their class, only 8 had finished elementary
school.200 F. and I. were working in Argaman, a settlement, along with M., 16,
who had dropped out of school when he was 14.201 F., the oldest of seven
siblings, said that his family depended on his earnings and those of his
father, a shepherd. About half of the 15 people who worked with F. were under
18. I., also the eldest of four siblings, said he was his family’s only source
of income, because his father was too old to work. Two of I.’s co-workers were
17 years old, while the other two were 15, he said.
M,
the oldest of five siblings, said that he was also the only breadwinner in his
family; his mother had passed away and his father was too old to work. M., who
said he would have liked to have become a teacher, said that 7 boys from his
elementary school class of 17 students had dropped out to work in settlements
before completing Grade 10. Palestinian educators and activists said children
were influenced by other children who earned a daily wage in agricultural
settlements and lured by Palestinian middlemen or contractors, many of whom had
“graduated” from working as laborers in settlements. The Sbeidat school
principal observed, “After 20 years of working in the school, I don’t have much
money, but a typical contractor can buy a car and a house after working for 5 years.”202
Some students Human Rights Watch interviewed also pointed out that that their older
siblings had obtained university degrees but nonetheless ended up looking for
work as laborers in the settlement agricultural sector. In Jiftlik, one Grade
10 student said that her brother finished nursing school but was picking grapes
on a settlement. Another tenthgrader said, “my brother finished a degree in
engineering at al-Najah University, now he’s looking for work in a settlement.”203 A 16-year-old from Fasayil who worked in Tomer settlement said,
“My cousin is an engineer but he can’t find work, so I don’t really care about
school anymore.”204 M., 18, said that he quit school in Grade 10 because, as he
explained, “so what if you get an education, you’ll wind up working for the
settlements.”205 M. said he worked from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. for 75 shekels per
day, and was the only member of his family of eight to work.
A
Palestinian non-profit organization, the Ma’an Development Center, reported in
2013 that students in Jordan Valley communities in Area C, where the Israeli
military controls land use and denies a majority of construction permit
applications, face additional disincentives to attend school:
Students
in Area C who do not have a school in their community must commute to schools
located in Area B. [Since] 2011 […] a majority of these 22 communities now have
buses to transport students to school. Unfortunately, due to budget constraints
from the [Palestinian Authority], the buses only have the capacity to transport
around 50 percent of [these] school-age children […]. Buses will make up to
seven trips to each community [daily]. Long transportation times, delays at
checkpoints, and a shortage of buses make students late for school, while
others have no choice but to walk. Others stop attending school entirely.206
Fasayil,
another Jordan Valley village, has a primary school that teaches children from Grades
1 through 10. S. N., 31, the head of the youth sports club in Fasayil, said
there were 42 children in the Grade 1 class, but only 10 children in Grade 9;
the rest had dropped out. “In the Grade 11 class now we have only seven girls
and one boy. Contractors come and convince them to leave.”207 N. said that
14-year-old boys were most at risk of dropping out of school to work in
settlements.
Some
children went to school during the week and worked in settlements on weekends, which
they said was tiring. M., a 14-year-old, told Human Rights Watch that he had
been working 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. shifts on Fridays and Saturdays in the settlement
of Petzael since he was 12. “I go to school during the week,” he said. “It’s
tiring to work all weekend. You take a break in school, it’s time to relax.” M.
said he wanted to finish secondary school, “but it might not be possible”
because he needed to earn money for his family. His father was unemployed, and
he and his 18-year-old brother, who quit school in Grade 4, were supporting
their parents and nine siblings, M. said.208
The
largest community in the Jordan Valley, apart from Jericho, is the village of
Jiftlik.209 The Palestinian Authority-run secondary school there has 120
students, including 77 girls, in Grades 10 through 12. Of the 25 children in
Grade 12, around 13 girls and 5 boys pass the final “tawjihi” exam, a
prerequisite to enroll in university, an administrative staff member said.210
A
teacher at the secondary school told Human Rights Watch: At the end of each
semester, the elementary school sends us a list of 75 to 80 children who are
going to come from Grade 9 there and enroll in Grade 10 with us, but only 50
ever turn up. We always ask where they go, and it’s usually to work in
settlements. After a month or two has passed in each semester, as well, there’s
usually another 2 to 5 kids who leave school to go to work in settlements,
usually the ones who aren’t great at school decide to leave. We follow up and
try to get them to go to vocational training. But you’ll find lots of people
with higher degrees who still go to work in settlements. 211
The
school administrator, who said he had formerly worked for a decade in an
agricultural settlement in the area, said that relatively few children from
Jiftlik worked in settlements after school and on weekends compared to those in
Sbeidat, and that those who did were not performing well academically. “It’s
very obvious which kids go to work in settlements, because they are exhausted
in class, and some of them proudly explain why they are getting low grades,”
earning money at work, he said.212
III.
