After the ceasefire, what will it take to rebuild Gaza?

Israeli control over reconstruction

The last time Gaza faced a conflict anything close to the current war was in 2014 when, according to estimates at the time, at least $4.5 billion in damage was done to the enclave, compared to the current $18.5 billion assessment now.

In the immediate six years after that conflict, about six million tonnes of material entered the strip as part of rehabilitation efforts. Now devastation is far greater and Israel has shown an even deeper reluctance to let in aid.

Reconstruction after 2014 showed how slowly international bureaucracy can move, with disbursal of promised donor funding proving painfully slow.

“By December 2016, so three years after the war, only 50 per cent of the $3.5 billion earmarked for reconstruction had actually been disbursed. They’d dispersed only $670 million, or 17 per cent, of the recovery needs allocated to finance priority needs,” said Ms Erekat.

“When we talk about 50 per cent of funds disbursed in three years, we’re talking about the first level of disbursement, money transferred from the donor’s budget."

One major reason for the slow response was the Israel-led Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism, she said.

“A lot of the delay was due to the GRM, which was set up to be a triparty mechanism, co-ordinating between the Israelis, the UN, the World Bank and the Palestinian Authority. But at the end of the day, the final decision was always Israel's, they restricted how much construction material could go in, whether it was concrete, whether it was iron, whether it was agriculture material, they decided what they approve and what they don't approve."

Before the 2014 war, which left entire neighbourhoods in ruins, Israel blocked most concrete imports into Gaza, claiming the material was being used by Hamas to build defensive structures. So vast was the devastation from that conflict, and previous wars, that the UN Development Programme said about 2.5 million tonnes of rubble littered the enclave.

At present, the World Bank estimates there is about 25 million tonnes of rubble in Gaza.

The GRM created a spiralling bureaucracy under which thousands of items were considered by Israel to be potentially of military use, or “dual use”.

Israel frequently changed what was listed as dual use and inspection times for components and material entering the strip – often more than 45 days – added additional requirements such as dedicated warehouses.

Once in Gaza, materials had to be strictly accounted for and monitored in dedicated facilities, leading to a small industry of staff working with the UN and the Palestinian Authority to manage the system, and eating into the aid budget.

David Harden, former assistant administrator for USAID’s Bureau for Democracy, who worked on 2014 reconstruction in Gaza, said: “Let’s say you have the money – so you have to get the bulldozers ... and a load of cement in – are the Israelis going to allow that? They’re going to have an opinion on this ... because the rebar and cement are going to have to cross into Gaza [through the] port, Rafah or Kerem Shalom ... the Israelis control everything else.

“Who is going to import the rebar? This is after we’ve cleared everything out and there’s money and stability. Who’s going to import the cement and how is this going to be monitored so that it’s not being used to build tunnels again?

“Because legitimately or illegitimately, the Israelis are going to be worried about that and the Americans – especially if Hamas isn’t defeated. You’re going to want to monitor that and that’s going to create bureaucracy, delays, confusion and debate and then you’re just starting.”

The bureaucracy required by the GRM meant more ambitious projects were sometimes avoided, Oxfam reported, due to the additional layers of complexity.

But now, more complex projects – such as desalination plants – are what Gaza needs more than ever.

Rebuilding water infrastructure, while not as expensive as housing reconstruction, will be a complex undertaking, including evaluating damage to hundreds of kilometres of pipelines and repairing treatment plants.

And Ms Erekat said whatever comes next must be significantly improved from a prewar Gaza when the strip was already suffering from severe water and power shortages.

“In addition to a ceasefire, before we think of rebuilding Gaza, there needs to be a lifting of the blockade,” said Amira Aker, a postdoctoral fellow at Canada’s Laval University, who specialises in epidemiology and environmental health.

Before the war, nearly 98 per cent of Gaza’s water was deemed undrinkable, she said.

Gaza acquires its water from three main sources: aquifers, surface water and desalination plants.

“Aquifers should be the number one water source but are not, because Gaza is the most densely populated area on Earth and overpopulation leads to overconsumption, because 80 per cent of Gaza’s population are refugees so, of course, there’s overpopulation.”

Gaza’s aquifers are now highly stressed, infiltrated by seawater and sewage, making well-water extraction precarious.

“In terms of desalination plants, the ones that existed before October 7 were already overcapacity and several needed maintenance because they were destroyed in previous wars,” Ms Aker said. "They couldn’t be maintained because material wasn’t allowed to come into Gaza by Israel.

“Most sewage, meanwhile, is dumped into the Mediterranean, or goes on the land and a lot of that goes into the aquifers, further contaminating what little water is left."

There are two main reasons for this.

“This is due to corruption in Gaza but also because Israel always targets infrastructure and then allows very few materials in for fixing it,” she said.

Experts say the challenges ahead, if not properly managed, could resemble the reconstruction of Iraq, which, for years, trailed behind the requirements of the population, fuelling bitter political divides, protests and armed rebellion.

In Iraq, serious problems fed into a system of dysfunction that made it hard for reconstruction planners to prioritise. The economy needed to rebuild rapidly as people faced hunger and poverty after 12 years of US-led sanctions.

There was also an optimistic tone among US and British politicians about how quickly Iraq would become secure and stable after Saddam Hussein’s regime was toppled. What quickly emerged was a crime wave and an insurgency aiming to topple the new political order.

