The war in Gaza continues unabated well past its first month, leaving behind massive losses of life and infrastructure damage and forcing displacements of unprecedented scale. The unfolding humanitarian emergency is also a development crisis. The continuation of the war comes with huge and compounding costs to all Palestinians, not only Gazans, now and in the near and medium-term future.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) are a releasing on 9 November 2023, a joint rapid assessment entitled ‘The Gaza War: Expected Socio-Economic Impacts on the State of Palestine.’

UNDP and ESCWA have specific mandates by the United Nations to work to improve the economic and social conditions of the Palestinian people, and to substantively report on those conditions, respectively.

The assessment compiles data and employs various analytical tools, including rapid satellite damage appraisals, night-time light satellite imagery and Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) economic modelling, to simulate the impacts of the war in Gaza on the entire occupied Palestinian territory at the one-month mark and for two-month and three-month scenarios — it examines:

1) impact on lives;

2) buildings and infrastructure damages;

3) health status;

4) poverty and food insecurity;

5) impacts on jobs and businesses; and

6) macro-economic performance.