Gaza – Only 12 months were enough for Israel to destroy the economy in the Gaza Strip, which had been suffering from a stifling siege for more than 17 years, thus returning the Tel Aviv Palestinians to square one and a long journey to rebuild if the opportunity arose.
Israel, with absolute American support, has continued genocide in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023, but the desired end to these massacres, once they end, will refer the Palestinians to battles in other arenas to rebuild the destroyed economy.
Before the start of the Israeli genocide, Gaza’s economy represented approximately 14 percent of Palestine’s gross domestic product, with a value of $2.8 billion, according to official government figures, while the unemployment rate was near 40 percent.
Last June, the International Labor Organization said that the unemployment rate in Gaza had reached about 80 percent, raising the average unemployment across the Palestinian territories to more than 50 percent, compared to 23 percent on the eve of October 7, 2023.
The United Nations organization stated, in its fourth assessment of the impact of the Israeli genocide on employment, that the unemployment rate reached 79.1 percent in the Gaza Strip, and about 32 percent in the occupied West Bank, bringing the total rate to 50.8 percent.
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Today, more than two million Gazans are awaiting the end of the war of extermination, in order to shake off the dust and start almost from scratch, with the poverty rate reaching 100 percent, meaning that all Gazans are poor, according to World Bank data.
World Bank data issued at the end of last September show that Gaza’s economy contracted by 86 percent in the first quarter of 2024, compared to a contraction of 50 percent in the last quarter of 2023.
While data for the second quarter of 2024 has not been released, economic research centers in Ramallah, such as the Institute for Economic Policy Research (MAS), expect the economy to contract by 80 percent in all of 2024.
As of the eve of October 7, the number of industrial facilities in the Strip was approaching 5,000; Today, Palestinian statistical institutions do not know the fate of these facilities due to the difficulty of surveying under Israeli attacks.
While the United Nations said last Monday that “two-thirds of the buildings in the Gaza Strip were destroyed or damaged” by the Israeli army, according to what was reported by the United Nations Satellite Center “UNOSAT.”
The center explained: “This analysis shows that two-thirds of the total buildings in the Gaza Strip were damaged, representing 66 percent of the damaged buildings in the Gaza Strip, amounting to 163,778 buildings.”
The center estimated that the damage now includes 52,564 buildings that were destroyed, 18,913 buildings that were severely damaged, 35,591 buildings whose structures were damaged, and 56,710 buildings that sustained moderate damage.
Reconstruction
As of mid-August, Israeli raids left more than 42 million tons of debris throughout the Strip, according to recent data issued by the United Nations.
This amount of debris and rubble is enough to fill a line of trucks extending from New York to Singapore, according to an investigation conducted by Bloomberg last August.
Removing all this rubble may take about 3 years of work, and may cost up to $700 million, “and the task will be complicated by unexploded bombs, dangerous contaminated materials, and human remains under the rubble.”
United Nations estimates indicate that there are more than 10,000 bodies under the rubble, which the Palestinians have been unable to recover since October 7 until today due to the absence of rescue tools and mechanisms.
Even before the end of the war, UN institutions fear an Israeli refusal to transport the rubble to landfill in the sea, because they may see this as increasing the area of the Gaza Strip, according to Israeli press reports.
While the Office of the Coordinator of Israeli Government Activities in the Palestinian Territories, a body affiliated with the Ministry of Defense, said it was too early to comment on the reconstruction and the fate of the rubble.
A strange paradox
One of the strange ironies in the Gaza Strip is the numbers issued by the Palestinian Monetary Authority, which show an increase in bank deposits in the Strip’s branches.
According to the data, bank deposits in the Gaza Strip amounted to $1.63 billion until the end of September 2023, that is, the eve of the war on the Gaza Strip.
While by the end of August 2024 – the most recent data available – the total value of bank deposits in Gaza branches amounted to about 2.73 billion US dollars.
This is due, according to previous statements by the Monetary Authority, to the fact that, in the event of an attack on the sector, banks were a safe haven for holders of bank deposits, instead of carrying them and moving them from one place to another.
Bank deposits in the Palestinian territories are insured under the umbrella of the Palestinian Deposit Insurance Corporation.
Anatolia
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2024-10-04 19:41:19