Israel rescues 10 Indian laborers being held in Palestinian West Bank village

Ten foreign workers from India were rescued overnight from a West Bank village where they had been held for over a month, the Population and Immigration Authority says.

Palestinians had lured the workers to the West Bank village of al-Zaayem with promises of work and then taken their passports and tried to use them to cross into Israel, the authority says.

The workers, who had originally come to Israel to work in construction, were rescued in an overnight operation led by the authority together with the IDF and the Justice Ministry. They have been transferred to a safe location until their employment status is determined.

The IDF had identified the illicit use of the passports and later returned them to their owners.

Some 16,000 laborers have come to Israel from India in the last year as part of an Israeli government effort to fill a void left when tens of thousands of Palestinian construction workers were barred from entering Israel after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack.