The United Nations warned Tuesday that Israel's war in Gaza has devastated the Palestinian territory's economy and now threatens its very survival, urging "immediate and substantial" international intervention.
Rebuilding the Gaza Strip will cost more than $70 billion and could take several decades, the U.N. 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."
Israel's two-year genocidal war on Gaza has killed nearly 70,000 people, according to figures from the Health Ministry that the U.N. considers reliable.
The war was triggered by the Palestinian resistance group Hamas' October 2023 southern Israel incursion, which caused 1,221 deaths.
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 U.N. 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."
