Tell us your work

Who is working in Palestine today, at what, and for how much.

Flour sacks become tote bags, and aid pallets become shelves

In a Gaza City factory run by the UN World Food Programme since April, about 113 women and 20 men work three-month shifts unpicking empty flour sacks into bags and turning pallets into furniture that is given away. The pay is 1,000 shekels a month.

A mechanical loom weaving black-and-white keffiyeh cloth, rows of looms receding into the factory hall.
Looms at the Hirbawi keffiyeh factory, Hebron, 2015 (archive). Photo: TrickyH, CC BY-SA 4.0. Not the Gaza factory described.

In a Gaza City factory run by the UN World Food Programme since April, about 113 women and 20 men work three-month shifts unpicking empty flour sacks into bags and turning pallets into furniture that is given away. The pay is 1,000 shekels a month.

Nisreen Abbas, 54, keeps 12 grandchildren and a husband who uses a wheelchair on it: “I bring food for my grandchildren; I bring medicine for my husband.”

I would like for this to be renewed, for us to keep working.

More people at work

From the wall: everyone Pal-Online has written about, with what they are paid. See the whole wall

−25%

Abu Ibrahim, 43

Civil servant in Gaza, paid in worn banknotes (name changed)

Gaza

₪1,500every 45–50 days; it was ₪2,000 every 30–35

Mondoweiss, 14 Oct

Nasr Ouda

Olive-press owner; one production line rebuilt from the rubble

al-Zawayda

1 of 7press lines running again

Palestinian Information Center, 14 Oct

Ahmed Khader, 38

Harvest day labourer; the season used to give him two or three months

Deir al-Balah

1 dayof harvest work this season

Reuters, 14 Oct