GAZA, July 24, 2008 (WAFA) - UNRWA said on Thursday said on Thursday that conditions for Palestinians living in Gaza have deteriorated to unprecedented levels.

According to a report by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), aid granted to Gaza has failed to stop more than half of the population in the territory from sliding below the poverty line, .

'The number of households in Gaza below the consumption poverty line [has] continued to grow, reaching 51.8 per cent in 2007 despite significant amounts of emergency and humanitarian assistance,' the report said.

The UNRWA said that conditions in the occupied West Bank, however, have improved, where the poverty level in 2007 dropped by nearly five per cent from the previous year, to 19.1 per cent.

The lifting of an international embargo on the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank was likely to have been the catalyst towards an improvement in conditions there, UNRWA said.

The UNRWA report, which is drawn from figures provided by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), said that 'the real average unemployment rate in the occupied Palestinian territory [as a whole] remained amongst the highest in the world at 29.5 per cent,' for 2007.

The unemployment rate in Gaza between July and December 2007 'reached an unprecedented high of 45.3 per cent' when adjusted to take into account the number of absentee workers in the last six months of 2007, the report says.

While the unemployment figure in the West Bank was lower, at 25.5 per cent for 2007, the rate is still about double the regional average, the report says.

A.D