The United Nations has estimated that the Israel-Hamas war has left Gaza buried under 50 million tonnes of broken concrete and other debris. That’s about a dozen times the volume of Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza.
The figure is just one of many that illustrate the extent of the destruction in Gaza, and the epic and costly effort that may soon be under way to make the strip habitable again. Doing so not only means repairing or rebuilding hundreds of thousands of homes, but also power generation and water-supply systems, schools, hospitals, mosques, roads and bridges, as well as purifying farmland turned toxic by the chemicals contained in exploded weapons.
Who will pay for this effort and how much will it cost? The answers are unknown, but there are some educated guesses, based on experience and analysis. The short answer is that Gaza can be rebuilt, as Dresden in Germany was after the Second World War and as Lebanon was after its 15-year civil war. The longer answer is that the financial and political obstacles are so daunting that the effort could take decades, and might not happen at all.
The war started on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas fighters killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel and took 250 hostages. Israel retaliated with air attacks and a ground invasion that left most of the 41-kilometre-long Gaza Strip in ruins. According to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, more than 47,000 Gazans have been killed, though Britain’s Lancet medical journal estimated in January that the true figure was 40 per cent higher (Hamas does not distinguish between combatant and civilian deaths).
This week, the start of the first phase of a tentative ceasefire allowed some 300,000 Palestinians to return to the northern part of the strip. But most had no home to go back to and will be living in rubble or tents or the shattered remains of their broken apartments. Today, rebuilding is virtually impossible, since Israel is not allowing any cement or steel reinforcing bars (rebar) into the strip for fear that Hamas could use it to rebuild their network of tunnels.
Using UNOSAT satellite data, the UN estimated that 69 per cent of the structures in Gaza had been damaged or destroyed by the start of December, including more than 245,000 homes. UNOSAT, with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, also found that more than two-thirds of the crop lands in Gaza “exhibited a significant decline in health and density” by last September.
The World Bank estimated that Gaza sustained US$18.5-billion in damage, equivalent to the combined economic output of the West Bank and Gaza in 2022, in the first four months of the war alone. The war has lasted almost 16 months, so the figure is no doubt much higher today. The UN recently said that the cost of rebuilding Gaza could reach US$80-billion.
The Palestinian Authority, which would like to resume control of Gaza after having lost it when Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian elections, is heavily in debt and has no money. Under U.S. President Donald Trump, who last week proposed the “clean out” of Gaza – he wants the entire population of about two million pushed into Egypt and Jordan – nothing more than humanitarian assistance is likely from the Americans. Egypt is under an International Monetary Fund loan program and can’t afford to fund large-scale reconstruction. Israel certainly will resist paying, which means that wealthy Arab governments, notably Qatar and Saudi Arabia, might have to do the heavy lifting.
Will they? This time, perhaps not. Last week, at the Davos forum in Switzerland, Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani said it made no sense to pump billions into Gaza if whatever is built “just gets destroyed” again. At the moment, the most reliable funding might come from the Palestinian diaspora. Millions of Palestinians live overseas.
Sovereign or institutional donors might open their wallets if there were a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and a government acceptable to the Israelis, which certainly means not Hamas. There is no realistic plan for postwar Gaza governance, or a two-state solution, raising the possibility that Hamas could emerge as the de facto rulers of Gaza. That scenario might make the flow of any meaningful amounts of rebuilding money impossible.
Absent a permanent ceasefire and a postwar governance plan, the Israeli and Egyptian control of the Gaza crossings might endure, meaning that little or no proper construction material is likely to seep through the barriers. The damage to Gaza is so vast that it could take 350 years to rebuild the strip if the blockade remains in place, the UN Conference on Trade and Development said in a report release in the autumn.
The Palestinians who are returning to the northern Gaza to rebuild their lives are resourceful – they had to be to endure the blockade, which began in 2007. A return any time soon to life as it was before the war seems impossible. Decades could pass before the strip rises from the ashes. Reconstruction money exists; the political framework that would let it flow does not. No one wants to throw good money after bad.