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Al-Quds Newspaper / AFP · 2022-05-08
A year after the Israeli assault on Gaza in May 2021, reconstruction remains slow despite Egyptian and Qatari financial pledges, while Hamas seeks to revive the economy of the besieged enclave. Officials and experts attribute the slowdown to political and financial reasons, saying economic improvement and reconstruction progress remain tied to security stability, a political track, and Palestinian internal reconciliation.
A year after the Israeli assault on Gaza in May 2021, reconstruction remains slow despite Egyptian and Qatari financial pledges, while Hamas seeks to revive the economy of the besieged enclave. Officials and experts attribute the slowdown to political and financial reasons, saying economic improvem…
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 to reconstruct what was destroyed during 11 days of Israeli bombardment of Gaza.
At exactly six o’clock 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, demanding 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 in the city. The tension then 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 martyred, including 66 children. 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” missile interception system intercepted about 90 percent of the resistance rockets launched toward the Hebrew state.
The confrontation extended into 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 were heavily or partially damaged in the territory that Israel has subjected to a tight blockade for more than fifteen years.
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, and Qatar pledged the same amount, for the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, whose area does not exceed 360 square kilometers.
But the reconstruction process is still proceeding slowly, according to Naji Sarhan, Undersecretary of the Ministry of Housing and Public Works in the Gaza Strip, which is administered by Hamas.
Sarhan attributes this to “political and financial reasons” without providing further details. Sarhan notes that the Egyptian grant “is proceeding well.”
He points out that “our priority in distributing the apartments of 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 north and center of the Strip comprising about two thousand housing units.
The undersecretary 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) oversees 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, and this file includes 7,000 homes that sustained 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 work permits for Gaza Strip workers 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 (the movement’s deputy chairman), think ideologically and believe that the strategy should not focus on Gaza.”
As for political science professor in Gaza Jamal al-Fadi, he believes that Hamas faces “major challenges represented by calm and resistance.”
He added to Agence France-Presse that among the challenges also are “settlers’ incursions into Al-Aqsa Mosque and the tension in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and at the same time, will Hamas choose calm in return for improving the economy, which is facing enormous difficulties” in the Strip.
Economically, the Palestinian economist Omar Shaban confirms that “the occupation will monitor preventing an explosion of the situation in Gaza through some economic facilitations and increasing the number of workers.”
Shaban expects that the reconstruction process in Gaza will remain “slow unless a political track and security stability are reached.”
According to Shaban, this “requires Palestinian-Palestinian reconciliation” because “the world is tired of rebuilding what is destroyed each time before a new confrontation breaks out.”
Text © Al-Quds Newspaper / AFP — archived here with attribution to the source. — Machine translation for archival reference. — Original source