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BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) -- Israeli border police detained 37 Palestinian teenagers on Tuesday over claims that they had entered Israel and were working in the country without permits.

Israeli police spokeswoman Luba al-Samri said in a statement that the Palestinian workers, most of them 16 or 17 years old, were arrested after they were found in a small encampment in the central Israeli district of Sharon.

Al-Samri added that Israeli border police found mattresses, covers and foodstuffs, which indicated that they have been using the location for sleeping.

She added that the detained Palestinians were all taken to an Israeli police station for interrogation.

Tens of thousands of Palestinian workers are forced to seek a living by working in Israel due to crippling unemployment in the West Bank,as the growth of an independent Palestinian economy has been stifled under the ongoing Israeli military occupation, according rights groups.

Israeli authorities have imposed a massive crackdown on undocumented workers in Israel in recent months, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying in March that since a wave of violence began last fall -- that to date has left some 34 Israelis and 235 Palestinians killed -- “a large proportion of (Palestinian) attackers were present in Israel illegally or infiltrated into Israel illegally.”

Meanwhile, Israeli authorities have launched a construction project to build a new separation barrier in the southern occupied West Bank district of Hebron, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said would protect Israel from “illegal residents” and Palestinian “attackers.”

However, few Palestinians attackers were in fact workers in Israel, and the recent crackdown on undocumented workers has been condemned by rights groups as a political game, unlikely to affect the violence, yet economically harmful to both Palestinians and Israelis.