Unemployment rate nearly 80% in Gaza: UN
AFP | Geneva
The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com
The war in Gaza has seen the unemployment rate in the besieged Palestinian territory surge to nearly 80 percent, the United Nations said yesterday.
The UN’s labour agency said the war between Hamas and Israel had “caused loss of jobs and livelihoods on a massive scale”.
Since the war began in October last year, “the unemployment rate in the Gaza Strip has reached a staggering 79.1 percent”, the International Labour Organization said, citing a new brief by the ILO and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. In the West Bank, unemployment has reached 32 percent, the ILO added.
The average unemployment rate across the West Bank and Gaza combined stood at 50.8 percent, it said.
However, these figures “do not account for those who have left the labour force altogether as job prospects proved unattainable”, it said.
“The actual number of those who have lost their jobs is therefore even higher than what the unemployment figures suggest.” The unemployment update comes as the ILO holds its International Labour Conference from June 3-14.
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