Gaza Herald — Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza has devastated the enclave’s already-fragile economy and now threatens its ability to survive as a functioning society, the United Nations warned on Nov. 25, urging the world to deliver “immediate and substantial” intervention.
A new assessment by the UN Trade and Development Agency (UNCTAD) estimates that rebuilding the shattered Gaza Strip will cost over US$70 billion and require decades of reconstruction. The agency said that relentless military assaults and long-standing Israeli restrictions have triggered an “unprecedented collapse across the Palestinian economy”.
According to the report, Israel’s war has destroyed the foundations necessary for life, from food access and housing to medical services, plunging Gaza into what UNCTAD described as a “human-made abyss”. The “systematic, sustained destruction”, it warned, raises serious questions about whether Gaza can ever return to being a livable place for its people.
The conflict began after an Oct. 2023 operation by Hamas in southern Israel that resulted in 1,221 deaths. Israel responded with a sweeping assault on Gaza that has since killed more than 69,000 Palestinians, based on Gaza Health Ministry figures that the UN deems credible.
The scale of devastation across the territory has unleashed overlapping humanitarian, economic, environmental, and social disasters, pushing Gaza from long-term underdevelopment into complete ruin, the UN report said.
Even with high levels of foreign aid and years of double-digit economic growth, UNCTAD projects that it will still take several decades for Gaza to regain pre-October 2023 living standards, a benchmark that was already shaped by years of blockade and deprivation.
To prevent total societal collapse, UNCTAD called for a wide-ranging recovery program involving coordinated international support, restored fiscal transfers, and the easing of Israeli restrictions on movement, trade, and investment.
The agency further urged the introduction of a universal emergency basic income for Gaza’s entire population, citing the “extreme, multidimensional impoverishment” affecting every household in the territory.
According to the report, Gaza’s economy shrank by a staggering 87% between 2023 and 2024, leaving its per-capita GDP at just US$161, one of the lowest figures recorded anywhere in the world.
Although the situation is less catastrophic in the West Bank, UNCTAD found that escalating violence, rapid settlement expansion and new restrictions on Palestinian labour have pushed the West Bank into its worst economic decline since the UN began keeping records in 1972.
