Israel Lets Trickle of Palestinians Back In : Mideast: Meanwhile, tens of thousands of foreign workers are streaming in to take over many jobs.

Israel on Monday further eased a closure of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, letting in about 2,000 Palestinian workers from the West Bank and 1,000 from Gaza.

A day earlier, it had begun lifting the closure, which was imposed last month after Gaza suicide bombers killed 21 Israelis in Israel.

But the Palestinians’ return could be limited by the tens of thousands of foreign laborers streaming to the Jewish state to replace Palestinians as part of Israel’s emerging separation from the West Bank and Gaza.

Typical is Ion Tofei, a 52-year-old welder who arrived in Israel this week, attracted by wages far higher than in his native Romania.

Tofei is among the new foreign workers who are picking fruit at farms in central Israel, for example, and building interchanges on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway.

“If Palestinians can find jobs in their own areas, that is more natural and better,” government spokesman Uri Dromi said Monday. “The less we are together the better.”

Aimed at preventing further terrorist attacks, the separation policy is a sharp departure from the initial hopes for peaceful economic integration when the Israeli-Palestinian accord was signed in September, 1993.

But it is making an already desperate situation even worse in the Palestinian areas, still heavily dependent on the income from jobs in Israel.

The wave of bombings against Israelis by Islamic fundamentalists opposed to the peace process has convinced many Israelis that the best option for the moment is divorce. Since October, 56 Israelis have died in such attacks.

After the most recent attack, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin sealed off the Palestinian areas and appointed officials to come up with a plan for making the separation permanent.

As the numbers of foreign workers in Israel grew to 70,000 this month, the government said it would allow about 15,000 Palestinians to return to work.

But only a few thousand have returned so far.

“We are really worried about this phenomenon,” said Shaher Saed, head of the General Federation of Labor Unions in the West Bank. “Once the Palestinian workers lose their jobs in Israel . . . they cannot find jobs in the West Bank and Gaza.”

He said unemployment in the West Bank, where about 1 million Palestinians live, had risen to 51% since the closure.

Dromi said foreign investment and joint Israeli-Arab industrial parks will eventually provide the Palestinians with work. But the foreign aid is coming in slowly, and the industrial parks are at least two years away.

The Israeli daily Haaretz reported that housing prices, which rose by one-third last year in part because of the frequent closures of the West Bank and Gaza, would no longer be affected by fluctuations in Palestinian labor.

“Those who suffer are the Palestinian workers and not the employers,” said Yaron Angel, who has replaced most of the West Bankers in his Jerusalem bakery with Arabs from Jerusalem who are not restricted by the closure.

Meanwhile, Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, frustrated by delays in his peace deal with Israel, summoned the PLO’s top decision-making body to Cairo today to reassess the accord, officials said.

“We are committed to the peace process but at the same time we have arrived at an impasse,” Arafat said in Paris on Monday.