Israel’s Failure to Protect Palestinian Children from Child Labor
The
UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Israel and Palestine have
ratified, obliges states to implement compulsory and free basic education, to
“recognise the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation
and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere
with the child’s education or to be harmful to the child’s health or physical,
mental, spiritual, moral or social development”; and to “provide for
appropriate penalties and other sanctions... in order to protect children from
economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be
hazardous or to interfere with the child’s education.”
Israel
and Palestine have also ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social
and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which requires states parties to protect children
from “economic and social exploitation,” to make children’s “employment in work
harmful to their morals or health or dangerous to life or likely to hamper
their normal development” punishable by law, and to “set age limits below which
the paid employment of child labor should be prohibited and punishable by
law.”213
Israel
is a state party to International Labor Organization (ILO) conventions intended
to protect children at work, jointly drafted by governments, employers’
associations and trade unions. The ILO General-Secretary’s annual reports on
the situation of workers in Israeli-occupied territory apply these conventions
to assess Israel’s responsibility toward Palestinian workers in the West Bank,
including children. The ILO Convention on the Minimum Age for Employment
(C138), ratified by Israel, and all EU member states, requires states to set
the minimum age of work at 15 years or older, and prohibits work until “the age
of completion of compulsory schooling,” which is 10 years of schooling in both
Israel and Palestine.214 It also bans hazardous work for children under 18.215 Light work is allowed for 13- to 15 year-olds only if it is not
hazardous and does not interfere with schooling.216 The
convention requires states to provide appropriate penalties to ensure its
effective enforcement, to define the “persons responsible” for ensuring compliance,
and to prescribe by law that employers must keep registers containing the names
and ages of employees less than 18 years old.217
Israel
is obliged by other ILO conventions to ensure children receive medical
examinations before being allowed to work.218 None of the children Human Rights
Watch spoke to received medical examinations.
Israel
is also a state party to the ILO Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labor
(182), which prohibits work including that which, “by its nature or the
circumstances in which it is carried out, is likely to harm the health, safety
or morals of children.”219 The ILO’s accompanying recommendation for the
convention says that in determining work that is harmful or hazardous, states
should give consideration to work at dangerous heights or in confined spaces;
with dangerous machinery or that involves the manual handling of heavy loads;
work in work in an unhealthy environment, which may expose children to
hazardous substances or agents or to temperatures damaging to their health; and
work for long hours.220 The ILO notes that long-term pesticide exposure at low
levels has been associated with chronic health problems in children, such as
cancer and reproductive health problems.221
Israel’s
international obligations to protect human rights, including the rights of
children at work, extend to Palestinians in occupied territory.222 Israel, however, disputes that its rights obligations extend to
Palestinians in occupied territory, and it refuses to report on their
implementation to the expert committees charged with monitoring Israel’s
practice as a state party to international human rights instruments including
the ICESCR and the CRC. For instance, the Committee on the Rights of the Child,
in its 2013 concluding observations on Israel, regretted that Israel “has
consistently failed to provide information on the follow-up to the Committee’s
recommendations relating to children living in the OPT,” including by failing to
provide data with respect to all children living in the occupied Palestinian
territory.223
Israeli Labor Laws
This
report describes Israel’s domestic laws on children and work because they
reflect its international obligations, and because Israeli authorities have
partly acknowledged a responsibility to enforce their protections for the
benefit of Palestinians working in settlements, yet have consistently failed to
do so. The report does not call on Israel to extend its domestic legal order,
including workers’ rights protections, into occupied territory. The international
law of belligerent occupation, applicable to the West Bank, prohibits Israel,
as the occupying power, from extending the jurisdiction of its domestic labor
laws into Palestine as though it were the sovereign. Israel has unlawfully
applied domestic laws in occupied territory for the benefit of Israeli
settlers, such as laws on the establishment of companies.224 Israel should prevent abuses against Palestinians working in
settlements, even though doing so would not mitigate the unlawful nature of the
settlements themselves, which depend on unlawful Israeli policies of
transferring its civilian population into occupied territory and appropriating
land and other resources there for civilian settlements.225
Article
2 of Israel’s Protection of Youth Labor Law of 1953 prohibits employment under
age 15, although children who are still in school may be employed as
apprentices.226 Children of age 14 may be employed
during the summer vacation, but only if the work is undemanding and does not
pose hazards to their health. The Israeli Youth Employment Law (Amendment No.
14) 5770-2010, which came into effect on September 1, 2010, prohibits young
persons in Grades 11 and 12 from work during school hours, unless they are
employed as apprentices, and provides for fines of up to 43,800 shekels
($12,000) as penalties for employers who violate this prohibition.227
Pursuant
to article 31 of the 1953 Youth Labor Law, Israel issued regulations requiring Israeli
employers to keep a register with specific information about any children they employ.
Regulation No. 5718-1958 on Registry of Youth requires employers of juveniles
to record, inter alia, the child’s name, father’s name, date of birth, address,
identity card number, employment card number, hours of work, annual vacation,
and the date of starting the work.228 Most of the children Human Rights Watch
interviewed said they had never met their Israeli settler-employer, only the
middleman, and he had never collected that information.
Other
provisions of the 1953 youth labor law entitle children of legal working age to
18 days’ annual leave from work, instead of 14 days for adults, and restrict
the work week to a maximum of 40 hours, instead of 43 for adults.229 Palestinian children interviewed by Human Rights Watch for this
report described work in settlements that varied with the season and crop, but
5 of the 38 children interviewed described regularly working for more than 50
hours per week, and some described 7-day work weeks or 11- or 12-hour workdays during
busy seasons.
Israel
in 1995 adopted regulations on prohibited and restricted employment for
children.230
The
regulations, as amended, prohibit work with certain chemical and biological substances,
lifting objects that weigh more than 12.5 kilograms, or exceed certain temperatures,
and working with certain machines.231 In
addition, Israel informed the ILO that “the minimum age for admission to
hazardous work is 18,” and that it had adopted regulations in pursuance of Work
Safety Ordinance No. 5370-1970 to that effect.232
Israeli
courts have ruled consistently that Israeli labor law protections extend to Palestinian
workers in settlements. In a 1992 case, Al-Harinat v. Ruth Village, the
National Labor Court ruled that an Israeli employer cannot use a contractor for
the purpose of bypassing or evading the employer’s obligations under the law.233 Ruling in 2007 on a case that had lasted for 12 years, Israel’s
Supreme Court held that Israeli settler-employers in the West Bank must comply
with Israeli labor laws with respect to Palestinian workers, and rejected the
argument that Jordanian labor laws, which do not protect minimum wage, severance
pay and other rights, applied to Palestinian but not Israeli employees.234 (Palestinian labor laws, which the Palestinian Authority can
enforce in limited areas of the West Bank, not including settlements, generally
afford greater protection than the Jordanian laws.) In 2010, according to a
summary of the judgment by Kav LaOved, the Israeli workers’ rights group, the
Jerusalem District Labor Court held “that in the case of Israelis employing
Palestinians through labor contractors, responsibility for the violation of the
employment terms lies with both the contractor and the employer.”235 In 2013, the Jerusalem Regional Labor Court ruled that a settlement
company was required to pay compensation to workers for non-payment of minimum
wages and other entitlements, on the basis that the 2007 ruling applied to all
Palestinian workers in settlements.236
Israel’s
Labor Inspection (Organization) Law of 1953 created an inspection service to
help protect workers’ rights in Israel.237 However,
Israeli inspections of labor standards for Palestinian workers in settlements
in the occupied Palestinian territory have been lax or nonexistent.
