Media coverage
Al Jazeera Net — Midan · 2021-06-24
The article examines the political and financial obstacles hindering Gaza’s reconstruction after the latest Israeli war, amid the accumulated destruction of previous wars and the failure of earlier reconstruction mechanisms, especially the trilateral arrangement among the Palestinian Authority, Israel, and the United Nations. It also highlights the roles of Egypt, Qatar, and international actors, as well as the dispute over who will manage reconstruction funds under the Israeli blockade, Palestinian division, and the international stance toward Hamas.
The article examines the political and financial obstacles hindering Gaza’s reconstruction after the latest Israeli war, amid the accumulated destruction of previous wars and the failure of earlier reconstruction mechanisms, especially the trilateral arrangement among the Palestinian Authority, Isr…
No sooner had the war between Israel and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) come to an end on 21 May after a round of fighting that lasted nearly two weeks, than talk began about the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, where Israeli warplanes had left thousands of residents’ homes razed to the ground.
The talk surrounding that process drew the attention of the young man Mohammad Dahman, 33. Although he was not directly affected by the latest war, his tragedy goes back seven years before it, when his family lost two apartments in the Italian Complex Tower, which Israeli aircraft destroyed in the 2014 Gaza war. At the time, the tower was one of the distinctive architectural landmarks in al-Nasr neighborhood (west of Gaza), housing a residential complex of 48 housing units, in addition to a commercial complex occupying three floors and containing a number of shops and offices.
At that time, the Dahman family was displaced along with fifty families who had lived in the Italian Complex Tower, and among the residents of more than 1,000 housing units destroyed in 2014 and not rebuilt to this day, even though Italy had in fact provided the funds to rebuild the famous tower that bears its name. The reason for the faltering reconstruction of some 171,000 homes destroyed in the 2014 war is that the process is governed by a tripartite agreement between the Palestinian Authority, Israel, and the United Nations. This agreement guarantees the facilitation of the passage of construction materials into Gaza while ensuring, first and foremost, that Israeli security concerns are addressed, by having the international community impose a monitoring system to oversee reconstruction efforts, as well as to ensure the confidence of donor parties.
In addition to the stagnation in Gaza’s reconstruction process imposed by the Palestinian division, that mechanism failed and did not contribute to any tangible reconstruction in Gaza. Rather, it led to the institutionalization of the Israeli blockade, through which the occupying state imposed strict control over the entry of goods into the Strip and refused to supply it with many construction materials that the occupation considered usable by the resistance for military purposes, within what is known as “dual-use materials.”
“Mيدان” revisited the memories with Mohammad Dahman, going back seven years to when his home was demolished. He said: “We left with only the clothes we were wearing, and years have passed while we try to rebuild our lives, whereas the paths of normal life have come to a halt. Until now, I have not been able to marry and establish a home independent from my family.” The young Palestinian’s suffering is compounded by the fact that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) stopped paying rent allowances for the tower’s residents several years ago. In light of the difficult conditions in the Gaza Strip, paying monthly rent of no less than $200 has become an economically burdensome matter for the Dahman family and the hundreds displaced by the recurring wars.
But while thousands of residents of the besieged Gaza Strip were searching for stable housing to replace their destroyed homes, the Israeli occupation state launched its latest military operation on the Strip last May, making matters worse and placing Gaza’s approximately two million residents before new suffering that added thousands of newly destroyed homeowners to a long waiting list whose members await a genuine reconstruction process in Gaza.
Over the course of more than a decade, the Gaza Strip has witnessed four military confrontations with Israel (2008, 2012, 2014, 2021), interspersed with sporadic military attacks, all of which caused the demolition of yet more housing units and facilities owned by the Strip’s residents. In the latest assault, Israeli warplanes completely destroyed around 1,800 housing units, while partially destroying around 16,800 units, in addition to destroying five large residential towers in central Gaza City alongside 74 government facilities.
