São Paulo – The unemployment rate in the Palestinian occupied territories has reached 27%, the world’s highest, according to an annual report released this Wednesday (12) by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The agency adds that, in the last year, the per capita income declined, the agricultural output dropped 11% and there was a worsening of the socioeconomic situation in the region. In the picture above, a Palestinian farmer works in a strawberry field in the Gaza Strip.
The report points to the decline in international donations and the freezing of Gaza’s reconstruction process as some of the factors that contributed to the deterioration of the situation and adds that Palestine’s economic outlooks are obscure against the continuous seizure of land and natural resources by the “occupying power”.
“Under international law, Israel and the international community have responsibilities not only to avoid actions that impede development but to take affirmative steps to foster development in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” said Mahmoud Elkhafif, Coordinator of the UNCTAD Assistance to the Palestinian People Unit, according to an UNCTAD statement.
The report emphasizes that Israel hasn’t reduced the constraints that it imposes to Palestinians and that international donations dropped to a third of the level registered in 2008. This year, for instance, the United States has slashed in half its contribution to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
In addition to the annexation of land in West Bank and the eviction of locals, UNCTAD criticizes the embargo imposed to the Gaza Strip, which has been on for over a decade. In the agency’s assessment, the adverse conditions imposed by the occupation impact women and young people in a disproportionate way
In the Gaza strip, according to the report, the per capita income is currently 30% lower than at the turn of the century in real terms and that poverty and food insecurity are extreme. In 2018, local households have been receiving, on average, two hours per day of electric power.
For the UN agency, a sustainable recovery of the region will only be possible with the lifting of the embargo to Gaza, the economic reunification of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, a solution for the power crisis and the permission for the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) to explore the fields of natural gas discovered in the country’s coastline, in the Mediterranean, in the 1990s, among other actions.
The occupation also imposes restrictions to trade, especially to the import of products that could be of military use, such as machinery, spare parts, fertilizers, chemicals, medical equipment, optical equipment and navigation tools. UNCTAD assures that the lifting of trade restrictions alone could make the local economy grow 10%.
Translated by Sérgio Kakitani
