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    • Thai workers caught up in Hamas attack faced with the dilemma of whether to flee or stay in Israel

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    When Hamas militants stormed into Israeli villages and towns along the border of the blockaded Gaza Strip last month, many Thai migrant agricultural workers shared the fate of hundreds of Israelis who were killed, kidnapped or forced to run for their lives.

    Since that day nearly a month ago, more than 7,000 of some 30,000 Thais working in Israel have returned home on government evacuation flights. At least 22 are believed to have been abducted by Hamas militants, who rule Gaza. Many more may be missing and 32 have been reported killed.

    Like many other Thai laborers in Israel, Natthaporn Onkeaw had been his family's main breadwinner, sending money home regularly after going to Israel to work on a kibbutz in 2021.

    The 26-year-old was among those abducted by Hamas, said his mother, 47-year-old Thongkun Onkeaw, who lives in a poor rural area in northeastern Thailand near the Laotian border.

    He was one of the few Thai captives pictured in a photo released by Hamas whose names were later confirmed by the Thai Labor Ministry. His mother said she had not heard from him since he was taken, and no officials have given her or her husband any updates.

    "I can only pray: Please help my son stay safe," she told The Associated Press.

    Farm laborers from Thailand and elsewhere in Southeast Asia seek work in more developed countries where there is a shortage of semi-skilled labor -- at wages considerably higher than what they earn at home.

    When the Israeli chicken farm where Sompong Jandai had been working since July was rocked with explosions in the early days of the Israel-Hamas war -- sparked by Hamas' deadly Oct. 7 incursion into southern Israel -- the 31-year-old first thought about going home.

    But the salary he makes -- more than eight times what he'd earn in Thailand -- and knowing he can send the bulk of it home to support his wife and four children and pay off loans he took to finance the move to Israel, changed his mind.

    "At first I thought about leaving," he said. After being initially evacuated to a safer area, he came back to work at the farm.

    Thailand's Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin pressed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a telephone conversation Wednesday for help with Thais hostages. A Thai parliamentary delegation last week traveled to Iran, a Hamas ally, to meet with a Hamas representative to try and work on the issue from the other side.

    Areepen Uttarasin, a Thai official who led the delegation, told reporters upon his return that the Hamas representative said the group would "try every possible way for all Thais held captive to return safely" to their families.

    He did not identify the Hamas representative but added that he was told the release of the hostages had become complicated by the ongoing fighting.In Israel, volunteer Yahel Kurlander, who has been helping Thai workers in the aftermath of the attack, said she knows of at least 54 missing or kidnapped Thais.

    "There are a lot of bodies ... not yet identified," she said.

    Hours after the Hamas attack, Kurlander, a sociologist with Israel's Tel-Hai College who specializes in agricultural labor migration with a focus on Thai workers, said she and other scholars and members of nongovernmental organizations started talking about what they could do to help.

    "We just came to this realization," she said. "If we won't gather together and reach a hand to the Thai workers, nobody will."

    The first priority was to evacuate "highly traumatized" workers and provide food and other aid, she said. Now they're reaching out to the families of the missing, trying to gather details about tattoos or other identifying marks, and also help those who fled the Hamas rampage to return home or find new work.

    It's important to give the workers "the freedom of choice," she added.

    For Siroj Pongbut, that choice was to return home -- at least until the fighting ends -- even though he doesn't make enough farming in Thailand to feed his wife and three children.

    The 27-year-old had only been working as a farmhand in Israel for less than a month, after more than a year of complicated bureaucracy and borrowing money for the trip.

    From that early Saturday morning when Hamas attacked, he said he could hear sirens and explosions from the tomato farm where he worked, and made up his mind it wasn't worth the risk to stay. About 150 of his coworkers at the farm stayed in Israel.

    "I don't know how it is going to be in the future," he told the AP by telephone while awaiting an evacuation flight from Tel Aviv last week. "I'm worried that it will become more serious."

    ------

    Associated Press writer David Rising in Bangkok contributed to this report.

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