Video: Gaza envelope evacuees at Joe Hotel, Tel Aviv, October 10, 2023/Walla!
Among the survivors and evacuees from southern settlements are thousands of agricultural workers, most of them Thai citizens. In the deadly attack over the weekend, Thai workers were also murdered and kidnapped.
Over the past six days, a group of volunteers called the "Assistance to Agricultural Workers" group has come together. The group, comprised of employees of civil society organizations, academic researchers and other independent volunteers, aims to allow workers who survived and were evacuated from the envelope full choice between the options currently available: return to Thailand, return to work (with a new or old employer when possible), or rest and recover until the end of the war.
Dr. Yael Kurlander of Tel Hai Academic College said that "just like the Israelis who were evacuated from the envelope, the workers, many of whom went through difficult experiences, need a safe space of rest."
Find the differences: This is how agricultural workers evacuated from the south are housed / Official website, Assistance to agricultural workers
Kurlander has been studying the Thai population in Israel for over a decade. The "Assistance to Agricultural Workers" group works to arrange a safe resting place for foreign agricultural workers where they can relax, receive mental health assistance and calculate their future steps.
Kurlander said, "To their great regret, the group's activists discovered that the officials officially responsible for the welfare of the workers – the manpower companies, the Population and Immigration Authority, and the Thai embassy – do not always recognize the importance of this right to vote. In many of the compounds to which workers were evacuated, they were pressured to return to work immediately, and in others, the hosts made it clear that staying there next week was conditional on work."
To deal with the problem, "Aid for Agricultural Workers" activists, together with the R&D unit of the Negev Mountain Regional Council, arranged another hospitality complex in the Negev. However, on Thursday, when activists Yonatan Omer Mizrahi and Dr. Matan Kaminer arrived at the compound, they found personnel companies, a representative of the Population and Immigration Authority, and a representative of the Thai embassy, who said that the workers should evacuate to the farms as soon as possible.
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"Just like the Israelis who were evacuated, they too need rest." Evacuated from the envelope at a hotel in Tel Aviv / Walla system!, None
To the activists' claims that in many farms the guests were forced to work, representatives of the establishment responded with expressions of shock, but did not specify how they would ensure the workers' basic right to rest after what they went through.
Dr. Kaminer, an anthropologist at the Hebrew University who specializes in workers from Thailand, said that "while the interests of the manpower company are clear and known, it was hard to see such pressure coming from a political authority and the Thai embassy, which were supposed to take care of the welfare and conditions of the workers." Kurlander said this pressure completely contradicts the visa conditions of every foreign worker in Israel, who is allowed to remain without an employer for up to 90 days after leaving his employer – let alone when it comes to people fleeing an inferno. Adv. Orit Ronen, agriculture coordinator at Kav LaOved, noted that "this pressure only adds to the enormous failure inherent in the abandonment of many hundreds more workers who have not yet been rescued from the surrounding communities, some of whom are required to go out to work and are in increasing anxiety and difficulty when the missiles whistle over them in a war that is not for them."
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