Refugee Colliers

For a picture postcard-size view of an inferno, you can drive along a four-kilometre stretch of Route 585 south of Yabad in the northern West Bank. To get a close up, walk into one of the charcoal-making yards on either side of the road. Few would linger here without cause.

The air swirls with particles of burning wood and straw, smoke and acrid fumes that coat the mouth, constrict the lungs and make the eyes water. Visitors, the few who stop, leave after buying a bag of charcoal. The charcoal makers, including about two-dozen UNRWA-registered refugees cannot leave. Or at least they cannot in these troubled times if they want to eat.


An UNRWA-registered refugee tending a charcoal stack near Yabad.

The Yabad businesses sell charcoal to restaurants and shops across the West Bank. Before the intifada, they supplied Israeli customers too. The charcoal yards, now faltering in the shadow of Israel’s barrier, are the last refuge for a few hundred Palestinian men desperate for work in a crumbling economy. If anything else were available, this would not be a job of choice.

It’s dirty, dangerous and hot and a serious long-term health hazard as well. The charcoal makers, or colliers, work 24 hours a day in irregular shifts to control the fires, whose oxygen supply must be carefully regulated to prevent the wood or the charcoal from burning completely. If a proper fire gets going in the smouldering, oxygen-starved stacks, wood, charcoal and revenue go up in smoke.

Three members of the Abu Bakr family are UNRWA-registered refugees from the Yabad area. Omar, aged 21, has been working in the coal yards for seven years. Mahmoud, aged 20, a cousin, joined a month ago after losing his construction job in Israel. Mouin, his 24-year-old brother, has worked in the yards for several years. Although their family homes are in Yabad, visible across the road, or in Anin, 12 kilometres to the north, all three men live in soot-stained, tin-roofed shacks next to the burning piles. They seldom leave.

‘I go home for an hour about once a week to have a shower and see my family, and then I turn around and come back here,’ a smoke-grimed Mouin said. Mahmoud has not been home since he started the job.

The wages are low: NIS 50 a day, and that is for a 24-hour day on duty. There are no holidays, no overtime and no insurance. If a worker gets sick – predictably, many suffer respiratory ailments – he is on his own. Tending the stacks at night, Mouin suffered a serious burn on one leg; he had to pay his own medical bills and was out of work, with no income at all, for seven months.


Mouin, Mahmoud and Omar Abu Bakr

The only outside assistance they receive, and it goes to their families at home, is flour, rice, cooking oil and other food commodities from UNRWA emergency distributions every three months.

It’s not that the Palestinian coal yard owners are heartless. After more than three years of the intifada, business has fallen off by 80 percent according to one estimate, with a sharp decline since Israel’s barrier went up a few kilometres to the west.

The barrier has choked off trade for both Palestinians and Israelis. Charcoal making depends on a steady supply of hardwood fuel – it takes about five tonnes of wood to make one tonne of charcoal – and all the wood comes from Israel. The truckloads of citrus, avocado and eucalyptus wood now cost twice as much as before the intifada. There’s also the cost of water used to cool down the piles – about NIS 20,000 a year at one of the yards.

Many Palestinians from the Yabad area used to have a steady income from cutting wood in Israel. Now only the few who hold Israeli ID cards can have these jobs. Others worked in the dozens of charcoal warehouses in Yabad when business was booming; now the warehouses have closed, their labourers added to the list of the unemployed.

As with the cost of hardwood, transportation costs have doubled. Most Palestinian vehicles lack the permits required to cross the barrier into Israel, and Israeli-registered trucks must travel longer distances because of checkpoints, thus consuming more time and fuel. In addition, the Palestinian coal yard managers must pay 17 percent tax on the wood they buy from Israeli suppliers, and sales tax to the Palestinian Authority on finished charcoal sold in the West Bank.

Israelis who once bought the Yabad charcoal now buy coal from Argentina and Brazil, one yard owner said. And there are fewer customers at home in the West Bank. A few years ago there were about 150 small coal yards employing perhaps 1,500 Palestinians including many refugees along Route 585; now there are fewer than 30 yards, with a total work force under 300. These remaining yards are struggling to survive. One owner said that he must pay two-thirds of any profits to businessmen in Yabad who provide up-front funding for the purchase and haulage of wood and other operating expenses.

Considering this economic morass and the fact that a restaurant owner in Nablus pays about NIS 4 – less than one US dollar – for a kilogram of charcoal, this is a regional business headed for extinction.

The ones paying the dearest price are the labourers such as the Abu Bakrs, who put in long hours to replace others who have been laid off.

How long will they keep doing this? The question brings general laughter. ‘Maybe things will get better and we can leave,’ Omar said.