The challenges of rebuilding the Gaza Strip are enormous, owing to the scale of destruction caused by Israel’s airstrikes and ground operations over the past two years, two Palestinian diplomats told the Blueprint in recent interviews.
The Palestinian militant group Hamas returned alive 20 hostages after the US-brokered ceasefire was announced on October 9. Of the 251 people Hamas took from Israel on October 7, 2023, 87 were killed. Hamas gunmen also killed 1,200 people in Israel that day. The Israel Defense Forces accidentally killed three Israelis in captivity in Gaza during a military raid. Israel released some 2,000 Palestinian prisoners in the latest swap.
“We have identified 67,000 people by their birth dates, names and gender, who have been killed in Gaza. Of which 75 per cent are children and women,” Palestinian Ambassador to India Abdullah Abu Shawesh said.
The United Nations (UN) has estimated a similar number of deaths, based on data from the Hamas-run health ministry.
Abu Shawesh said heavy machinery is necessary in the enclave (365 square kilometres) of some 2 million people, where thousands of bodies lie underneath the debris.
The United Nations Development Programme has already cleared 81,000 tonnes of rubble, according to news reports, and a joint study by the UN, the European Union and the World Bank, estimated that at least $70 billion, and possibly decades, will be needed to re-create the lost infrastructure.
“We need experts, from the UN and the international community, to come in and make the assessment,” Abu Shawesh said. “Israel should be asked to pay for the damage.”
He added, “The other problem is the unexploded ordnance – which is very dangerous.”
The vast majority of buildings in Gaza have been severely damaged, both interviewees said. Food, drinking water and medicine are in short supply, too. Both interviewees described the deaths of Palestinians as “a genocide” and spoke of malnutrition, disease and life-changing injuries.
“Gaza is flattened, with 85 per cent of devastation that requires the clearing of a massive quantity of rubble,” Palestinian Ambassador to Denmark Manuel Hassassian said. According to UN data, the total amount of debris had increased to 61 million tonnes by the end of October.
The notion of a $70 billion reconstruction cost is conditional and based on the finality of the conflict and the disarmament of Hamas, “which is untenable to date”, Hassassian, a senior Copenhagen-based official of the Palestinian Authority (PA), the government in the West Bank, said, “Until it is resolved, Palestinians will continue to live in destitution.”
Israel launched airstrikes 10 days after the ceasefire was announced.
Hassassian said the United States (US) agreement “is couched in constructive ambiguity, leading to a permanent state of crisis rather than conflict resolution”. Abu Shawesh said the US special representatives to the Middle East have stressed to Israel that the ceasefire should hold.
With the return of hostages, “Israel is ready to move on, continuing to devastate Gaza and facing no accountability for the harm it has already caused”, activists Phyllis Bennis and Khury Petersen-Smith from the Institute of Policy Studies, a think-tank based in Washington, DC, have written in The Nation, a US magazine. “The Trump plan aims to help it do that.”
President Donald Trump’s peace plan involves the setting up of a Gaza International Transition Authority. The body would be tasked with managing economic activity related to the reconstruction and disbursing funds contributed for the redevelopment.
The plan envisions “an internationally managed system” that gives priority to Israeli security and external control over Palestinian sovereignty, Hassassian said. The framework comprises “a temporary committee of Palestinian technocrats” who will handle the daily basic requirements; the international board, chaired by Trump himself to oversee things; and an international security force.
“This is considered a neocolonial project, because it lacks domestic legitimacy, that is designed without PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation under which the PA functions) consultation,” Hassassian said.
The Trump plan is ambiguous on Palestinian statehood, he said when asked about the future of the two-state solution.
Israel and Hamas did not send their respective representatives to a US-Egypt cochaired peace summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on October 13. Trump told the US media in January that postwar Gaza would transform into “a riviera of the Middle East”. Other than what he saw as the real estate potential of the coastal enclave, Trump talked about expelling Palestinians to neighbouring countries. His administration has since walked back on some aspects of that proposal.
“Israel expelled us in 1948 (when the State of Israel was founded). But we are resilient. We will rise stronger from the ashes like the phoenix,” Abu Shawesh, who was born in a camp for the internally displaced in Gaza, said.
That post-war reconstruction is a complex process has been highlighted by French academic Denis Bocquet in his paper on Berlin after World War II, which was published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 2022. In Berlin in 1945, damage assessments and decisions on whether to keep a building were not impartial. It was an active phase of imposing visions of experts and institutions that were already engaged in implementing a precise idea of the city, Bocquet wrote. “Every reconstruction configuration is unique. If the Berlin case can teach only one thing, it is that models should be considered with great care — and even challenged — with regard to their relevance and content.”
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 "Can Gaza rise from rubble?")
