Mahmoud Issa on the economic costs of the Gaza invasion

Israel's retaliation has killed more than 33,000 people, with thousands more still unrecovered in the rubble, according to Gaza health authorities. Most of the territory's 2.3 million people are now homeless.

Long blockaded by Israel, Gaza's economy had struggled for years before the current conflict, suffering one of the world's highest unemployment rates.

The economic shock inflicted by the latest war - the deadliest in decades of Israeli-Palestinian conflict - is one of the largest observed in recent history, the World Bank and the United Nations said in a recent report.

As of Jan. 31, it said, the enclave had suffered some $18.5 billion of damage to critical infrastructure - equal to 97% of the GDP in 2022 of Gaza and the West Bank, where Palestinians exercise limited self-rule under Israeli military occupation. 

~ Mahmoud Issa, "A life's work destroyed - Palestinian counts cost of Gaza war," Reuters, April 5, 2024

Palestinian owner of a mobile phone business
holds phones inside his shop which was
destroyed in an Israeli strike