(Photo: Eyad Baba/AFP via Getty Images)

Ramallah/Amman - Israel on 2 February refused entry to the West Bank to an international delegation of construction trade unions, seeking to meet Palestinian construction workers. The delegation included the General Secretary of the Building and Wood Workers’ International (BWI), representing more than 12 million workers worldwide, together with trade union leaders from Belgium, France, Spain, and South Africa.

This denial of entry is not incidental. It reflects the conditions under which the future of Palestine is currently being discussed: exclusion, control, and the systematic silencing of workers.

From our conversations with Palestinian workers and communities, construction union leaders from FGTB (Belgium), CGT (France), CCOO-Habitat (Spain), COSATU, and NUM (South Africa) recalled that Israel is deepening annexation across the West Bank while severely restricting movement, access to land, and the ability of Palestinians to work and live with dignity. The scale of this reality is clear. More than 1,000 checkpoints fragment the West Bank, literally at every corner. Over 350,000 Palestinians are unemployed. Those who still leave home for work often do so without knowing whether they will return at night.

For construction workers, these are not abstract political dynamics. This determines whether a worker can reach a site, whether materials can move, whether a home is repaired or demolished, and whether building serves survival or facilitates dispossession. Palestinian workers are routinely forced into a cruel contradiction: building infrastructure they are barred from living in, while their own communities are denied permits or face demolition.

At the same time, plans to “rebuild” Palestine are being openly discussed by rich and powerful international actors without Palestinian workers, without trade unions, and without guarantees of land rights, freedom of movement, or protection from displacement.

Shaher Saed, General Secretary of Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU), said: "Denying entry to international worker representatives confirms a broader reality: exclusion is being built into the process before rebuilding even begins. It reflects the Occupation’s deliberate policy of isolating Palestinian workers and blocking their engagement with the international trade union movement.”

Any just approach to rebuilding must rest on clear principles:

• Workers must be able to speak and organise without fear of reprisal.
• Building must not enable displacement, annexation, or erasure.
• Those who rebuild must have rights to land, safety, and dignity.

Blocking access shows how decisions about rebuilding are intended to proceed instead: without participation, without consent, and without accountability to those who will carry the work.

International construction unions reject this approach. Workers cannot be treated as labour alone while being excluded as rights-holders. Any future rebuilding of Palestine must be grounded in justice, land rights and dignity.

Ambet Yuson, BWI General Secretary, said: “Blocking us from meeting workers is a deliberate act of exclusion and part of a wider attack on union rights and basic freedoms. You cannot decide the future of Palestine, of the West Bank, Gaza, or Jerusalem, while silencing the workers who will rebuild it.”

Download the press release.