The
ILO reported in 2009 that although many of the estimated 1,900 children working
in settlements “perform dangerous work, for instance on date plantations,” it
was “unable to obtain any specific information” from the Israeli authorities
“on any inspections carried out in undertakings located in Israeli
settlements.”238 In 2010, the Israeli military’s Civil Administration division,
which has jurisdiction over the West Bank, confirmed that “today there is no
listed monitoring of minimum wage payments and social benefits regarding the employment
of Palestinians in the settlements.”239 That
year, the Israeli State Comptroller reported an “ongoing failure over many
years to carry out meaningful supervision and enforcement in the realm of
safety and hygiene in Israeli factories in Judea and Samaria, which indicates
an ongoing contempt for human life” – a failure that implicitly extends to agricultural
workers, who often work on lands outside settlement gates and do not have the
official security and work permits that Israeli authorities more commonly grant
to Palestinians who work in factories located inside settlements.240 In 2011, the comptroller criticized the Civil Administration and
the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor for not regularly monitoring
Palestinian workers’ rights in settlements.241
Israeli
inspectors carried out no labor inspections into conditions for Palestinians
working in settlements in the Jordan Valley in 2013, the most recent date for
which information is available, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported.242 None of the children Human Rights Watch interviewed had ever been
spoken to by an Israeli labor inspector.
Israeli
authorities claim that they have been stymied for bureaucratic reasons from protecting
the rights of Palestinian workers in settlements. The Israeli military
commander in the West Bank applies Jordanian labor law that was in force there
prior to the 1967 occupation, as well as military orders that incorporate
Israel’s minimum wage law, women’s labor law, and foreign workers law.243 In 2013, the Ministry of Economy stated that the enforcement of
other Israeli labor laws for the benefit of Palestinians working in settlements
would depend on the recommendations of an inter-ministerial committee including
representatives of the military, and the ministries of justice and economy.244
In
May 2014, responding to questions from Haaretz, the Israeli military Civil
Administration stated that under a military order that incorporated Israeli
labor laws, enforcement of labor laws in the West Bank settlements is the
responsibility of the same officials as in Israel proper.245 The Ministry of Economy acknowledged to Haaretz that it has the
authority to enforce Israeli laws on minimum wage and foreign workers in the
West Bank, and stated it was working with the Civil Administration and the
justice ministry on “amending” military orders applicable in the West Bank. The
ministry said:
The
goal is to apply [Israeli] labor laws ... to Israeli employers in this area as well.
The High Court of Justice’s ruling in the Givat Ze’ev case [2007] applied on
the level of private international law alone, giving workers the possibility to
file a suit against an employer. But the government cannot acquire enforcement
powers regarding laws that have not been applied to the area through military
orders.
The
inter-ministerial committee had decided to implement Israel’s Youth Labor Law
in the West Bank – presumably by issuing a military order incorporating the law
– according to a 2014 news report citing a Ministry of Economy official.246
However, Israel has not yet done so.
The
Jordan Valley Regional Council, the municipal authority in the settlements,
stated to Haaretz that it did “not have any data” on labor rights violations by
settlers.247
Palestinian Labor Law Protections
for Children
Palestinian
laws and regulations provide protections for children at work, but suffer from under-enforcement
in general, and particularly in the case of children who work in settlements.248 Palestinian labor inspectors cannot enter settlements, over which
the Palestinian Authority has no jurisdiction.249
Palestinian
Labor Law No. 7 of 2000 (article 93) and Palestinian Child Law No. 7 of 2004, applicable
to the West Bank, prohibit the employment of any person under age 15; among numerous
other requirements, children between ages 15 and 18 must receive medical examinations
every 6 months while working.250
The
Labor Law prohibits children under age 18 from being employed in industries identified
by the Minister of Labor as dangerous or unhealthy (article 95), as well as
from work on night shifts, overtime, piece work and employment away from their
communities. In 2004, the Minister of Labor created a list of 32 activities
prohibited for children ages 15 to 18, including producing and using pesticides
and lifting more than 10 kilograms.251 The Ministry’s
decision allows the employment of children for a maximum of 6 hours of work per
day, and requires employers to keep a record of birth certificates and other
information such as letters of consent from parents allowing the children to
work.
