Poverty affects 79 per cent of all Gaza households
Gaza (AsiaNews) According to the World Bank, Palestinians are currently experiencing the worst economic depression in their modern history. Worse of all are the 1.4 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Stripas of April 2006, 79 per cent of Gazan households were living in poverty and unemployment levels stood at 40 per cent. Matters are made worse by internal (a 3 to 5 per cent annual population growth) and external factors (the territory's closure by Israel, the impossibility to work outside the Strip, and Israel's attack on Gaza's only power station last June which supplied 45 percent of its electricity). All this is complicated by the US and EU decision to suspend international aid following Hamas's election victory.
All this comes from a study by Professor Sara Roy for the "The Palestine Center" that was published in Lebanonwire. The scholar, who works at Harvard University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Gaza's economy is undergoing a "debilitating decline" and a process of "pauperisation". In her research she shows the extent to which the Gazan economy has deliberately become structurally dependent on Israel over the past 30 years. She further suggests that the border closure in 1993 and Israeli disengagement in 2005 have had devastating effects.
"Decades of expropriation and deinstitutionalization had long ago robbed Palestine of its potential for development, ensuring that no viable economic (and hence political) structure could emerge," she writes.
Hamas's electoral victory and the creation of a Hamas government further robbed the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) of its two main sources: Western financial aid worth about US$ 1 billion per year (according to World Bank sources), and the monthly transfer by Israel of US$ 55 million in customs and tax revenues that it collects for the PNA.
The loss of international assistance and the impossibility of Palestinians to work outside the Strip and to trade with the world have led to the current economic crisis. Unemployment levels approaching 40 per cent (compared to less than 12 percent in 1999) are one result.
The combination of a growing population and a shifting age structure places enormous pressures on public services like education. Gaza schools will require 1,517 more teachers and 984 new classrooms over the next four years to cope with half of the territory's population who are under 15. And if Gaza's educational system is to reach current West Bank standards, it needs at least 7,500 additional teachers and 4,700 new classrooms.
If the Gaza Strip is to just maintain current levels of access to health services in 2010, it will need 425 more physicians, 520 additional nurses and 465 new hospital beds.
According to the United Nations, in the absence of any meaningful improvement, the Palestinian economy in 2007 will be 35 percent smaller than it was in 2005, falling to its level in 1991. Over half the labour force will be unemployed and 84 per cent of total jobs available in 2005 could be lost.
According to Raja Khalidi, an economist with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), "the Palestinian economy will implode to levels not witnessed for a generation".
A possible solution lays not so much in renewed international assistance, which barely keeps the economy afloat, as in "liberating" Gaza from its present restraints. Gazans should be allowed greater movement into and trade with Israel and beyond.
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