A Palestinian man separated from his family by the Gaza war has been unable to reunite with them since Israel canceled all permits for Palestinians from Gaza living in the West Bank following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack — a policy sweep that cut off both day laborers and other resident categories from legal pathways back to their families, according to U.S. State Department reporting.

The permit cancellations were sweeping and immediate. Palestinians from Gaza who had been residing or working in the West Bank under Israeli-issued permits lost that status overnight, with no clear administrative mechanism to restore it. For families split between the two territories — a routine reality given Gaza's severe movement restrictions predating October 7 — the revocation effectively hardened an already formidable separation into something closer to permanent.

The broader legal architecture governing movement between Gaza and the West Bank has long been among the most restrictive in the world. Israel controls all land crossings into Gaza and restricts the movement of people and goods; Human Rights Watch characterized the blockade as unlawful under international law and documented its lethal consequences for Palestinian civilians, particularly children, even before the current war began. Since October 7, those restrictions have intensified dramatically.

The Displacement Dimension

The permit revocations sit inside a much larger pattern of forced displacement. In November 2024, Human Rights Watch published a 154-page report — 'Hopeless, Starving, and Besieged': Israel's Forced Displacement of Palestinians in Gaza — documenting how Israeli military operations, evacuation orders, and the blockade have combined to drive mass internal displacement within Gaza itself. The report's framing is significant: displacement is presented not as a battlefield byproduct but as a deliberate and unlawful outcome. Israel disputes that characterization.

For Palestinians caught between the two territories, the displacement dynamic is different but no less intractable. Unlike internally displaced Gazans who can, in theory, move within the Strip, those stranded in the West Bank face a legal wall: no valid permit, no recognized crossing, no administrative channel. Their families in Gaza are simultaneously hemmed in by the blockade. The result is a bilateral immobility — each side sealed off from the other.

A Conflict With No Short History

The conditions producing this separation did not emerge in October 2023. Amnesty International describes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one of the longest-running in modern history, with the current architecture of permits, checkpoints, and territorial separation having evolved over decades of occupation policy. The Oslo Accords of the 1990s formally divided administrative control across Area A, B, and C designations; the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007 prompted Israel to impose the blockade that has been in place, in various configurations, ever since.

That history matters for understanding why permit cancellations carry such outsized weight. The permit system is not incidental — it is the mechanism through which Israel manages Palestinian movement between territories it controls or occupies. When that system is suspended wholesale, as it was after October 7, it leaves no fallback legal route. There is no bilateral Palestinian authority with jurisdiction over both territories that could negotiate alternatives. The Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and Hamas in Gaza are not only politically estranged; they govern separate populations under separate, adversarial arrangements.

The personal cost of these structural facts lands on individuals in ways that aggregate statistics rarely capture. A man waiting to see his children, a family unable to attend a funeral, a laborer whose work permit was the household's only income — each is a discrete instance of a policy that operates at scale. Whether that scale constitutes a violation of international humanitarian law is a live dispute between Israel and human rights organizations. What is not disputed is that reunification, for many of these families, has no visible legal pathway as of mid-2026.

The trajectory from here depends heavily on ceasefire negotiations, which have proceeded fitfully. Any arrangement that addresses civilian movement — including the restoration of some permit regime — would require Israeli agreement on terms it has so far declined. Until then, the families separated by October 7 remain separated by the absence of any mechanism to bring them back together.