GENEVA, Oct. 4 -- Divide everything Gaza produced last year by everyone who lives there, and each person is left with the equivalent of 58 cents a day. That is not an austerity target or a worst-case projection. It is the number the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development put on paper Thursday, and by UNCTAD's own account, no economy anywhere has been measured falling this far.

Pedro Manuel Moreno, UNCTAD's acting secretary-general, called it "the most severe economic crisis ever recorded" when the agency presented its findings at its 73rd session. Gaza's per-person economic output, the report found, has dropped to just 17 percent of what it was in 2022, before the war that a United Nations commission of inquiry and a growing ...