Gaza suffering world’s worst-ever economic crisis, UN agency says

Gaza is suffering the world’s worst economic crisis ever recorded, with nine in 10 businesses destroyed and hundreds of thousands of people unemployed, a top UN development agency warns.

The war in Gaza, sparked by the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, onslaught, devastated the territory of two million people before a fragile ceasefire was announced in October 2025.

“The collapse of the economy of Gaza is the world’s most severe economic crisis on record,” says Pedro Manuel Moreno, acting secretary-general of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

“It has wiped out decades of development and generated an acute economic crisis for its people,” he tells reporters in Geneva as the organization releases a new report.

It says 92 percent of Gaza’s “economic establishments have been damaged or destroyed.”

The territory’s daily per capita GDP is $0.58 a day, the report says. Prices are 274 percent higher than in 2022.

Before October 2023, “two out of three Gazans were poor. Today, everyone in Gaza is multidimensionally poor,” says Mutasim Elagraa, UNCTAD’s coordinator for assistance to the Palestinians.

Industrial activity and agricultural production have fallen by 94 percent, with only 1.5 percent of arable land accessible, forcing “total dependence on humanitarian food aid,” Elagraa says.

According to the report, the conflict has destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs, leaving more than 90 percent of Gaza’s working-age population unemployed.

The report also details an economic and financial crisis in the West Bank, citing “reduced access to land and natural resources linked to [Israeli] settlement expansion.”

The Palestinian Authority government has borrowed heavily from local banks, drawn on the Palestinian pension fund and owes money to private contractors, Elagraa says.

The territories risk a “banking collapse,” he warns. The “political and social and humanitarian consequences will be immense.”