UN warns of ‘staggering’ economic devastation in Gaza, occupied West Bank

Eighty percent of Gaza’s businesses have been damaged or destroyed since Israel launched its war, according to a UN report.

Israel’s war on Gaza has devastated the Palestinian enclave’s economy, reducing it to less than one-sixth of its 2022 size, while there has also been a “significant downturn” in the occupied West Bank, according to a United Nations report.

“Production processes have been disrupted or decimated, income sources have disappeared, poverty has intensified and expanded, neighbourhoods have been eradicated, and communities and towns have been ruined,” a report published on Thursday by the UN Trade and Development agency (UNCTAD) found.

Mutasim Elagraa, who coordinates UNCTAD’s Palestinian assistance programme, said it remained unclear how much it would cost to rebuild.

“But the evidence we have now [indicates] it will be high tens of billions or maybe even more,” he told reporters in Geneva.

“It will take decades to bring Gaza back to where it was in October 2023.”

Already by early 2024, UNCTAD said up to 96 percent of Gaza’s agricultural assets – including farms, orchards, irrigation systems, machinery and storage facilities – had been “decimated”.

This had crippled food production capacity and worsened the already towering number of people who do not have enough food to eat in the besieged Palestinian territory, it said.

Eighty-two percent of businesses in Gaza had also been damaged or destroyed.

In the last quarter of 2023 alone, Gaza’s gross domestic product (GDP) plummeted 81 percent, leading to a 22-percent contraction for the entire year, the report found.

“By mid-2024, Gaza’s economy had shrunk to less than one-sixth of its 2022 level,” UNCTAD said.

‘Rapid and alarming economic decline’

Spiralling violence in the West Bank, meanwhile, has sparked a “rapid and alarming economic decline” there as well, the agency warned, pointing out that GDP there had contracted 19 percent in the final quarter of 2023.

Since October 7, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed at least 662 Palestinians in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

At least 24 Israelis, including members of the security forces, have been killed in Palestinian attacks during the same period, Israeli officials said.

Thursday’s report said factors like settlement expansion, land confiscation, demolition of Palestinian structures and increased settler violence had displaced West Bank communities and severely impacted economic activities.

About 80 percent of businesses in Jerusalem’s Old City have either partially or completely ceased operations, UNCTAD said.

A Palestinian man walks past closed shops in the Old City of Hebron in the occupied West Bank on June 13, 2023 [Jewel Samad/AFP]

High unemployment

Labour market conditions across the Palestinian territory have also worsened dramatically since October 7.

The report showed that 96 percent of West Bank businesses decreased activity and more than 42 percent reduced their workforces.

In all, 306,000 jobs have been lost, pushing the West Bank’s unemployment rate from nearly 13 percent before Israel launched its war on Gaza to 32 percent.

In Gaza, meanwhile, a full two-thirds of pre-war jobs – about 201,000 positions – had been lost by January, the report showed.

It said unemployment in the besieged territory reached 79 percent in the final quarter of 2023, up from 46 percent in the previous quarter.

Source

:

Al Jazeera and news agencies