In
December 2012, the Palestinian Authority adopted amendments to the Child Law
that penalized child labor violations, including fines up to approximately
$2,800 for exposing children to dangerous work conditions. The law calls for
the doubling of fines and closure of work facilities upon repeated child labor
violations.252
Overall,
the Palestinian authorities’ capacity to inspect labor conditions is “weak,”
the ILO reported in 2014. The General Directorate of Labor Inspection, in the
Ministry of Labor, employs “a mere 40 inspectors […] in the West Bank, where an
estimated 300 are needed.”253 The Ministry of Labor employs 12 labor inspectors
assigned to monitoring child labor conditions.254 The Palestinian Ministry of
Social Affairs is attempting to register all employed youth, in an effort to
improve the monitoring of working conditions, but employs only 13 child
protection social workers in the West Bank.255 The Palestinian government established
a National Committee on Child Labor to combat the problem of child labor. The Ministry
of Social Affairs, working with UNICEF, also established “Child Protection
Networks” in all 12 governmental districts in the West Bank, through which it
leads awareness-raising campaigns on the damaging impact of child labor on
children’s development and well-being, and the legal implications of child
labor for adults involved.256
Palestinian
authorities have not adequately enforced these laws in areas where they have jurisdiction
in the West Bank (Areas “A” and “B” under the Oslo agreement, corresponding to
Palestinian cities and towns). Between 2007 and 2011 the Palestinian labor
ministry referred only 10 people to the Attorney General for employing children
under age 15 in dangerous work. As the US Department of Labor reported,
“Further information on any penalties imposed as a result of these referrals is
not available.”257
Under
the terms of the Oslo agreement with Israel, Palestinian authorities do not
have criminal enforcement powers in Area C, where settlements are located, as
well as in many rural Palestinian communities in the Jordan Valley. At best,
Palestinian police can arrest middlemen suspected of child trafficking if they
are traveling through areas where the Palestinian Authority has jurisdiction.
The Palestinian Ministry of Labor’s Jericho office reportedly worked with
Palestinian police to prosecute five child labor cases related to work on
settlements from February 2013 to early 2014.258
IV. International Law Obligations of Businesses
and Third Countries
Businesses
have responsibilities to abolish child labor, including in their supply chains.
Israel and its trade partners, including the US and EU member states, are
members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).259 The OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises stipulates that
enterprises should “contribute to the effective abolition of child labor.”260
The
UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights oblige businesses to
“respect the standards of international humanitarian law,” and to “respect the
human rights of individuals belonging to specific groups or populations that
require particular attention, where they may have adverse human rights impacts
on them,” including children. The responsibility to respect human rights
requires businesses to:
Avoid
causing or contributing to adverse human rights impacts through their own activities,
and address such impacts when they occur.
Seek
to prevent or mitigate adverse human rights impacts that are directly linked to
their operations, products or services by their business relationships, even if
they have not contributed to those impacts.261
Israel’s
trade partners that import settlement agricultural products, like the EU and
the US, have incorporated human rights obligations into their internal laws and
regulations. Article 32 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights prohibits child
labor and protects young people at work. It states that “The minimum age of
admission to employment may not be lower than the minimum school-leaving age,”
and that “Young people admitted to work must have working conditions
appropriate to their age and be protected against economic exploitation and any
work likely to harm their safety, health or physical, mental, moral or social
development or to interfere with their education.” Other European directives
require member states to prohibit young people from work involving harmful
exposure to toxic agents, including some pesticides and herbicides; the risk of
accidents that young persons cannot be assumed to be able to avoid; and
exposure to extreme heat or cold.262
The
EU has committed to seek to eradicate child labor globally and supports a “ban
on child labor.”263 An EU report from 2010 noted that
“child labor is both a cause and a consequence of poverty, and it perpetuates
impoverishment by compromising children’s education. Working children delay
entry into school, fail to complete a basic education or never attend school at
all.”264 A commentator notes that in order to
operationalize these rights in EU foreign policy, the EU could insert “social
clauses” in trade instruments.265 The EU offers trade incentives, under the
“General System of Preferences” and “GSP +” trade regimes, to developing
countries that take steps to combat child labor, such as signing and
implementing relevant ILO conventions.266 These
incentives do not apply to Israel. The EU has not undertaken to restrict trade
in products made with child labor, including products from Israeli agricultural
settlements.
