GAZA CITY– In 2003, unemployment rates in Gaza reached 34 percent of the territory’s total workforce.
As Gazans welcomed in the New Year, local economists predicted bleak economic conditions in the Palestinian enclave – still reeling under a crippling Israeli blockade– in 2014.
“Indicators don’t augur well for Gaza’s economy in the new year, especially if Israel continues to keep the strip’s commercial crossings closed,” Jamal al-Khoudari, head of the Popular Committee against the Siege on Gaza, told Anadolu Agency on Wednesday.
“We’re expecting unprecedented economic deterioration in Gaza this year,” he said.
In 2003, unemployment rates in Gaza reached 34 percent of the territory’s total workforce, according to Gaza’s Labor Ministry.
But this year, al-Khoudari predicts unemployment in Gaza will reach a whopping 50 percent.
More than half of Gaza’s roughly two million inhabitants will be forced to rely on humanitarian assistance from international organizations,while some 80 percent of its total population will live in absolute poverty, al-Khoudari said.
Gaza’s Labor Union also believes that the number of jobless in Gaza will increase sharply in 2014.
In 2013, there were around 120,000 unemployed people in the Gaza Strip, including about 3,000 who had worked in the underground tunnels linking the territory to Egypt, the union said in a statement.
-Hard life-
In the first hours of the New Year, the General Union of Public Transportation warned of a looming “catastrophe” facing thousands of the strip’s transport workers.
The union said that an ongoing Egyptian crackdown on the border tunnels,coupled witha chronic fuel shortage,had effectively neutralized around 20,000 private vehicles and some 30,000 public ones.
Losses incurred by the public transport sector had amounted to $154 million in 2013, the union said, predicting losses to rise further in 2014.
Gazan economist Ali Abu Shahla warned that the strip was standing on the brink of economic catastrophe.
“Without an urgent solution and closer economic cooperation between Gaza and the West Bank, Gaza’s nearly two million people will be afflicted with a major catastrophe that threatens to bring them back to the Stone Age,” he said.
Economist Rami Abdohad, for his part, expects Gaza’s economy to grow by only 1 percent this year.
The Finance Ministry says that Gaza’s economy grew by 3 percent in 2013, compared with 13.5 percent in 2012 and 26 percent in 2011.
“The [Israeli] blockade poses real dangers to the economy,” Abdo said, going on to predict that Gaza’s economic growth was likely to fall to zero if current conditions remain unchanged.
On Tuesday,Hamas lawmakers approved a $784-million budget for 2014, which includes a staggering deficit of $598 million.
Lawmakers blamed the deficit on the crippling Israeli siege, a lack of foreign aid and the failure of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority to grant Gaza its share of the general Palestinian budget.
