Are Orphans and Unemployment a Driver of Hamas?: Israel vs Palestinian Unemployment Rates
The Economic Impact of the Conflict on Israelis and Palestinians
The Israeli unemployment rate is 3.40%, while the Palestinian unemployment rate in the West Bank is 13% and 45% in Gaza. Gaza has the highest unemployment rate in the world.
“Roughly 30,000 Gazans lost jobs because of last summer’s July-August conflict, according to Frode Mauring, the U.N. Development Program’s special representative for Gaza and the West Bank. The war cost Gaza $200 million in economic losses, causing the Palestinian economy to contract for the first time since 2006, the International Monetary Fund said in late January.”
Source: The source for these unemployment numbers are the OECD Data (Q3 2022) and World Bank (2022).
The sharp rise in Palestinian unemployment is universally viewed as resulting from Israeli policies of closure and movement restrictions. The economic situation in Gaza has been devastated by an air, sea, and land blockade that Israeli officials say was designed to keep Gaza indefinitely on “the brink of collapse.”
For more information on Gaza, see this.
Considering nobody can find a job in Gaza and Israel has been illegally bombing their water treatment and power plants for decades, I don’t think any half-wit would conclude they might lash out in violence on occasion. Then we feign surprise when some lone wolves killed illegal settlers in revenge and outrage on Oct 7th, as if it was based on “antisemitism” and not from living a slow Zionist-inflicted death by a thousand cuts in a suffocating, hopeless concentration camp where your dad got shot dead by a sniper for nonviolently protesting and your mom died in a “revenge bombing.”
The al-Qassam spokesperson, Abu Obaida, stated that “85% of the members of our force are orphans of the wars of the past few decades. Their parents and family members all died in the war. They have no relatives, no houses, no studies, no jobs, and no future. All they have is endless bombings and a dark and underground life. Now, these children have grown up and become our death warriors.” (1,2,3)
