Media coverage
Al-Quds Newspaper · 2022-05-08
A year after the Israeli assault on Gaza in May 2021, efforts to revive the economy and rebuild the besieged Strip remain slow despite Egyptian and Qatari funding pledges, with officials citing political and financial reasons. Officials and analysts, including Omar Shaban, expect reconstruction to remain slow unless there is a political track and security stability, amid continuing challenges related to calm, Al-Aqsa, the West Bank, and the struggling economy.
A year after the Israeli assault on Gaza in May 2021, efforts to revive the economy and rebuild the besieged Strip remain slow despite Egyptian and Qatari funding pledges, with officials citing political and financial reasons. Officials and analysts, including Omar Shaban, expect reconstruction to…
Gaza - "Al-Quds" dot com - (AFP) - One year after the Israeli aggression on Gaza, Hamas is seeking to revive the faltering economy in the besieged Strip and rebuild what was destroyed during 11 days of Israeli bombardment of Gaza.
At exactly six in the evening on 10 May 2021, Hamas and Islamic Jihad launched hundreds of rockets toward Israel, following a threat issued by the spokesman for the Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, in which he demanded the "withdrawal" of Israeli police personnel from Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Jerusalem.
This was preceded by several weeks of clashes by Palestinians with the occupation police in Jerusalem, because of an Israeli threat to expel several Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of the city, after which the tension moved to the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque and left several hundred Palestinians injured.
Throughout the 11 days of military confrontation, considered the fiercest in years, 260 Palestinians were killed, including 66 children, while on the Israeli side 14 people were killed, including a child, a girl, and a soldier.
The Israeli occupation army said that the "Iron Dome" rocket interception system intercepted about 90 percent of the resistance rockets launched toward the Hebrew state.
The confrontation extended to the occupied interior, where clashes broke out between Palestinians and Jews, in addition to confrontations in the occupied West Bank.
During the war, Israel completely destroyed 1,600 Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip, while more than sixty thousand other homes in the Strip, which Israel has subjected to a tight blockade for more than fifteen years, were heavily or partially damaged.
After the truce agreement reached by Israel and Hamas through Egyptian and other mediation entered into force, the Egyptian president pledged to provide $500 million, with Qatar pledging the same amount, for the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, whose area does not exceed 360 square kilometers.
But the reconstruction process is still moving slowly, according to Naji Sarhan, Deputy Minister of Housing and Public Works in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.
Sarhan attributes this to "political and financial reasons" without providing further details. Sarhan says that the Egyptian grant "is proceeding well."
He points out that "our priority in distributing apartments from the Egyptian grant will be for those whose homes were destroyed during the last war, low-income people, and poor families."
Egypt is currently building three residential cities in the northern and central parts of the Strip comprising about two thousand housing units.
The deputy minister expects "the completion of the reconstruction of 500 homes by the middle of this year, which is one-third of the total number of destroyed homes."
The Strip is home to 2.3 million Palestinians, about two-thirds of them poor refugees.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) is overseeing the restoration and reconstruction of damaged refugee homes in the Strip.
According to the agency’s spokesman in Gaza, Adnan Abu Hasna, it has completely finished the partial damage file, which includes 7,000 homes that suffered either minor, moderate, or severe damage."
Sources in Hamas had previously announced that they had been informed through Egyptian and Qatari mediators of Israel’s intention to raise the quota of Gaza Strip workers’ permits to 20,000, with 8,000 new permits, due to the "security stability" prevailing in the region.
For Ofir Salzberg, an expert on Middle East affairs at the Herbert C. Kelman Institute, "Hamas leaders outside Gaza, such as Saleh al-Arouri (deputy head of the movement), think ideologically and believe that the strategy should not focus on Gaza."
As for Gaza political science professor Jamal al-Fadi, he believes that Hamas faces "major challenges represented by calm and resistance."
He adds to Agence France-Presse that among the challenges are also "settlers’ incursions into Al-Aqsa Mosque and tensions in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and at the same time, will Hamas choose calm in exchange for improving the economy, which faces immense difficulties" in the Strip.
Economically, Palestinian economic expert Omar Shaban confirms that "the occupation will seek to prevent an explosion of the situation in Gaza through some economic facilities and increasing the number of workers."
Shaban expects the reconstruction process in Gaza to remain "slow unless a political track and security stability are reached."
This, according to Shaban, "requires Palestinian-Palestinian reconciliation" because "the world has grown tired of rebuilding what is destroyed each time before a new confrontation erupts."
Text © Al-Quds Newspaper — archived here with attribution to the source. — Machine translation for archival reference. — Original source