Among those whose homes were destroyed in this war, Alaa Shamali lost his apartment in the Anas bin Malik building on al-Yarmouk Street (central Gaza). Although the man sees everything related to reconstruction as “suspended in the unknown,” as he told “Mيدان,” he hopes the process will move quickly and that he will be compensated for his home, which was bombed last May. Alaa added to “Mيدان”: “There are restrictions by the occupation that may add years of waiting between the bombing and reconstruction. For any affected person, this period is full of details, beginning with the search for new means of living, from furnishing a home and securing rent allowance to rebuilding a house anew.”
To meet immediate recovery needs and repair key facilities over the next three months, the United Nations launched an emergency appeal for $95 million, and also allocated $22.5 million in aid to provide relief and deliver basic services to people such as healthcare and water. Meanwhile, many countries set about announcing financial pledges to support reconstruction efforts in Gaza, including Egypt and Qatar—each of which promised to provide $500 million in aid—in addition to the European Union, the United States, Germany, and Britain.
Gaza is also witnessing efforts to establish what is called the National Reconstruction Council, an independent council composed of governmental and private bodies. Osama Kahil, head of the Contractors’ Union in Gaza, stresses that no full vision of the reconstruction process has taken shape thus far, as the relevant Palestinian bodies are working to form the council so that it becomes the official and international gateway for reconstruction operations on the ground. The most important point agreed upon in principle is that all materials will be imported from Egypt, after which experienced Palestinian companies will undertake the removal of rubble and the construction of new buildings. Kahil added to “Mيدان”: “Our companies are the ones that carry out reconstruction projects; they are capable of doing so, and their efforts would solve the unemployment problem, whose rate exceeds 50 percent.”
A group of workers enjoyed the taste of “al-barad,” the iced popular drink beloved by Gazans, served to them by Kazem, owner of the most famous ice cream shop in the Gaza Strip, before they returned to continue the work of removing the rubble of al-Shorouk Tower, which Israel bombed in its latest war on Gaza.
These workers, with their well-known Sinai keffiyehs, seemed to be strangers to the place. They were Egyptians who had arrived in Gaza days earlier with their machinery and engineering equipment as part of the Egyptian technical crews participating in the removal of rubble from destroyed buildings. They were the first to set foot in the Gaza Strip after the war, following instructions issued by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi “to contribute to the removal of debris and the rubble of demolished homes and towers as part of alleviating the suffering of the Strip’s citizens and rapidly restoring life to normal,” according to an official Egyptian statement.
The Egyptian regime did not stop there. On 18 May, it announced the provision of $500 million for the reconstruction of Gaza, followed by official and popular Egyptian rhetoric described as positive and unusual toward Hamas and the Gaza Strip. The change in the Egyptian position is due to a set of shifts in the Arab stance toward Israel following the signing of normalization agreements between the Gulf states and Israel last year—shifts that raised Egyptian fears of a reduction in its regional role in the Palestinian cause. Egypt therefore moved quickly to restore its role as a vital mediator between the Palestinians and Israelis, and through its active mediation in the ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel.
If we take a quick look at the Egyptian role after the Israeli war on Gaza in 2009, during which the late Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak called for allowing in the materials needed to rebuild Gaza, we find that Cairo hosted the Gaza reconstruction conference in the city of Sharm el-Sheikh, where international donors at the time pledged more than four billion dollars, despite the role Mubarak’s own regime played in the blockade of Gaza. As for the 2012 war, immediately after it ended, the late Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi sent construction materials and equipment to Gaza through the Rafah border crossing, purchased with Qatari funds, as Doha donated $254 million, and those efforts were considered the first step in implementing major reconstruction projects, including, for example, the construction of Hamad Residential City in Khan Younis, which contains nearly 3,000 housing units.
Then came the 2014 war, in which Egypt played a more negative role than ever before as a result of tensions between the then-new regime led by President el-Sisi on the one hand, and Hamas on the other. A study published by the Brookings Institution in this regard says that “reconstruction efforts (after 2014) largely failed because of intractable political opposition to Hamas, not only from Israel, but also from Egypt, which opposes the militants’ ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.”
