The Electronic Intifada 10 August 2023
Gaza’s economy has taken a battering over the past 16 years of Israel’s blockade on the impoverished coastal enclave.
But adversity breeds defiance, and some sectors of Gaza’s economy are pulling themselves to their feet in spite of the circumstances.
The al-Bawab manufacturing facility, also known as Unipal 2000, currently exports 150,000 to 160,000 items of women’s clothing to the Israeli market.
This marks a remarkable turnaround for a company that had left Gaza to survive in 2007. The company relocated to Egypt in the aftermath of clashes between Hamas and Fatah, the two main Palestinian political factions, following the former’s parliamentary election victory the year before, and the full blockade Israel imposed.
“In 2017, we shut down the business in Egypt and returned to Gaza, with the hope of resuming production for the local and Israeli markets, the way we did before 2007,” said owner Nabil al-Bawab.
The factory is now located in the PADICO industrial zone to the east of Gaza City and just west of Shujaiya, the neighborhood that was the site of a massacre during Israel’s 2014 assault.
PADICO is a Palestinian investment group that, among a number of other interests, runs two industrial zones, one in Gaza and one in Jericho.
The Gaza industrial zone is nearly 500,000 square meters, allowing plenty of space for the dozens of companies and factories operating there. Unipal 2000 runs a large facility that employs more than 1,000 people, according to al-Bawab, who said the return to Gaza – even with the subsequent COVID-19 pandemic – had been a success.
“We only stopped production for a short period of time once, back in May 2021,” al-Bawab told The Electronic Intifada. This was during Israel’s May assault on Gaza that year, he said.
The size and scale of Unipal is an aberration in Gaza, where poverty runs at over 50 percent and unemployment has reached 45 percent, while investment opportunities have been few and far between.
In 2020, the UN estimated that Israel’s blockade had cost Gaza’s economy nearly $17 billion in the years 2007-2018.
Aiding al-Bawab’s production are the power generators made available by PADICO to mitigate for power shortages that have been a major problem in Gaza ever since Israel bombed the coastal strip’s only power plant in 2006.
Since then, Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have had to cope with eight hours of power, followed by eight hours of outage.