Gaza ‘Survival’ At Stake, UN Warns

Israel’s war in Gaza has ravaged the Palestinian territory’s economy and is threatening its very survival, the United Nations warned Tuesday, calling for “immediate and substantial” international intervention.

Rebuilding the Gaza Strip will cost more than $70 billion and could take several decades, the UN Trade and Development agency (UNCTAD) said in a new report, warning that war and restrictions had triggered an “unprecedented collapse across the Palestinian economy”.

“The military operations have significantly undermined every pillar of survival,” from food to shelter to healthcare, “and plunged Gaza into a human-made abyss”, it said.

“The sustained, systematic destruction casts significant doubt on the ability of Gaza to reconstitute itself as a liveable space and society.”

Palestinian Islamist group Hamas’s attack on southern Israel in October 2023 resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people and sparked a devastating two-year war in Gaza.

Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza has killed more than 69,000 people, according to figures from the health ministry that the UN considers reliable.

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The scale of destruction wrought on the territory has meanwhile “unleashed cascading crises, economic, humanitarian, environmental and social, propelling (it) from de-development to utter ruin”, UNCTAD’s report said.

Even “in an optimistic scenario of double-digit growth rates facilitated by a significant level of foreign aid, it will take several decades for Gaza to return to pre-October 2023 welfare levels”, it said.

UNCTAD called for a “comprehensive recovery plan”, combining “coordinated international assistance, restoration of fiscal transfers, and measures to ease constraints on trade, movement and investment”.

With Gaza’s entire population facing “extreme, multidimensional impoverishment”, the UN agency is also calling for the introduction of a universal emergency basic income, providing everyone there a renewable and unconditional monthly transfer of cash.

The report showed that Gaza’s economy contracted by 87 percent over the course of 2023-2024, leaving its gross domestic product per capita at just $161 — among the lowest globally.

While the situation was not as bad in the West Bank, the report found that “violence, accelerated settlement expansion and restrictions on worker mobility have decimated the economy” there as well, “resulting in the worst economic decline since UNCTAD began to maintain records in 1972”.

AFP