Nearly two-thirds — 63.3 percent — of Gazans aged 15 to 29 were unemployed in the period preceding Operation Protective Edge, the IMF and World Bank reported, and 45 percent of the territory’s workforce as a whole was jobless. In the West Bank, these figures were 25 percent and 16 percent, respectively. A weighted average of these numbers produces an overall Palestinian unemployment rate of 26.3 percent, rising to 39.5 percent for young people.
“As international experience and recent history in Gaza shows, such a dire situation may fuel further violence,” the World Bank report warned.
The Palestinian growth rate fell from 6.3 percent in 2012 to 1.9 percent in 2013. And it’s only thanks to Gaza’s cross-border tunnel economy, which hadn’t yet been destroyed by Egypt at that point, that the decline wasn’t even more drastic. Growth in Gaza fell from 7 percent to 6 percent, while in the West Bank, growth plunged from 6 to 0.5 percent.
In 2014, the IMF predicts that the West Bank economy will contract by a further 3.7 percent and the Gaza economy by 15 percent. “Political uncertainty and restrictions on movement and access are the main reasons why the Palestinian economy is unable to take off,” the World Bank report said.
The PA’s report, “Rebuilding Hope,” notes that 48 percent of the PA’s regular budget goes to wages and social benefits such as welfare payments in Gaza. But since the Hamas-Fatah political rift in 2007, only 3 percent of PA tax revenue has come from Gaza, down from 45 percent before 2007.
Last year’s World Bank report concluded that Israel’s policy of preventing Palestinian development in Area C results in an annual loss to the Palestinian economy of about $3.4 billion.
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