More than a year into Israel’s war against Hamas, “nearly 100 percent” of Gaza’s population has been plunged into poverty with a ruined economy and “staggering” unemployment, the UN said Thursday.
In the occupied West Bank, where violence has also surged since Hamas’s October-7 attack last year that sparked the war in Gaza, the situation “has been equally concerning”, the UN’s International Labour Organization said.
“The impact of the war in the Gaza Strip has taken a toll far beyond loss of life, desperate humanitarian conditions and physical destruction,” Ruba Jaradat, ILO’s regional director for Arab States, said in a statement.
“It has fundamentally altered the socioeconomic landscape of Gaza,” she warned. “The impact will be felt for generations to come.”
In the Gaza Strip, “nearly 100 percent of the population now lives in poverty”, ILO said.
It warned that “the significant economic contraction in the West Bank is estimated to have more than doubled the short-term poverty rate, rising from 12 percent in 2023 to 28 percent by mid-2024”.
Unemployment in the West Bank surged to nearly 35 percent since last October, “while in Gaza it averaged a staggering 79.7 percent”, ILO said.
The agency said the wider economic toll had also been “unprecedented” across the occupied Palestinian territories.
The West Bank saw gross domestic product contract by 21.7 percent year-on-year, while GDP in the Gaza Strip nosedived 84.7 percent, it said.
