NAZARETH (Israel): For 15-year-old Issa, days of summer start when the sun rises over a northern Israeli hill, shining on a garbage dump, a thorny field and then the dirty mattress that is his bed.

Issa is among hundreds of Palestinian child labourers who sneak into Israel from the West Bank, hawking or begging at traffic junctions.

Israel’s massive barrier of walls and fences separating it from the West Bank has made it harder for adult labourers to enter Israel, so families wracked by poverty are increasingly sending their children instead.

Children as young as three stand at traffic lights for hours, in rain or baking sun. They beg for change or sell cigarette lighters and batteries. At night, they sleep in fields, cemeteries, mosques, drainage canals or on streets. Their earnings are often taken by thieves or shady middlemen, and some are sexually abused or forced to sell drugs.

Issa, who asked that his last name not be published, had eaten no breakfast as he walked along a dirt road with other Palestinian youths to sell lighters at a junction. He said he hasn’t told his mother 90 miles away in the West Bank town of Yatta that two days earlier a man with a razor blade robbed him of almost $100, a week’s earnings.

“I make the most money in my family,” Issa said quietly, looking at his worn sneakers. “I’m not making money for my future, but to help my mother and father.”

Border police arrest or, on rare occasion, shoot those who breach the barrier built to keep out suicide bombers. But the families reckon children are more likely to make it in.

“Anyone who’s 18 or older can get shot coming over but the children won’t be,” said Eymad Harb, 18, who oversees the work of Issa and his four partners. Anyway, he said, “If they are killed it’s not as bad as if an older person is killed because he has children relying on him.”

But children, too, get caught and sent home. Often they come right back.

With unemployment in the West Bank topping 25 per cent, the children often become their families’ main breadwinners.They climb under or over the barrier, or hike through incomplete sections, say Israeli and Palestinian advocates who work with the kids. Children under 14 are allowed through army crossings into Israel if accompanied by an adult with an entry permit. Israeli human rights workers say they see the children asking strangers at crossings to escort them into Israel.

“Even though movement for children has become more difficult, Palestinian child labour has increased due to the difficult economic situation,” said Mamoun Eid, an inspector with the Palestinian Labour Ministry.

Often Palestinian or Israeli Arab middlemen pay the children’s families $50 for the right to take a child into Israel, the advocates said.

These agents force the children to beg at intersections, take their money at the end of the day and bring them to sleep in rundown apartments, they said. The children return home on weekends, or every few weeks.

“This brings continuous deprivation on the children who do not see their families, do not go to school and never rest,” said Salwa Kupti, an Israeli Arab social worker in Nazareth who has worked with the children for 10 years. “The children become machines.”

Shlomo Dror, an Israeli army spokesman, says about 500 Palestinian children work in Israel.

“We have stopped fighting this,” Dror said. “We bring them home, and the father is angry because the child didn’t bring any money and the father sometimes hits him because he got caught, and then sends him back.”

There used to be a more or less orderly flow of some 150,000 Palestinian workers a day into labour-starved Israel, but it dwindled with the onset of the Palestinian uprising in 2000 and the bombings that followed. The separation barrier made it still harder for workers to enter, even illegally.

Nazareth Mayor Ramiz Jaraisy, whose city has received much of the influx of children, said Israel bears a good deal of the responsibility for the children.

“The suffering is a result of the continuous occupation and the unemployment and poverty that comes as a result,” Jaraisy said.

“I don’t think there is a father who will let his children beg at a traffic light unless the situation has become catastrophic that he really cannot feed him,” the mayor said.—AP