Rebuilding the Gaza Strip after Israel's devastating two-year military offensive will cost seven times as much as the combined cost of reconstruction following the three previous conflicts in the Palestinian territory, according to a new report.
A Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment report issued by the World Bank, UN and EU this year said Gaza requires $71 billion to rebuild from the war triggered by Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
A report by Oxfam, the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute and the Palestine Trade Centre released on Thursday said the estimate was seven times the combined cost of rebuilding after the 2008, 2014 and 2021 wars.
Reconstruction after the previous wars was never completed, hindered by Israel's blockade on building materials and equipment, the report said.
“Gaza has never been allowed to finish rebuilding,” said Amitabh Behar, Oxfam International's executive director. “A decade after Israel’s 2014 offensive on Gaza, families were still waiting for homes that never came, and then the bombs returned.
“This is not fate. It is Israel’s illegal occupation and blockade, and the impunity producing the same result, war after war. Every government that funds the rubble but never the reckoning is complicit in it.”
More than 30 reconstruction plans have been produced since the start of the 2023 war, including by the US-led Board of Peace, the UN, the UAE's Al Habtoor group and the Rand Corporation. But nine months into a ceasefire under a US-brokered peace plan, rebuilding has yet to start.
The plan, overseen by the Board of Peace, includes the disarmament of Hamas, the creation of a Palestinian technocratic body to govern Gaza's day-to-day activities, and reconstruction and rehabilitation of the densely populated coastal territory of about 360 square kilometres.
However, the plan has been stalled by disagreement over disarming. Instead, the Board of Peace this month approved a pilot project to set up portable cabins near Rafah, in southern Gaza, for 50,000 Palestinians. That is a fraction of the territory's population of two million, most of whom have been displaced by the war and live in crowded tent encampments.
It is also a stark contrast to the vision of “New Gaza” presented by US President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner in January. It featured skyscrapers, new apartment buildings, parks and sports facilities that would be completed within three years.
The Oxfam report sets out a Palestinian-led five-year recovery plan in co-ordination with the EU and Arab states as well as the UN.
It said housing is the sector most affected by Israel's bombardment, representing half of all the destruction in the strip. Commerce and industry account for 18 per cent of the devastation, and transport nine per cent. Water and sanitation, education, health, energy, agriculture, municipal services, information and communications technology, governance and cultural heritage have all been affected.
“Nearly all schools are destroyed or damaged, universities levelled, thousands of teachers, professors and researchers have been killed and libraries and archives of Palestinian history lost,” the report said.
Unemployment stands at 92 per cent with at least 58,600 households now headed by women because of the high number of men among the 72,000 people killed during the war.
“What was destroyed in Gaza was not merely steel and concrete. Israel eradicated an entire social and economic world, built up over generations, and only Palestinians can rebuild it,” said Mohammad Skaik, Gaza programme manager at the Palestinian Trade Centre.
In his first speech after being elected Hamas leader, Khalil Al Hayya promised that reconstruction efforts would be sped up and called for co-operation by mediators and those involved in the peace talks to exert pressure on Israel to end its occupation of the strip.
