Media coverage
Perfil (AFP) · 2024-10-07
The Spanish edition of an AFP feature published a year into the war (English original: "Gazans struggle to imagine post-war recovery", September 2024), on Gazans who rebuilt after earlier wars and now face doing it again, citing UN estimates of 80 years to rebuild destroyed housing and 15 years to clear the rubble. Omar Shaban, founder of PalThink for Strategic Studies, says the slow responses to the wars of 2008–9, 2012, 2014 and 2021 give little reason for confidence, that regional governments pledged large sums and did not pay them, and that "people are fed up"; the piece describes his proposal for a first phase of reconstruction focused on ten neighbourhoods across Gaza's five governorates, "to create hope".
The Spanish edition of an AFP feature published a year into the war (English original: "Gazans struggle to imagine post-war recovery", September 2024), on Gazans who rebuilt after earlier wars and now face doing it again, citing UN estimates of 80 years to rebuild destroyed housing and 15 years to…
## It could take 80 years to rebuild around 79,000 destroyed homes, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to housing said in May. A UN report published in July said workers might need 15 years just to clear the rubble.
The enormous scale of the destruction caused by the deadliest war in Gaza’s history has made the path to recovery hard to imagine, especially for people who had already lost their homes during previous conflicts.
After an Israeli strike flattened his family’s house in Gaza City in 2014, Mohammed Abu Sharia, 37, fulfilled his promise to return to the same plot of land in less than a year.
The process was not perfect: the grant they received paid for only two floors instead of the original four. But they happily called it home until it was hit from the air again last October, following Hamas’s attack on southern Israel.
Hamas marked the anniversary of its “glorious” attack on Israel, which left 1,205 dead
This time, the family could not flee in time and five people were killed, four of them children. The rest remain displaced nearly a year later, scattered across Gaza and neighboring Egypt.
“A person puts all of their life’s effort into building a house and, suddenly, it turns into a mirage,” Abu Sharia said. “If the war stops, we will rebuild in the same place because we have nothing else.”
## One year after the start of the war, there is still no hope for Gaza’s inhabitants
Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel caused the deaths of 1,205 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures that include hostages who died in captivity.
The Israeli military offensive in retaliation has killed at least nearly 42,000 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures provided by the Health Ministry of the Hamas-controlled territory. The UN has described the figures as reliable.
As bombs continue to fall on Gaza, many of the 2.4 million inhabitants of that Palestinian territory will face the same challenge as Abu Sharia: how to gather the resources and energy needed for another round of reconstruction.
“The pessimism stems from bad experiences with reconstruction in the past and from the different scale of the current destruction,” said Ghassan Khatib, a former Minister of Planning.
That has not stopped people from trying to plan for the future. Some are focusing on the immediate challenges of removing the rubble and getting their children back to school after almost a year of suspended classes.
On maximum alert over the anniversary of the October 7 massacre, Israel promises a response to Iran’s attack
Others dream of more ambitious projects: building a port, a Palestinian film industry, or even assembling a globally competitive football team.
But with no ceasefire in sight, analysts say most long-term planning is premature. “It’s like putting the icing on a cake that is not yet fully baked,” said Brian Katulis, of the Middle East Institute in Washington.
## “People need to realize that their suffering will end. Otherwise, they will become radicalized”
It could take 80 years to rebuild around 79,000 destroyed homes, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to housing said in May. A UN report published in July said workers might need 15 years just to clear the rubble.
The slow responses to Gaza’s past wars in 2008-09, 2012, 2014 and 2021 give little reason to trust that recovery from this one will be smoother, said Omar Shaban, founder of the Gaza-based think tank PalThink for Strategic Studies.
In the past, regional governments have pledged large sums of money but then failed to disburse them.
The Israeli blockade of Gaza, imposed after Hamas took control of the territory in 2007, remains firmly in place and severely restricts access to construction materials.
“People are fed up,” Shaban said. “They had lost faith even before the war.”
Despite the hopelessness, Shaban is among those proposing more imaginative strategies for Gaza’s postwar future.
Earlier this year he published an article suggesting that the initial reconstruction work could focus on ten neighborhoods, one inside and one outside the refugee camps in each of Gaza’s five governorates.
The idea would be to ensure that the benefits of reconstruction are seen throughout the besieged territory, he said.
“I want to create hope. People need to realize that their suffering will end,” even if not immediately, he said. “Otherwise, they will become radicalized.”
Hope is also an important theme for Palestine Emerging, an initiative that has suggested building a port on an artificial island made from war debris, a technical university for reconstruction, and a transport corridor between Gaza and the West Bank.
Other proposals have included launching a tourism campaign, creating a Palestinian film industry, and assembling a football team inspired by the strategies of Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
“Maybe when you look at some of these things, you think they are, you know, dreams or something like that,” said Palestine Emerging chief executive Shireen Shelleh from her office in Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
“However, I believe that if you do not dream, you cannot achieve anything. So even if some people may think it is ambitious or whatever, in my opinion that is something good.”
Khatib, the former Minister of Planning, said that it was not the time for such proposals. "I think people should be more realistic," he said. "The urgent needs are medicines, food, shelter, schools."
Text © Perfil (AFP) — archived here with attribution to the source. — Machine translation for archival reference. — Original source