- Nearly 90 percent of businesses in the territory have been destroyed
- Hundreds of thousands of residents are now unemployed
Updated 8 minutes 21 seconds ago
September 24, 2026 22:31
GENEVA: Gaza is experiencing the most severe economic crisis ever recorded, with roughly nine out of ten businesses destroyed and hundreds of thousands of people out of work, according to a senior UN development agency.
“The collapse of Gaza’s economy is the world’s most severe economic crisis on record,” said Pedro Manuel Moreno, acting secretary‑general of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
“It has erased decades of development and created an acute economic crisis for its people,” he told reporters in Geneva as the organization released a new report.
The report found that 92 percent of Gaza’s economic establishments have been damaged or destroyed.
The territory’s daily per‑capita GDP has fallen to $0.58, while prices have surged 274 percent above 2022 levels.
According to the Hamas‑run health ministry—considered reliable by the UN—the offensive has caused over 73,000 deaths, displaced virtually the entire population, and destroyed or damaged most buildings.
Before October 2023, two‑thirds of Gazans lived in poverty; today, every resident faces multidimensional poverty, said Mutasim Elagraa, UNCTAD’s coordinator for assistance to the Palestinians.
Industrial and agricultural output have plummeted by 94 percent, leaving just 1.5 percent of arable land usable and forcing total reliance on humanitarian food aid, Elagraa added.
The report estimates that hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost, pushing unemployment above 90 percent among Gaza’s working‑age population.
It also highlights an emerging economic and financial crisis in the occupied West Bank, tied to reduced access to land and natural resources due to Israeli settlement expansion.
The Palestinian authority has tapped local banks, exhausted its pension fund, and accumulated debts to private contractors, Elagraa noted, warning that a banking collapse looms and that the political, social, and humanitarian fallout will be enormous.