Gaza loses at least 66% of jobs, says ILO

At least 66 per cent of jobs have been lost in Gaza since the Israel-Palestine conflict erupted in October, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) said on Wednesday. The organisation warned that employment losses could continue to increase in the enclave, Reuters has reported.

The losses amount to a total of 192,000 jobs in the small occupied Palestinian territory, said the ILO in its second assessment of the impact of Israeli ground and air strikes on Gaza. Even before the war and the tightening of Israel’s 16-year economic blockade of the Gaza Strip, around half of the narrow coastal enclave’s 2.3 million people lived below the poverty line.

In a first assessment released in early November, the ILO estimated that 182,000 jobs had been lost in Gaza, a figure representing more than 60 per cent of employment. “Today hardly anybody in Gaza is able to earn income from work,” said Peter Rademaker, ILO deputy regional director for the Arab states. “It’s clearly a still growing curve,” he said of employment loss. “It might even get worse.”

Jobs are also being lost on a large scale in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where the UN has recorded an upturn in violence against Palestinians since the outbreak of the conflict on 7 October. As of yesterday, Israel had killed 19,667 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since then, most of them children and women. Almost 53,000 have been wounded, and at least 8,000 remain missing under the rubble of the civilian infrastructure destroyed by the apartheid state. The occupied Palestinian territory is in the grip of an “unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe,” say Palestinian and UN sources.

Hamas launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October against Israeli military bases and settlements in the vicinity of Gaza, during which 1,139 Israeli soldiers and civilians were killed, many of them by “friendly fire” from the Israel Defence Forces. The operation was in response to “daily Israeli attacks against the Palestinian people and their sanctities,” notably Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied Jerusalem. Around 240 Israelis were captured during the operation, 110 of whom have already been exchanged for some of the thousands of Palestinians held by Israel.

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