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After more than 15 months of relentless Israeli air and ground assaults on Gaza, many of the tiny Palestinian enclave’s 2 million residents are homeless and scrambling to obtain basic necessities. If last week’s ceasefire holds, experts caution that rebuilding the devastated territory will take decades and cost tens of billions of dollars.
The three-phase ceasefire deal places the reconstruction of Gaza as the final phase, following a permanent end to the war. Dima Toukan, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute, says it’s important to acknowledge that this last phase could be a long way off — or never happen at all.
“The path forward beyond the first phase of the agreement is fraught with challenges and remains unclear,” she says.
The United Nations estimates that $50 billion will be required to rebuild Gaza, which occupies an area about the size of Philadelphia on the Mediterranean coast between Israel and Egypt. Even the rosiest of estimates project it would take a decade. But other predictions are much more dire. A U.N. report issued in September estimates $18.5 billion worth of damage was done to Gaza’s infrastructure from the war’s start through the end of January 2024, and that once a ceasefire is reached, “a return to the 2007–2022 growth trend would imply that it would take Gaza 350 years just to restore GDP to its level in 2022.”
Here are five questions about the enormous reconstruction challenges faced by Gaza.
What is the scope of the destruction?
“At least a million people won’t have homes to return to,” says Shelly Culbertson, a senior researcher at the think tank RAND. Most utilities, such as electricity, sewage, water, and communications, are not working in Gaza, and the vast majority of hospitals and schools have been destroyed.
Somdeep Sen, an associate professor of international development at Roskilde University in Denmark, says, “What we have witnessed is not just the material destruction of Gaza but also the destruction of the very fabric of Palestinian life in the enclave.”n October, a year after the war began, the U.N. said Gaza’s human development index, a statistical measure that summarizes a country’s average human development, was expected to drop to a level not seen since 1955, “erasing over 69 years of progress” there.
Who will pay?
The biggest issue may be the most fundamental one: Where will the money come from? For obvious reasons, Israel is an unlikely source. Meanwhile, neither Egypt nor Jordan has the resources or political will to add much, Sen says.
Instead, wealthy Gulf states such as Qatar may have to step in, he says. Even so, “without a large cohort of donors committed to the long-term recovery of Gaza, reaching [the $50 billion] mark will be difficult,” he says.
Even without offering funding, Israel does have an important role to play, Sen says. “How Israel chooses to implement and interpret the ceasefire agreement and subsequently the nature/extent of its military control over the Gaza Strip will determine how much and how quickly the enclave can recover.”
As for funding, Culbertson, who has done extensive work on the West Bank and Gaza, says the U.S. and European Union are also likely to provide funds.
One key issue is whether Israel continues its “dual use” import restrictions for Gaza on items it deems could be used either for legitimate civilian purposes or to make weapons, Culbertson says. “The list … is fairly wide. It includes many materials necessary for reconstruction, like concrete, timber, rebar.”
What will be the biggest challenges?
Simply clearing debris will be a monumental task. Not only are there massive amounts of rubble to contend with, but it will have to be carefully handled for such things as unexploded ordnance, says Mark Jarzombek, an architectural history professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Jarzombek has studied how cities such as Dresden, Germany — which was gutted by Allied bombing in 1945 — were able to recover after World War II.
War-era buildings were mostly made of brick and wood, he says. “When those were bombed, they left big piles of that stuff,” Jarzombek explains. As a result, postwar Dresden witnessed “brigades of women who would have wheelbarrows and go to the brick piles and then dump them in particular places.”
Not so in Gaza, where buildings are made out of steel and concrete, he says. “In other words, you can’t get just local civilians [to] … take the stuff apart. You need special equipment: You need bulldozers. You need cranes,” Jarzombek says.
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On Jan. 16, following a truce announcement amid the war between Israel and Hamas, a child recovers books from the rubble of a building hit in Israeli strikes the previous night in Jabalia, in the northern Gaza Strip. Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP via Getty Images
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