‘Stranded’: Palestinians who were in Israel on 7 October 2023 are suspended between exile and war

Inside a dim locker room at the Nablus municipal stadium, in the occupied West Bank, the television rarely goes dark, streaming day and night the relentless news from Gaza. Gathered in front of it are a group of men from Khan Younis. For more than two years, they have lived in this stadium converted into a refugee camp, their lives suspended between exile and the war they watched on a screen. They are mostly construction workers who were in Israel on the morning of 7 October 2023 when Hamas launched its attack. As Israel rounded up Palestinians from Gaza, they fled to the West Bank, where they remain – cut off from wives and children living in makeshift tents inside the strip. With very few exceptions, civilians are not currently allowed in or out of Gaza. “They killed my nephew and his two children,” says Baker Majjar, 37, who before the conflict split his time between a month in Gaza and a month working on construction sites in Tamra, in north-eastern Israel. “They were seeking food at an aid distribution point near Khan Younis. I’ve lost more than a hundred people – relatives and friends – to Israeli attacks since the war began. Then I stopped counting.” Majjar was one of the 18,500 married men in Gaza over the age of 25 who had permission from the Israeli authorities to enter the country, mostly to work in agriculture and construction. In the hours immediately after the Hamas attack, Israeli forces began rounding them up. Thousands of these workers were swept up in raids across Israel, imprisoned or deported back to Gaza with their work permits cancelled. Along with hundreds of other workers from Gaza, Majjar made his way to the West Bank, hoping to find refuge. He crossed the border at Barta’a, a town straddling Israel and the West Bank on the green line and long used by Palestinians to evade checks at official crossings. Eventually, he ended up at the stadium in Nablus where, in the first months of the war, nearly 1,000 Palestinians from Gaza were living. “Slowly, some moved elsewhere in the West Bank,” says Majjar. “Others were arrested by Israeli forces during a raid here at the stadium. We haven’t heard from them since.” Today, about 50 Palestinians from Gaza remain, living in the crumbling rooms that once served as the stadium’s locker rooms. Most sleep on mattresses or battered sofas. A few electric fans offer the only relief from the suffocating summer heat, when temperatures in the West Bank can top 40C. Laundry hangs from the fences around the pitch. The Palestinian Authority’s labour ministry gives them about 700 shekels (£162) every one to three months – money they send to their families in Gaza, though only half makes it through, the rest eaten away by commissions. A handful have found short-term work for paltry pay. “My wife and two sons, aged four and six, live in a tent in the al-Mawasi camp, between Khan Younis and Rafah,” says Majjar. “Our house was destroyed […] And I’m here, unable to help them.” “I have seven children – two boys and five girls – the youngest is 11,” says Maher Qudeh, 53, who, before the war, worked south of Tel Aviv. “I knew a man who was here with us. He was from Gaza City. One day they told him his son had been killed. He had a heart attack from the shock and died that same day.” “There was a man who came to this stadium after the start of the war,” says Wajdi Yaeesh, director of the Human Supporters Association in Nablus, which provides food and aid to Palestinians from Gaza living in the city. “He had written the names of his eight children on the wall beside his bed. Before he left the stadium to move elsewhere, he had already crossed out four of those names – the ones who had been killed in Gaza.” In Nablus there are also at least seven women from Gaza who are either cancer patients themselves or mothers of children with cancer. Like many others, they had received authorisation before Hamas’s 7 October attack to leave the strip for medical treatment. After the outbreak of war, however, the Israeli authorities urged hospital officials to provide lists of patients deemed fit for discharge so they could be returned to Gaza. Although an Israeli court blocked the deportations, many of the women moved to the West Bank. In March 2024, the Guardian visited a Jerusalem hospital where at least five children from Gaza were being treated for cancer. Today, all those children are dead. Their mothers, cut off from the rest of their families still in Gaza, have since relocated to towns in the West Bank. According to figures from the Qatar Red Crescent and the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, more than 4,400 stranded Palestinian workers and patients from Gaza are currently in the West Bank. Khaled, 51, from Tuffah – one of the four quarters of Gaza’s Old City – still carries the pain of not being by the side of two of his five children, aged 10 and 19, when they were killed in an Israeli airstrike last year. “Now, with the truce, I only hope to hold my three surviving children and my wife again,” says Khaled, who has since become the cook for displaced Palestinians from Gaza sheltering in the stadium. “I just want to go back to Gaza as soon as possible.” Others, however, have lost faith in returning. Samir Hajjaj Abu Salah, 55, from Khan Younis, is convinced there is no longer a future among Gaza’s ruins. “I never want to set foot in my home again,” he says. “Once my family is evacuated, we’ll settle somewhere far from the Strip.”