Gaza: world historical crimes but the global alarm bells have yet to ring
Palestinian man reacts to the destruction after an Israeli strike on the Sheikh Radwan Health Centre run by UNRWA in the north of Gaza City on 6 August 2025
Jeremy Salt writes in The Palestine Chronicle on 29 November 2025:
Behind the immediate horrors of massacres and destruction in Gaza and the West Bank, the effects of the dry economics of the genocide often take a back seat. In fact, they are analogous to the python’s slow suffocation of its victim and are just as deadly, over time, in their intent.
For those who do not have the time to plough through lengthy documents, here is a summary of some of the main points in the report by UNCTAD (UN Trade and Development) Secretariat (Geneva, November 24-28, 2025) on the economy of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), excluding East Jerusalem:
- By 2024, GDP of OPT had fallen to 70 percent of 2022 level; by end of 2024, the economy had regressed to 2010 level, “thereby erasing 22 years of economic progress in only 15 months.”
- In the West Bank, in 2024, GDP shrank by 17 percent and GDP per capita by 18.8 percent, erasing 17 years of economic progress. By the end of 2024, total GDP had fallen to 2014 level and GDP per capita to 2008 level.
- By 2024, Gaza’s economy had shrunk to 16.7 percent of 2023 levels and 13.3 percent of 2022 levels, with rising desperation leading to increase in child labor. The economic crisis in Gaza and the West Bank ranks as the tenth most severe (globally) since 1960. The crisis in Gaza alone is the most severe ever recorded, based on the Uppsala (Sweden) Conflict Data Programme data set.
- The Palestinian Human Development Index is projected to fall from 0.716 in 2022 to 0.643 in 2024, “erasing a quarter of a century of hard-won progress. The impact is worst in Gaza, where over 69 years of human development are estimated to have been lost.” Multi-dimensional poverty now engulfs the entire population.
- In the West Bank, violence, accelerated settlement expansion and restrictions on worker mobility have decimated the economy, “resulting in the worst economic decline since UNCTAD began to maintain records in 1972.”
- In Jenin, about 8,000 businesses have been forced to close and 74 percent of farmers have reported a 50 percent decline in revenue.
- The cost of living across the OPT rose by 54 percent in 2024. In Gaza, restrictions on the entry of humanitarian and commercial goods triggered a surge in inflation of 238 percent. Prices of food and beverages rose by 225 percent.