GENEVA (Reuters) – More than 60% of jobs have been lost in Gaza since the Israel-Hamas conflict, the International Labour Organization said on Monday, adding to the dire economic situation in the Israeli-besieged enclave.
The losses amount to a total of 182,000 jobs in the small Palestinian territory, the ILO said in its first assessment of the impact of Israeli ground and air strikes on Gaza which began after Hamas militants’ deadly cross-border incursion on Oct. 7.
“Our initial assessment of the repercussions of the tragic current crisis on the Palestinian labour market has yielded extremely worrying results, which will only worsen if the conflict continues,” ILO Regional Director for Arab States Ruba Jaradat said, adding that the crisis would reverberate for “many years to come” for jobs and businesses.
Even before the war and the tightening of Israel’s economic blockade of the Gaza Strip, around half of the narrow coastal enclave’s 2.3 million people lived below the poverty line.
(Reporting by Emma Farge; editing by Mark Heinrich)