The
1995 EU-Israel Association Agreement, which entered into force in 2000, states
in a preambular paragraph that “the principle of economic freedom and to the
principles of the United Nations Charter, particularly the observance of human
rights and democracy […] form the very basis of the Association,” but contains
no enforceable provisions relating to workers’ or children’s rights, human
rights abuses, or violations of international humanitarian law.267 An EU-Israel agreement to liberalize trade in agricultural
products, which expanded the scope of the 1995 Agreement, entered into force in
2010; it contains no reference to workers’ or children’s rights.268
Israel
claims tariff-free preferential treatment for exports of settlement
agricultural products to EU countries under the 1995 Agreement. The terms of
the Agreement allow Israel to determine its territorial scope, and Israel
insists that it applies to settlements in occupied territory. In 2004, the EU
and Israel agreed to a “Technical Arrangement” that required Israel to supply
the postal codes of the point of production of each product it exported to
Europe, in order to distinguish products from Israel from products from settlements,
and deny preferential tariff treatment to the latter.269 However, in shipments to the EU, Israeli exporters mix settlement
products with products that originate inside Israel, and claim tariff-free
treatment for the entire shipments. 270 The
EU’s policy places the burden of checking each item in the shipments on
European importers, rather than requiring Israeli exporters to distinguish such
products in the first place.271
The
United States Department of Labor, pursuant to the Trafficking Victims
Protection Reauthorization Act of 2005, maintains and publishes a list of
consumer products from foreign countries that the Bureau of International Labor
Affairs “has reason to believe are produced by forced labor or child labor in
violation of international standards.”272 The US
defines child labor under international standards as “all work performed by a
person below the age of 15” as well as “all work performed by a person below
the age of 18” in practices including “work which, by its nature or the
circumstances in which it is carried out, is likely to harm the health, safety,
or morals of children.”273
There
are currently 136 listed goods from 74 countries, a total of 353 items.274 Israeli settlement agricultural products have never been included
on the list, although Israel was among the countries researched in 2008-2009,
when the first list was published.275 Other US
labor department reports on the worst forms of child labor have focused mainly
on child labor in Palestinian-administered areas, but also repeatedly noted
that Palestinian “children traveling to and working in Israeli settlements may
be subject to exploitation and harassment.”276 The US
should publicly list Israeli settlement agricultural products as among the
goods produced with child labor. Further, the US should instruct US-domiciled companies
not to import such products.
The
United States–Israel Free Trade Agreement, as revised in 1996, treats products
from the West Bank as products of Israel for the purposes of the agreement.277 In 2004, the US and Israel liberalized trade in agricultural
products, via an exchange of letters that did not exclude settlement
agricultural products.278
The US should revise the
FTA to exclude settlement agricultural products on the basis of international
legal violations, including systemic abuses of children’s rights.
Acknowledgments
This
report was researched and written by Bill Van Esveld, senior researcher in the
Middle East and North Africa division. Research assistance was provided by Jana
Boulus and Noga Malkin, consultants, and by intern Frederik Johannison. Anan
Abu Shanab helped provide Arabic-to-English translation. Malcolm Smart edited
the report, and Clive Baldwin, senior legal advisor, provided legal review.
Fred Abrahams, special advisor; Jo Becker, children’s rights advocacy director;
Arvind Ganesan, Business and Human Rights Division director; and Tom Porteous,
deputy program director, also reviewed the report.
Human
Rights Watch is grateful for the assistance with our research provided by the
Jordan Valley Solidarity Center, Kav LaOved, the Ma’an Development Center, and
the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions. We thank the children and
others who shared their stories with us.
Hundreds
of Palestinian children work for low wages on Israeli settlement farms in the
occupied West Bank, where they grow, harvest and pack agricultural produce,
much of it for export. Based on interviews with 38 children and 12 adults who
work on settlement farms in the Jordan Valley area, Ripe for Abuse documents dangerous working
conditions to which children employed on Israeli settlement farms are
subjected, in violation of international standards. Children described working
in high temperatures, carrying heavy loads, and spraying or being exposed to
pesticides. Some children said they had to pay themselves for medical treatment
for work-related injuries or illness. Many said they dropped out of school
before completing the 10 years of basic education that are compulsory under
Palestinian as well as Israeli laws. Discriminatory Israeli policies have
allocated 86 percent of the land in the Jordan Valley to settlements. The
Jordan Valley covers about 30 percent of the West Bank. In addition, Israel has
restricted Palestinian access to farmland and water in the area, contributing
to high Palestinian poverty rates. Human Rights Watch calls on Israel, which
does not meaningfully enforce labor rights for Palestinian children working on
Israeli settlement farms, to end unlawful settlement policies and in the
meantime to prohibit settlers from committing human rights abuses against
Palestinian children. Other countries and businesses should uphold their own
responsibilities not to benefit from or contribute to these abuses by ending
business relationships with settlements, including imports of agricultural
produce grown on the settlements.
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