As Israeli authorities have documented the results of the shocking attacks launched by Hamas earlier this month, it’s become clear many of the hostages taken back to Gaza by the Islamic militant group aren’t Israeli.
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More than half of the estimated 220 hostages hold foreign passports, some of whom are dual nationals, the Israeli government said on Oct. 25. That includes a dozen Americans, as well as German, Argentine, French, Russian and Filipino victims. But the largest group, numbering 54, are from Thailand. Thai nationals also make up the largest group of foreigners killed by Hamas during its Oct. 7 assault, and nearly two dozen are still unaccounted for.
“We [Thais] are not involved in any of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. We are just there to work and earn money so we can have better lives,” Chumporn Jirachart, whose son was taken hostage by Hamas, told CNN. “I am begging for my son’s release. I need to have him back, in good shape—like before he left Thailand.”
The reliance on (and abuse of) migrant labor has been widely covered in other Middle Eastern states, particularly Qatar, which came under scrutiny for its treatment of foreign workers while hosting the World Cup in 2020. However, Israel also imports a significant share of its workforce from abroad—there are thought to be about 150,000 foreign workers there, a little under 4% of the total workforce.
Thailand receives more than $5 billion in remittances from citizens working abroad each year, according to the Bank of Thailand. More than 30,000 migrant workers from Thailand are employed in Israel’s agricultural industry, according to government figures, where in theory they can earn higher wages than at home. They dominate foreign employment in that sector, working in cooperative agricultural communities; the Thai government said 5,000 workers were in the recent conflict zone along the Gaza strip.
Often hailing from the poorest region of Thailand, these workers pay exorbitant fees to labor agencies to obtain work in Israel—but upon arrival, many find different conditions than expected. While efforts to reform the system, including a bilateral agreement between Thailand and Israel inked in 2013, have had some effect, international observers still express concerns about the treatment of workers.
“Traffickers subject some Thai men and women to forced labor in Israel’s agricultural sector by imposing conditions of long working hours, no breaks or rest days, withheld passports, poor living conditions, and difficulty changing employers due to limitations on work permits,” the US State Department wrote in a 2022 report on human trafficking.
Thai workers have become central to the country’s crop exports. Matan Kaminer, a fellow at the Hebrew University in Jersualem who studies Thai laborers in Israel, writes that Israel adopted a policy to recruit these workers after the first intifadah, a resistance movement among Palestinians opposed to Israeli occupation, occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The government at the time made a policy choice to limit Palestinian labor in Israel and replace those workers with migrant labor from other countries, Kaminer writes in his 2019 dissertation.
Israel’s decision to look across the world for workers highlights the complexity and costs of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. The International Labor Organization (ILO) said in 2022 (pdf) that unemployment in Gaza had reached 47%, urging Israel to permit more Palestinian workers to seek work within its borders. Concerns about security have made Israel slow to allow freer movement, but the ILO also estimates that 30,000 to 40,000 undocumented workers crossed barriers between the West Bank and Israel in 2021.
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