UN regional commission tells General Assembly committee that Gaza’s losses reverse decades of development; Israel rejects the report

A senior official of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) told the General Assembly’s Second Committee on 16 October that the economic damage in Gaza has reversed decades of development, and Israel’s representative rejected the report’s account in sharp terms. The exchange took place as the committee considered the UN Secretary-General’s annual report on the economic and social effects of the Israeli occupation on Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and on Arab residents of the occupied Syrian Golan.

What ESCWA presented

Youssef Chaitani, who heads an economic affairs section in ESCWA’s Governance and Prevention Cluster, introduced the report. According to the UN meeting summary, he described the situation as an unprecedented catastrophe and said the ceasefire of October 2025 had held but remained fragile, with Israeli military operations continuing. He called for urgent action and a negotiated two-State solution.

The figures he cited, as recorded in the summary, included more than 73,000 Palestinians killed, nearly 1.9 million people in Gaza, about 90 percent of the population, repeatedly displaced, and a fall of 84 percent in Gaza’s gross domestic product in 2025 compared with 2023. He put unemployment among Palestinians at 46 percent. On the West Bank, he said settler violence was at its highest level since 2006, that more than 9,500 Palestinians were held in Israeli prisons as of March 2026, many without charge or trial, and that 925 movement obstacles were in place as of December 2025. He also referred to plans for 10,000 housing units in East Jerusalem and more than 26,640 in Area C.

Israel’s response

Israel’s representative objected to the report’s account of lost development. He asked what had led to the destruction, said the report does not mention Hamas, and criticised ESCWA in strong terms. The summary does not record any Israeli figures offered in reply.

Positions of member states

The State of Palestine, speaking as an observer, said Israeli violations were growing in scale and that resource exploitation continued with impunity. It said only 3 percent of Gaza’s agricultural land was undamaged and that about 57 million tons of debris remained, and it urged states to ban imports from Israeli settlements. Libya, for the Arab Group, called for accountability, and the Gulf Cooperation Council condemned settlement expansion in the West Bank and the Golan, including the planned E-1 project.

Russia said the attacks of 7 October 2023 were unjustified but that collective punishment of civilians in Gaza was equally so. China affirmed the Palestinian right to statehood. Iran estimated Gaza’s recovery needs at $71.4 billion, and Jordan said 700,000 children in Gaza had lost access to education. Egypt condemned the use of hunger as a weapon of war and pointed to its work on the Sharm el-Sheikh peace plan, while Saudi Arabia recalled that it had set up a global alliance for implementing the two-State solution. These figures are the speakers’ own and were not independently verified in the summary.

Context

The Second Committee deals with economic and financial questions, and its debates produce draft resolutions for the General Assembly rather than binding decisions. On the security side, the UN envoy told the Security Council this week that the Gaza truce was weak along the Yellow Line, as reported in Gaza ceasefire “exists in name only” along the Yellow Line, UN envoy Alakbarov tells the Security Council.