Palestinian and Burmese workers in Saudi Arabia have been exempted from the Gulf kingdom’s ongoing crackdown on expatriate labour, local press reported on Monday.

According to Saudi Gazette, workers from Myanmar and the Palestinian Territories will not be deported from the country if they are found to be in violation of labour regulations, which authorities have begun stringently enforcing in recent months. The newspaper did not explain where the directive had come from.

Nearly 1m foreigners are believed to have left Saudi Arabia since March, when the government stopped turning a blind eye to visa irregularities that had been tolerated for decades. Saudi Arabia is home to about 10m overseas nationals, mainly from other Arab countries and the Subcontinent, and the push to deport foreigners to part of a broader move to increase employment among Saudi nationals.

Saudi Gazette said that the exemption applied to Palestinians holding travel documents from Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq or Egypt. It added that the decision had been taken as many Palestinians and Burmese were unable to return to their homeland due to internal strife.

In recent months, Saudi Arabia has taken in an increasing number of predominantly Muslim refugees from Myanmar (Burma), who have been affected by inter-communal violence in the South-East Asian country.