Gaza Loses Nearly 66% Jobs Since October 7

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Nearly 66 percent of jobs have been lost in the Gaza Strip since Israel began its bombing campaign in the enclave, according to a report by the International Labor Organization or ILO.

The losses amount to a total of 192,000 jobs, the ILO and Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) said on Wednesday, Dec. 20.

The spillover effect on the economy of the occupied West Bank was also significant, with a 32 percent reduction in employment, equivalent to 276,000 jobs.

In total, 468,000 jobs are estimated to have been lost across Palestine as of Nov. 30, 2023, which supersedes the previous ILO and PCBS estimate of 390,000 jobs expected to be lost due to the ongoing bombardment.

These job losses translate into daily labor income losses of US$20.5 million, the second bulletin by ILO and PCBS projected.

The unemployment rate in Palestine is projected to increase from 24 percent in the 4th quarter of 2022 to a staggering 46.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2023

“The Palestinians of Gaza are in the midst of a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions,” said ILO Regional Director for Arab States Ruba Jaradat.

“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 labor force, and around a third of the West Bank’s labor force is unemployed, reaching the highest level of unemployment in decades.”

ILO and PCBS project that employment will decline in all economic sectors, except for the agricultural sector, where employment is forecast to remain stable and provide a cushioning effect from the loss of employment from other sectors.

Peter Rademaker, ILO’s deputy regional director for Arab states, told Al Jazeera that Palestinians in Gaza “will be in poverty for many months and years to come” because of Israel’s war on the enclave.

“The labor market was already very depressed in the occupied West Bank and Gaza even before the war,” he said.

REUTERS | AL JAZEERA

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