The analysis also concluded that the suffocating blockade on Gaza—imposed by Egypt and Israel—led to restrictions on construction supplies and humanitarian aid, and thus to intensifying tensions between Hamas and its political rivals in the Palestinian Authority, whom Egypt pressured to take over security operations in Gaza as a condition for supplying the Strip with what it needed. International donors, meanwhile, were slow in sending the funds they had pledged, and most of them in fact never arrived. Therefore, Gazans were forced to rely on temporary housing throughout those years amid rising unemployment rates and deteriorating services in electricity, clean water, and waste management.
“We affirm our commitment in Hamas that we will not take a single penny of what comes for reconstruction in the Gaza Strip, and the movement will ensure that not a single penny goes to Hamas or to the al-Qassam Brigades.”
With those words, the head of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, addressed the international community in his first meeting with journalists in Gaza following the end of the most recent war. Sinwar’s statements came in response to the US administration, which made its support for the Gaza reconstruction process conditional on partnership with the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, alongside the United Nations, Egypt, and the Gulf states. Washington said it would work to ensure the transfer of reconstruction funds to Gaza while ensuring that Hamas would not benefit from the $360 million that Washington pledged for reconstruction and Palestinian development.
The American and international position, which has long dealt with the Palestinian Authority as the Palestinians’ de facto representative, was not a product of the latest developments in Gaza. The United States and the European Union have clearly considered Hamas a “terrorist organization” since it won the Legislative Council elections in 2006. Those elections were followed by a state of internal Palestinian division whose well-known chapters unfolded over 15 years and cast a shadow over the Palestinians’ relationship with the international community. The most important of those chapters was the aid file, which was managed through complex mechanisms designed to circumvent channels linked to Hamas, which effectively governs Gaza, and thus reconstruction efforts slowed down or stopped altogether in most cases.
Maher al-Tabba, economic expert and spokesperson for the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Gaza Governorate, says, “The fact that Hamas, which is de facto responsible for administering Gaza, is considered a terrorist group should not be a reason to deprive the Strip of reconstruction funds, because there are many ways to deliver the money, including through UNRWA and other United Nations institutions.” Al-Tabba stresses that genuine reconstruction requires international guarantees that Israel will not bomb in the future what has been rebuilt, and therefore there must be a political solution to the Palestinian crisis along with the necessity of ending the blockade on the Strip. Al-Tabba expects that donors will be reluctant to finance the reconstruction process in Gaza because of the policy of “repeated destruction” that Israel deliberately pursues.
In the same context, Omar Shaban, founder and director of PalThink for Strategic Studies, says that what can be concluded after the Gaza Strip has gone through several reconstruction processes over the past 12 years is that there must be a national workshop in which everyone participates, after which the funds allocated for reconstruction from donor countries should be placed in an independent fund supervised by representatives of civil society. This would also reassure donor countries that their donated funds are going toward the purpose for which they were earmarked.
Ultimately, the page of yet another war in Gaza is turned, but this time by opening the reconstruction file and spotlighting the need for real building on an unprecedented scale. The credit for this goes back to several changes, most importantly the decline of the Palestinian Authority, the centrality Hamas now occupies in the Palestinian political process despite its international designation as a terrorist group, the shift in the Egyptian position toward a desire to ease the blockade on Gaza in exchange for Egypt assuming a central role in reconstruction, and also the gradual erosion of Western support for Israel as a result of its policies that have gone beyond the framework of 1967 and its previous commitments to the Palestinian Authority. While Gazans eagerly await the fulfillment of these reconstruction promises this time, Egyptian funds and Palestinian companies stand waiting for a clear path forward, hoping that bulldozers and construction equipment will be on their way this time, and that Israeli intransigence and the international position toward Hamas will not contribute to keeping Gaza under the ashes and under blockade as it has been since 2006.
Text © Al Jazeera Net — Midan — archived here with attribution to the source. — Machine translation for archival reference. — Original source