At least 61 percent of jobs have been lost in Gaza and an estimated 24 percent in West Bank due to the ongoing Israeli war against Hamas, the International Labour Organization (ILO) said on Monday.
“At least 61 percent of employment, equivalent to 182,000 jobs, has been lost in the Gaza Strip since the start of the current Israel-Hamas war,” a new ILO report read. “The conflict in Gaza is also having a spillover effect in the West Bank, where an estimated 24 percent of employment, equivalent to 208,000 jobs, has been lost over the same period.”
The new report is the ILO’s first bulletin on the impact of the current Israel-Hamas conflict on the labour market and livelihoods in the Territory.
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza has severe implications on the labour market, employment prospects and livelihoods in the enclave and across the entire Occupied Palestinian Territory, the bulletin stated.
The ILO prepared the bulletin in partnership with the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), based on data primarily sourced from the PCBS Labour Force Survey. The ILO and PCBS have established a Labour Market Observatory to track the status of Palestinian labour market indicators as the situation unfolds and issue further bulletins on a monthly basis.
“Our initial assessment of the repercussions of the tragic current crisis on the Palestinian labour market have yielded extremely worrying results, which will only worsen if the conflict continues,” ILO Regional Director for Arab States Ruba Jaradat said.
“The ongoing hostilities not only represent an enormous humanitarian crisis in terms of loss of lives and basic human needs, they also represent a social and economic crisis which has caused vast damage to jobs and businesses, with reverberations that will be felt for many years to come,”
Jaradat reiterated the call by the ILO Governing Body in its current session to promptly enable and facilitate, consistent with international humanitarian law, full, rapid, safe, and unhindered humanitarian access for the sustainable delivery of humanitarian aid to civilians throughout Gaza.
“We are working tirelessly with government, worker and employer partners, other UN agencies and humanitarian actors to provide immediate assistance to impacted workers and businesses.” Jaradat further said. “We will also support them in the longer term towards collecting vital labour market information and recovering jobs and enterprises, combined with social protection initiatives, to the utmost extent of our mandate,”
The ILO bulletin also referred that the entire neighbourhoods in Gaza have been destroyed, infrastructure has been severely damaged, businesses have closed, large-scale internal displacement has occurred, and the lack of water, food and fuel are crippling economic activity.
Even prior to the current conflict, the situation in the blockaded Gaza Strip was particularly dire. Gazans have been long suffering with persistently high rates of poverty, vulnerability and one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, which stood at 46.4 percent in the second quarter of 2023.
ILO three-phase response Programme to Gaza Crisis
The ILO has prepared a three-phase response programme to address the impact of the crisis on the Palestinian labour market and livelihoods.
The first phase, which is already underway, relies on relief works. It includes providing immediate assistance such as emergency livelihood support schemes to Palestinian workers. The workers include Gazans who, having lost their jobs inside Israel after the outbreak of the current conflict, are stranded in the West Bank.
The ILO has mobilised its internal resources and already channelled around $1.1 million towards emergency relief interventions and preliminary data collection. The UN agency is also working on allocating further internal resources to implement its response plan.
The second stage – or review phase – entails data collection and impact analysis in order to help plan, prioritise, and fine-tune interventions, ILO added.
As for the final, recovery phase, it will focus on job creation through employment intensive infrastructure recovery and other means, as well as on social protection measures and recovery of jobs and businesses.
The ILO will hold a meeting for development partners on the sidelines of the ongoing 349th Session of the Governing Body. The meeting will witness the launch of an appeal for $20 million to fund implementation of the ILO’s entire three-phase response plan.
