Gaza could be “uninhabitable” in less than five years if current economic trends continue, according to a new United Nations report.The report released on Tuesday by the UN Conference on Trade and Development points to the eight-year economic blockade of Gaza as well as the three wars there over the past six years. Last year’s Israeli war on Gaza displaced half a million people and left parts of the strip destroyed. The war “has effectively eliminated what was left of the middle class, sending almost all of the population into destitution and dependence on international humanitarian aid,” the new report says.Gaza’s GDP dropped 15 percent last year, and unemployment reached a record high of 44 percent. Seventy-two percent of households are food insecure.The wars have shattered Gaza’s ability to export and produce for the domestic market and left no time for reconstruction, the report says. It notes that Gaza’s “de-development,” or development in reverse, has been accelerated. Israel and Egypt have maintained a blockade of Gaza since the armed group Hamas seized control of the territory in 2007. This new report, from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) details that up to 17,000 Palestinians structures in the West Bank are currently under Israeli demolition orders. And because of these demolition orders, the Palestinian residents who live there do so under a chronic state of uncertainty and threat. Imagine living on land that your family has farmed for generations, tending herds that have grazed in fields that have been under heredity ownership for centuries. But now, because your nation has been illegally occupied, the interlopers who impose their laws and rule through an iron fist or detention without trial declare your farm buildings to be illegal, your home to be demolished.More than 11,000 Israeli demolition orders are currently awaiting implementation in a huge swathe of the occupied West Bank. While only a minority of the orders issued are executed, these orders do not expire and leave affected households in a state of chronic uncertainty and threat. And where the orders are implemented, they have resulted in displacement and disruption of livelihoods, the entrenchment of poverty and increased aid dependency. And that land you have farmed and the house where you lived are now ready to be cleared turned into lands where new illegal Israeli colonies might be built for people who have moved to Israel to satisfy the terms of their Jewish religion. When it comes to planning applications for developing properties owned by Palestinians, only 1 per cent of applications are actually approved. In effect, Israel is slowly applying the same principle on the West Bank as it has forcibly expedited in the Gaza Strip making Palestine unliveable for Palestinians.
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