Rights Groups Documented Torture of Detained Gaza Workers; Israel Has Never Accounted for Them

A clip circulating online shows what rights groups say is footage of Palestinian workers held by Israeli forces after October 7, 2023, the kind of material that Israel's own Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, aired on social media at the time, according to reporting by The New Arab. Three years later, the people in that footage, and thousands like them, remain largely unaccounted for.

Before the war, more than 18,000 Gazans held Israeli work permits, crossing the Green Line daily for blue-collar jobs. Within days of the October 7 attack, Israel revoked those permits and closed the crossings, turning authorized workers into people it classified as illegal residents. Thousands were detained in Israel and the occupied West Bank, held, according to Human Rights Watch testimonies published in January 2024, without contact with lawyers or family.

The testimonies HRW collected describe beatings, electric shocks, humiliation, and deprivation of food and water. The International Trade Union Confederation's 2024 Global Rights Index independently recorded thousands held in what it called illegal detention, denied legal representation, and reported two deaths in custody. Australia's Union Aid Abroad–APHEDA repeated Palestinian union allegations of torture deaths in January 2024. In March 2025, the International Labour Network of Solidarity and Struggle endorsed further reports from the Arab Workers Union in Nazareth describing disappeared workers and deaths in detention.

On November 3, 2023, more than 3,000 detained workers were released into Gaza, according to The New Arab's account, into a territory still under bombardment. Release was not safety. No Israeli government body has published a public accounting of how many workers were detained, what happened to them in custody, or what became of those who did not return.

The union response

Palestinian labor organizations sounded the alarm early. The Palestinian Democracy and Workers' Rights Centre denounced the violence on October 11, 2023, and by October 25 was demanding immediate release and appealing directly to the international labor movement. On October 16, Palestinian unions went further, calling on counterparts abroad to refuse to manufacture or transport weapons bound for Israel and to pressure their governments on military trade.

The global response that followed was narrower. On September 27, 2024, nine global unions, including the ITUC, IndustriALL, Education International, Public Services International, and UNI, filed a complaint with the International Labour Organisation on behalf of more than 200,000 Palestinian workers employed in Israel.

"Widespread wage theft due to the suspension of work permits and the unilateral termination of their contracts."

That complaint, filed with the OECD's Trade Union Advisory Committee also joining, addressed stolen wages and canceled contracts. It did not seek accountability for the detentions, the alleged torture, or the deaths in custody that the same unions' own federation had already documented.

IndustriALL's executive committee condemned what it called an ongoing genocide in May 2024 and urged affiliates toward BDS action. Education International's 2024 congress demanded an end to arms transfers to Israel. The World Federation of Trade Unions had called for an end to the violence as early as October 2023. None of these positions has produced an independent investigation into what happened to the detained workers themselves.