ISTANBUL
As the Gaza Strip lies in ruins from Israel’s ongoing military offensive, the task of rebuilding the Palestinian enclave will be one of the most formidable reconstruction efforts in modern history.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, relentless Israeli airstrikes and bombardments have decimated Gaza’s infrastructure, leaving its 2.3 million residents facing catastrophic suffering and destruction.
Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 157,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, and reduced to rubble thousands of homes, schools, and hospitals. Israel faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice, while the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants against its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ex-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
Now, following a recently brokered cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas, global attention turns toward the daunting challenge of reconstructing Gaza.
The agreement’s third phase prioritizes rebuilding Gaza under the supervision of several countries and organizations, and experts caution that the road ahead is fraught with complex obstacles – from the logistical nightmare of debris removal to the enormous financial burden of reconstruction.
Scale of destruction
Covering just 360 square kilometers (139 square miles), the Gaza Strip has endured destruction reminiscent of the world’s most devastating wartime events, such as the bombing of Dresden in World War II or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
A damage assessment from the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT) in September reported that two-thirds of all structures in Gaza had sustained damage.
“Those 66% of damaged buildings in the Gaza Strip account for 163,778 structures in total. This includes 52,564 structures that have been destroyed, 18,913 severely damaged, 35,591 possibly damaged structures, and 56,710 moderately affected,” read the report.
The UNOSAT assessment in September had Gaza governorate as the worst affected region, with 46,370 structures impacted, while Gaza City had 36,611 structures damaged, including 8,578 totally destroyed.
A previous UN report in April 2024 estimated that around 370,000 housing units had been damaged by Israeli bombardment, with 79,000 completely destroyed.
Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN special rapporteur on housing, has separately said that more than 60-70% of Gaza’s housing stock has been obliterated. In northern Gaza, this figure skyrockets to 82%.
The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC)-led Shelter Cluster reports that nine out of ten homes in Gaza have been damaged or completely destroyed, alongside critical infrastructure like hospitals, schools, and water facilities.
UNOSAT, in collaboration with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), also found that “approximately 68% of the permanent crop fields in the Gaza Strip exhibited a significant decline in health and density in September 2024.”
An earlier assessment by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in early 2024 found that “between 80% to 96% of Gaza’s agricultural assets had been decimated, including irrigation systems, livestock farms, orchards, machinery and storage facilities.”
Costs, time, and Israel’s blockade
The financial cost of rebuilding Gaza is equally overwhelming.
In September, the Arab States Regional Bureau of the UN Development Program (UNDP) projected the total reconstruction cost at over $40 billion.
The initial recovery phase alone – focused on restoring basic services and infrastructure – is expected to cost between $2 billion and $3 billion, and take three to five years.
UNCTAD, meanwhile, estimated the physical damage to Gaza’s infrastructure by the end of January 2024 at $18.5 billion – a figure seven times larger than Gaza’s entire GDP in 2022.
Rebuilding Gaza, according to various analyses, could take generations.
UN expert Rajagopal has estimated that reconstruction could take up to 80 years under current conditions due to the ongoing occupation and blockades.
Even under an optimistic scenario where Israel allows a five-fold increase in construction materials entering Gaza, the UNDP predicts that housing reconstruction alone would take until 2040.
This estimate does not account for rebuilding hospitals, schools, power plants, and water systems.
Experts agree that Gaza’s reconstruction will be severely hindered by the Israeli blockade, which restricts the entry of essential construction materials.
Shaina Low, a communication adviser for the NRC in Palestine, highlighted the urgency of lifting restrictions on “dual-use” items – materials like timber, cement, and tools.
“We need to unblock bottlenecks in the screening process and ensure that goods are allowed to enter unconditionally,” she told Anadolu.
Safety and mountain of debris
The safety of returning residents poses another serious challenge.
The UN Mine Action Service (UNMAS) estimates that 7,500 tons of unexploded ordnance remain scattered across Gaza, clearing which could take up to 14 years.
Low stressed the importance of safety assessments “because of the risk of unexploded ordnance and also structurally fragile buildings.”
“There needs to be a priority of doing assessments to ensure that buildings are safe, and also informing populations that are returning to their homes of the potential risks,” she said.
On the scale of debris in Gaza, an assessment by the UN Environment Program (UNEP) in August had a figure of 42 million tons of rubble – 14 times greater than the debris from all regional conflicts in the past 16 years combined.
Other UN officials have said an estimated 37 million tons of solid waste has to be cleared in Gaza.
NRC official Low emphasized that rubble and debris removal has to be one of the top priorities, carried out in coordination with clearance of unexploded ordnance.
"This is a process that will take huge efforts and perhaps years to complete. Equipment and fuel must be allowed in to help expedite rubble removal,” she said.
Fadi Shayya, assistant professor of architecture and urbanism at the University of Salford, drew a comparison with the situation after the civil war in Lebanon.
Over there, big companies were engaged to repurpose debris to reclaim land, and they “created an area that’s literally half of the area of the Beirut city center,” said Shayya, who worked on Lebanon’s post-war reconstruction.
- Housing, land, and property rights
Another major issue in the rebuilding of Gaza would be the housing and land rights of its Palestinian residents.
“For example, in multistory apartment buildings, where multiple families lived; the question will be how to ensure that there is enough room for returning families when you don’t have vertical space to house people and how land can be shared equitably,” said Low.
She also pointed to massive shifts in population distribution once Palestinians are permitted to move freely around Gaza.
“Displacement sites that currently exist will probably be emptied out and people will return to their homes – or what’s left of them – or the ruins,” she said.
“That will lead to issues around attempting to identify who needs what, and where they are when there is such a large movement of people.”
Shayya warns that redevelopment could mirror Lebanon’s post-war reconstruction, where companies “could not build on small plots which were inherited historically by many generations.”
To get around that hurdle, the smaller plots were clustered into bigger groups and the owners were given shares, but those were based on the price of the destroyed land, leading to “one of the biggest socioeconomic controversies in Lebanon,” he explained.
Once they were redeveloped, their value went up 10 times, or even 100 times in some cases, but the owners’ share remained at the agreed level, meaning that all the profits went to the companies, Shayya added.
Future of Gaza and Palestine
Questions remain about who will lead Gaza’s reconstruction.
“Will it be the Qataris, the Saudis, the Americans? You have all these different paths intersecting in Gaza,” said Shayya, adding that international funding and internal politics will also be issues to address.
NRC’s Low emphasized that the reconstruction process “must be led by and centered around Palestinians from Gaza, those who have been affected by 15 months of hostilities.”
“The reconstruction process needs to ensure that human rights and humanitarian law are respected and adhered to,” she added.
Shayya also raised concerns about unchecked development, warning that if the reconstruction becomes a free-market endeavor, Gaza could lose its identity, replaced by modern cities that erase its historical and cultural significance.
This, he emphasized, was the version put forward by many people, specifically Israelis “trying to promote their settler colonial vision.”
He asserted that it could be a political project for Palestinians to rebuild Gaza in a way that reflects the new Palestine they envision.
If Gaza is treated as just another construction site, the deeper issues of land ownership and historical belonging will be ignored, he added.
“What was destroyed was not just stone … but an entire social and urban fabric, an entire landscape,” said Shayya.
