The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported this week that the Israeli occupation forces have killed, in the ongoing genocide war on the Gaza Strip over the past 10 months, around 1.8% of Gaza’s population, 24% of them from the youth category.
This came in a press statement on the occasion of the International Youth Day, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1999 on August 12 of each year.
The Bureau explained that more than 39,000 Palestinians from the Gaza population have been martyred since the start of the Israeli occupation’s aggression on the Strip.
It added that the number of those who fell due to hunger reached 34 martyrs, noting that ‘about 3,500 children are at risk of death due to malnutrition and lack of food.’
It also stated that the number of wounded from Gaza’s population ‘exceeded 95,000, 70% of them women and children, in addition to about 10,000 missing’.
The Central Bureau pointed out that on the eve of the Israeli occupation’s aggression on the Gaza Strip, there were around 5.6 million Palestinians residing in the State of Palestine, including 1.2 million youths (18-29 years) who constitute 22% of the total population.
The Bureau highlighted the displacement of around two million Palestinians from their homes out of the 2.2 million Palestinians who were residing in the Strip on the eve of the war.
In the same context, the Bureau indicated that the number of martyrs in the occupied West Bank reached 620 Palestinians, mostly young people and children.
The Palestinian Central Bureau expected a decline in the estimated growth rate in the Gaza Strip from around 2.7% according to the Bureau’s estimates for 2023 to only around 1% in 2024.
The Bureau stated that the number of martyred students enrolled in higher education institutions in Palestine reached 653 students, 619 of them in the Gaza Strip and 34 in the West Bank, in addition to the martyrdom of 105 employees in higher education institutions in the Gaza Strip.
The Central Bureau, in its statement, referred to the deprivation of 88,000 students in the Gaza Strip of their right to university education.
It also indicated that out of every 100 youths aged 18-29 years, there are 18 who hold a bachelor’s degree or higher according to 2023 data.
The Bureau also addressed unemployment, explaining that it reached 56% in the occupied West Bank in 2023, and 75% in the Gaza Strip in the fourth quarter of the same year, noting that the unemployment rate among young people with an intermediate diploma or higher qualification reached about 91% in the Gaza Strip.
Meanwhile, Israel has sought to turn the ‘cash shortage crisis’ into one of the harshest tools of collective punishment against the people of Gaza amidst the ongoing genocide.
‘For the past two months, I’ve been struggling immensely to obtain money to provide for my family’s basic needs and secure the essentials for living, due to the severe cash shortage in the markets,’ said Bilal Ibrahim to the Palestinian Information Centre (PIC).
Ibrahim confirmed that ‘the economic conditions have become extremely dire for most Palestinian families due to the cash shortage and the difficulty in accessing money, with high fees imposed by money changers’.
He noted that at the beginning of the war on Gaza, the money changers were charging a fee of 1-2% at worst, but this percentage gradually increased, reaching 20% by the end of April this year.
Since the beginning of its aggression on Gaza on October 8, 2023, the Israeli occupation forces have sought to destroy all aspects of life.
High-level political statements have dehumanised the residents of Gaza.
As part of their attempt to exterminate the population or force them to leave, they have employed various means, policies, and procedures to undermine the residents’ ability to survive.
The Al Mezan Centre has confirmed in a recent report that this crisis has become one of the tools used by Israel to cripple the banks’ ability to provide financial services to the public.
This is part of the genocide, with the occupation authorities preventing the necessary cash, especially the Israeli shekel (the main currency in the occupied Palestinian territories), from reaching the banks.
As a result, they have created an unprecedented cash shortage crisis in Gaza.
This cash shortage directly impacts the population, exacerbating daily challenges and preventing them from withdrawing their money from banks, whether it’s salaries, savings, or funds sent by relatives and friends abroad.
Since the start of the Israeli aggression on Gaza, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich stated in a tweet on his X account that he refuses to transfer tax revenues to the Palestinian Authority until further notice.
He also said he would not renew the licenses for banks dealing with Palestinian Authority banks. According to the geographical distribution by the Palestinian Monetary Authority, there are 10 banks, 56 branches and offices, and 84 ATMs operating in Gaza.
In a press statement issued in the first week of May, the Palestinian Monetary Authority noted that there are no official statistics on the partial and total damages inflicted on the banking sector in Gaza.
However, field data indicates that all branches and offices of Palestinian banks in Gaza and Northern Gaza have been out of service since the first day of the aggression.
The Hamas Movement has called on the UN and the international community to send inquiry committees to the Gaza Strip to visit shelters and displacement centres in order to investigate Israeli claims against them.
In a statement on Saturday, Hamas called for necessarily exposing Israel’s ongoing war crimes in Gaza and enforce the resolutions and conventions intended to protect civilians in wartime in order to end the genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza.
Hamas strongly denounced the remarks that were made by British foreign secretary David Lammy regarding the massacre that had been committed at dawn Saturday against innocent displaced people in al-Tabin School, in which he called on Hamas to stop endangering civilians.
Hamas called Lammy’s remarks an ‘appaling alignment with the occupation’s false narrative about the alleged use of schools and displacement centres for military purposes’, adding that Israel’s claims in this regard are intended to justify its targeting of civilians.
Hamas also decried his remarks as a ‘blatant attempt to absolve his country of any legal, political and moral responsibility for providing the Israeli occupation regime with political and military support to continue its brutal genocide in the Gaza Strip’.
‘In their reports, several humanitarian groups, the UN, its organisations and international rapporteurs have documented that the terrorist occupation government has committed during more than 10 months of horrific genocide the most atrocious crimes known to humanity against unarmed civilians in cities, camps, schools, hospitals and shelters,’ Hamas underlined.
‘The number of martyrs has neared 40,000 people and over two-thirds of them are women,’ Hamas pointed out.
The Movement called on secretary Lammy, his government and Western governments spearheaded by the US administration to back down from this path that makes them accomplices in Israel’s war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide in the Gaza Strip.
In another statement, Hamas described the Israeli occupation army’s claim that a number of civilians who were martyred in the school massacre in al-Daraj neighbourhood were members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad as ‘misleading and false’.
‘Out of over 100 civilians cold-bloodedly killed in the al-Tabin School massacre, the occupation army announced a list of 19 martyrs whom it claimed to have been resistance activists in a bid to justify its heinous crime after it received widespread international condemnation,’ Hamas said.
Hamas stressed that there was no one gunman among the people who were martyred in Saturday’s massacre, adding that all of them were civilians who were targeted while performing the Fajr (dawn) prayer.
Hamas affirmed that all the people in the Israeli list have nothing to do with any political or military activity, adding that they are civil servants, university teachers, religious figures and children.
