The United Nations employment agency and the Palestinian office note significant fallout in the occupied West Bank, with the loss of a third of jobs.
Nearly 66 percent of jobs have been lost in the Gaza Strip since the war between Israel and Hamas began on October 7, according to new data from the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics. .
Palestinians have seen their employment reduced by two-thirds in the Gaza Strip – the equivalent of 192,000 jobs – since the start of the war, the ILO and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) said on Wednesday.
The knock-on effect on the economy of the occupied West Bank was also significant, with a reduction in employment of a third, the equivalent of 276,000 jobs.
The devastating loss of Gaza’s labor market worsens the already dire conditions that prevailed in the blockaded territory even before the current conflict, “rendering it essentially uninhabitable,” the report said.
Palestinians in Gaza have long struggled with persistently high rates of poverty and vulnerability and one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, the report notes.
“The crisis has caused a huge distortion in the Palestinian economic structure,” said PCBS President Ola Awad. “The unemployment rate in the Gaza Strip now exceeds three-quarters of the working population, and around a third of the working population in the West Bank is unemployed, reaching the highest level of unemployment in decades. »
This “humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions” which has wreaked havoc on the job market will result in lifelong hardship for the population and total dependence on international aid, the organizations said.
Peter Rademaker, ILO deputy regional director for Arab states, told Tel Aviv Tribune from Geneva that Palestinians in Gaza “will remain in poverty for many months and years to come” because of Israel’s war against the enclave.
“The labor market was already very depressed in the occupied West Bank and Gaza even before the war,” he said.
“(As the war continues), many people in Gaza and the West Bank will have no income or wages. No one will pay them any money and they will have to rely more and more on international aid,” added the deputy director.
This will leave the Palestinian people in a state of dependence and competing for a share of global financial aid distributions for many years to come.
“Unfortunately, the authorities have no public funding to provide social assistance, so it will have to come from outside,” he explained. “As we all know, there are many crises raging globally and the chances of Palestine receiving the international aid it needs are not necessarily very high. »
Nearly 40,000 buildings, or about 18 percent of all pre-conflict structures, have been damaged or destroyed in the Gaza Strip since the start of the conflict, a UN assessment showed last week.
