UN’s New Report Warns Gaza Is Running Out of Time
Economic Extinction?
(21WIRE) – The latest report from the UN Trade and Development Agency (UNCTAD) reads like a verdict: the Palestinian economy is in freefall, and time is running out. What might look like another UN document is, in fact, a blueprint of devastation, one that UNCTAD’s Secretary-General Rebeca Grynspan delivered with unmistakable urgency, warning that an entire society is being pushed past the threshold where recovery is still possible. Her words carried the weight of someone bearing witness to a collapse so vast it threatens to erase decades of human progress in a single sweep.
The Palestinian economy isn’t failing; it is being dismantled.
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DOCUMENT: UNCTAD report on the developments in the economy of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), with note by Rebeca Grynspan, the Secretary-General of UN Trade and Development – UNCTAD. [Click Here to read]
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The report reveals a collapse so severe it defies the usual language of downturns and recessions. By late 2024, the Palestinian economy had shrunk to just 70 percent of its 2022 size, reversing decades of progress almost overnight. Gaza’s economy has been gutted to a fraction, 16.7 percent of its former output, with average annual income plummeting to a staggering $161 per person. UNCTAD estimates that Gaza has lost nearly seven decades of human development in a single year. These aren’t just numbers; they are the contours of a society being pushed back into conditions the modern world vowed never to tolerate.
Walk through the report, and the destruction unfolds like an inventory of erasure: hospitals mangled, schools shattered, water systems collapsed, farmland razed, fishing boats crushed, and entire neighbourhoods wiped from maps. Even before the latest conflict, Gaza’s blockade and the labyrinth of restrictions across the West Bank had already squeezed economic life into a narrow corridor. When the shock came, it did not disrupt the economy; it obliterated it.
And then comes the financial chokehold. Under the archaic clearance system, revenues owed to the Palestinian government were withheld, amounting to nearly half of what would have been the 2024 budget. Civil servants went unpaid, essential services stalled, and public systems began to seize up. UNCTAD doesn’t mince words: this is the worst fiscal collapse in the Palestinian Authority’s history, the kind that unravels institutions from within. Without those funds, hospitals crumble, sanitation collapses, and social safety nets vanish.
The labour market has collapsed alongside everything else. In Gaza, unemployment has soared to around 80 percent. The private sector, once the fragile backbone of daily survival, has been reduced to rubble. Families who once depended on fishing, agriculture, small workshops, construction, and trade are now confronting the void: no jobs, no salaries, no markets, no materials, no mobility. Food insecurity is spiralling, clean water is scarce, diseases are spreading, and displacement has become a brutal constant. The crisis is so widespread that it no longer feels like an economic phenomenon, but a systemic unravelling of the basic conditions that allow a society to function.
At the same moment the report landed, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, weighed in, amplifying the alarm. Posting on X, she declared that the destruction revealed in the UNCTAD findings “erased 69 years of human development,” describing the calamity not as war, but as “genocide.” She called the collapse “the worst economic collapse ever recorded.” Albanese didn’t frame this simply as a catastrophe; she framed it as a moral indictment. For her, the UNCTAD report is not an academic exercise; it is evidence. Evidence that the structures of life in Gaza, households, institutions, and social networks, have been systematically dismantled under conditions she views as constituting crimes against humanity.
When Grynspan presented the findings, her tone was measured but unavoidably urgent. She spoke not of setbacks, but of thresholds, points of no return. The ceasefire, she said, provides a narrow window, but one that could slam shut without decisive action. Rebuilding Gaza alone is projected to cost at least $70 billion, a figure so outsized it makes reconstruction seem like an insurmountable task. Even in the best-case scenario of massive international support and rapid growth, it would take years just to climb back to pre-war levels, which were already marked by chronic fragility.
VIDEO: UNCTAD – Press Conference: 2025 Report on developments with Pedro Manuel Moreno, UN Trade and Development, Deputy Secretary General Mutasim Elagraa, UN Trade and Development, Coordinator, UNCTAD Assistance to the Palestinian People Rami Alazzeh, UN Trade and Development, Economist (Source: Webtv UN)
The West Bank tells a parallel story: economic indicators have been knocked back nearly two decades. Entire sectors are regressing under the weight of movement restrictions, investor flight, and the suffocation of public finance. Development is not stalling, it is rewinding.
UNCTAD’s report and its fallout avoid sensationalism on paper, but in reality, their implications are explosive. Recovery is not just a matter of aid deliveries or reconstruction pledges; it hinges on structural choices. The release of withheld revenues, the easing of movement restrictions, lifting the blockade, reopening trade routes, and the injection of rapid, substantial financial assistance are not optional; they are prerequisites for preventing long-term immiseration. Without these conditions, any talk of recovery is little more than diplomatic filler.
What emerges from this analysis is a portrait of a society on the edge of irreversible decline. The risk is no longer that Palestinians will endure temporary hardship; it is that the foundations of daily life, institutions, infrastructure, livelihoods, and human capital will decay beyond repair. The danger is no longer a temporary crisis, but a generational slide into despair.
Albanese’s concluding words on social media were stripped of rhetoric and delivered like a challenge:
BREAKING: A new UN report finds that Israel’s assault on Gaza – with the destruction of health care, education, infrastructure, even the banking system – has erased 69 years of human development, marking the worst economic collapse ever recorded.
This is not war: it is genocide. pic.twitter.com/9fGRlFOdRJ— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) November 25, 2025
With that, she confronted the world with a question: not whether to react, but whether it will refuse to act. Her statement was not a plea. It was a test of whether the global community treats this report as just another entry in an archive of tragedies, or as the moment it decides that passivity is a choice that deepens injury and cements collapse.
The choices made by governments, institutions, and civil society over the coming days will determine whether recovery begins now or whether this collapse becomes the new normal.
~Freddie Ponton - 21st Century Wire
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