India, April 6 -- Each morning, Mahmoud Shamiya walks to the Mediterranean shoreline, not for leisure but for lack of anything else to do.

A university graduate who once imagined a future as a teacher, he now spends his days searching for water, firewood, and fragments of routine in a life stripped of purpose. His story is no longer an exception. It is the defining condition of a generation.

Across Gaza, unemployment has surged to nearly 80 percent, one of the highest rates ever recorded globally. Young people, who make up the overwhelming majority of the population, find themselves locked out of work, education, and mobility, trapped in a territory where economic life has all but ceased to function.

What is unfolding is not merely a ...