“Until you have an end of conflict, you can’t really do anything ... but there has to be enough stability on the street – between Israeli troops and Hamas – but you also need enough calm to avoid a breakdown in law and order, or clan rivalry,” Mr Harden said.

“Let’s say Hamas is not in the picture but you have a chaotic security situation on the ground, you still can’t rebuild.”

As in Gaza, the requirements to quickly move the economy in Iraq, including lighting streets and markets, ensuring banks functioned, and factories and workshops were humming, all needed electricity.

This needed billions of dollars, power plants and electricity grid repair, taking years. But as the economy recovered through reconstruction funds, demand for electricity started to rise sharply, leading to blackouts and problems at water and sewage treatment plants.

In essence, the recovery of the economy outpaced growth in the electricity supply, leading to power cuts, which stalled economic growth.

All the while, discontent made it hard to quell the appeal of armed groups, which drained reconstruction project funds on security costs.

Meanwhile, Iraq’s interim government was riven with factional rivalry, much as Gaza’s political system once was, when Hamas and the Ramallah-based Fatah party fought in the strip in 2007.

Today, there is uncertainty over who will run Gaza, with the current Palestinian Authority government sworn in on March 31 and Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa, an economist, saying one of his priorities will be the “reconstruction” of the Palestinian territories.

“With all due respect to Abu Mazen, it's really time for him to move on,” Mr Feierstein said, referring to PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s government.

In the meantime, it is imperative to get aid flowing into Gaza – to “stabilise” the situation for millions of Palestinians in need of food, water and shelter, he said.

“And then hope that in 2025, we can begin to actually make progress.”

Clearing the rubble

As policymakers grapple with these questions, reconstruction will involve the colossal challenge of moving rubble, potentially toxic industrial material, bodies and unexploded bombs (UXO) something that plagued the rebuilding of Mosul, Iraq, after the war on ISIS.

Ms Aker said contamination from building materials within the debris itself will be a major issue, especially if asbestos was used, as it is in Egypt. Then the issue of waste comes in – whether human or in terms of bodies.

“The number of bodies, be it those that have been buried anywhere right now, or those exhumed by Israeli military tanks, or mass graves, or just bodies lying around everywhere, which need to be buried appropriately but will also be within the rubble we bring up. How will that be taken care of?” Ms Aker asked.

Mr Harden agreed, saying the rubble would be toxic, contain human remains and a lot of UXO that will have to be mapped and disposed of safely and transparently.

“If you have some UXO near a school, or a water site, or a sewage plant, you can’t do anything until you remove the rubble and UXO and you need specialised teams to remove those UXOs. Once you’ve essentially diffused it, then you have to dispose of it. Israelis are going to have a view on that, the UN is going to have a view on that, the US is going to have a view on that."

Mr Harden said Gaza is now essentially a zone of risk, because even the most modern weapons have a “failure rate”, where some don’t detonate and pose danger to farmers, reconstruction workers and civilians searching through rubble of their homes.

“There's probably tens of thousands of UXOs, so we have to figure out where each one is ... then defuse it and remove it and make sure these things are done in a way that is not used later by Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad or anyone else and all this stuff is extremely complicated. And it’s not even reconstruction."

The need to 'build back better'

For 17 years, two thirds of Gaza's population lived below the poverty line, with the strip's GDP growing by 1 per cent over the same period.

Today, the population is poorer, more insecure and lacks access to basic infrastructure needed for survival. Between 50 and 60 per cent of Gaza's structures have been completely destroyed, including schools, hospitals and universities.

Rami Alazzeh, a UN Conference on Trade and Development economist, believes in the idea of “building back better” for a more secure and ultimately prosperous Gaza.

“Since 2007, Gaza has been looked at as a humanitarian case and not part of the development agenda,” he said. “While humanitarian needs need to be met as a priority, it’s time to put Gaza back on the development agenda.”

Gaza has plenty to benefit from, Mr Alazzeh said, given its location and natural resources, as well as its human resources.

“Gaza cannot be under blockade under reconstruction and the economy in the West Bank and Gaza should be unified,” he said.

These aspirations, Mr Harden said, tie into a longer-term hope that a viable Palestinian state can exist alongside Israel.

“Is there a two-state solution or a definitive trajectory towards a Palestinian state? Is the PA well involved, well received or broken and corrupt? Is there an Arab multinational force or UN umbrella on the top of this or not? Because I don’t think people are going to invest unless there’s a pathway towards a Palestinian state,” he said.

Regardless of what happens in the coming years, Ms Erekat said, surviving Gazans – in addition to losing so much and facing so much trauma – have to regain something that, for now, remains intangible: their heritage.

“When we talk about reconstruction, we can probably visualise it in the physical sense but what about rebuilding history? Rebuilding memory, rebuilding the heritage sites that have been destroyed? What about the artefacts that have been looted? There were around four main museums in Gaza and 11 in total, because it has such a rich history that is over 5,000 years old. There are artefacts in the sea of Gaza. Gazans would actually find these artefacts in the shallow waters off the coast and they were put in museums and so forth.

“You have to have the memory of the social fabric," she said. "You have the spaces, the people's spaces and personal lives that have been completely destroyed or looted. How do you rebuild that?”