The Palestinians on Tuesday marked Labor Day by holding rallies in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip, calling for reducing unemployment, creating job opportunities and improving the income of Palestinian labors.

Dozens of Palestinians, waving Palestinian flags and carrying banners, demonstrated in front of the inoperative Palestinian Legislative Council, or parliament, dominated by the Islamic Hamas movement, calling for giving Palestinian labors legal rights and addressing unemployment.

The demonstrators chanted slogans that called for improving labors' wages and ending a five-year-old Israeli blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip.

Meanwhile, dozens of Palestinians rallied in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah to protest the high unemployment rate and severe lack of jobs.

Zeyad Gargoun, a leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, told the rally that "this action is to reveal our real suffering."

In the northern West Bank city of Nablus, dozens rallied in front of the Labors Union, waving the union's flags and carrying banners that called for a better life for workers by creating jobs, reducing unemployment and improving the workers' wages.

Farooq Aaref, representative of the union who joined the rally, told Xinhua that the rally called first of all for ending all the measures that violate the labors rights, adding that "this rally aims at pressuring on the Palestinian official bodies to seriously work in ending the crisis of high prices.

He called on the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) to immediately approve a law of social security and put out a system to insure the lowest level of incomes to confront high prices.

Meanwhile, Salam Fayyad, Prime Minister of the caretaker government of the PNA in the West Bank, reiterated on Labor Day his government's commitments to resolve the questions of workers, which "is a basic need to finalize the establishment of the independent Palestinian state."

"The current rate of unemployment in the Palestinian territories is very high and we can never accept to keep it going like that," Fayyad said to a group of labor leaders in the West Bank, adding that Israel is held fully responsible for such a situation due to the restrictions it imposes on all aspects of Palestinians' life.

He stressed that the Palestinian people "can create the best economic developing program once the Israel military occupation of the Palestinian territories ends."

Fayyad expected that his government "would start next week a new round of dialogue which aims at improving the labors' wages."

The Palestinian Central Statistics Bureau said in a report that the rate of unemployment in the year 2012 reached 21 percent in the West Bank and 28 percent in the Gaza Strip.

The report said that the number of workers with a steady salary reached 558,000, including 300,000 in the West Bank, 177,000 in the Gaza Strip, 69,000 in Israel and 12,000 in Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

According to the report, the number of workers with a steady salary in the Palestinian private sector stood at 52 percent, while 34 percent work in the government and 14 percent in Israel and the Israeli settlements.