State of the Gaza Strip Border Crossings 01 – 31 October 2020
As the coronavirus continues to spread in the Gaza Strip with hundreds of cases recorded each passing day, the Israeli authorities continue to impose harsher restrictions under its illegal and inhuman 14-year long closure of the Gaza Strip.
Gaza remains on the brink of a true catastrophe which shall deepen its humanitarian crises especially with the skyrocketing unemployment, poverty and food insecurity rates. The Gaza unemployment rate is 46% (i.e. 211,300 are unemployed), 63% of which is among youth. Also, more than half of the Gaza population lives in poverty as the poverty rate reached 53% according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Meanwhile, more than 62.2% of the Gaza population suffer from food insecurity according to the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Furthermore, the tightened closure restrictions led to a catastrophic deterioration in humanitarian conditions, exhausted the health system, and weakened Gaza’s economic structures. All of these factors negatively reflected on the provision of basic services for at least 2 million Palestinians who live in poor living conditions in the Gaza Strip, classified as the most overpopulated area in the whole world.