Also Sunday, an Israeli military court convicted two soldiers of using a 9-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield during last year's Gaza war – the most serious conviction yet connected to troops' conduct during the military offensive.
The West Bank laborer, Izzedine Kawazbeh, a 35-year-old father of five, was shot after scaling Israel's towering separation barrier by rope and dashing across a wide stretch of road heavily patrolled by Israeli police. Israel started building the barrier in 2002 during a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings that killed hundreds of Israelis. The last one was in February 2008.
In an added twist, some of the laborers head to construction jobs in Jewish settlements, helping Israel tighten its hold on lands the Palestinians want for their state.
The workers say they are too busy struggling to feed their families to think much about the risk or the nature of their work. West Bank jobs are scarce, and a laborer there makes only about half of what he would get on an Israeli construction site.
"All he wanted in life was to earn money to feed his family," Kawazbeh's brother, Zeinedin, 34. "He didn't care about anything else." Kawazbeh's widow, Fathiyeh, 30, is pregnant.
The West Bank has recently witnessed a modest economic recovery after years of conflict-driven downturn, but hardship remains widespread in places like Kawazbeh's home village of Sair, where hundreds of men set out weekly for jobs inside Israel.
West Bank Palestinians must obtain permits to enter Israel and the dozens of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Israel argues that it must tightly screen Palestinian workers to weed out possible attackers.
About 20,000 Palestinians have permits to work in Israel, and another 20,000 have permits to work in West Bank settlements, said Salwa Alenat from Kav Laoved, an Israeli group that assists the laborers. As many as 15,000 sneak in without permits, she said
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