The rough outline of loss in Gaza is easily visible from space. Eighty-four per cent of what humans built there has been destroyed. More than 61 million tons of rubble lie strewn across its battered landscape, enough to build the Great Pyramid of Giza 10 times over. Reassembling the shattered pieces will cost at least US$70-billion, the United Nations has estimated.
Work has already started, as men with little more than shovels and pickaxes begin to pick apart the debris under the protection of a tenuous ceasefire.
The digital renderings of foreign planners make it seem as though Gaza can be quickly reborn as a futuristic metropolis by the sea, complete with factories spinning out electric cars, and trains whisking residents between gleaming skyscrapers.
In reality, builders and engineers in the war-ravaged region are worried about the most fundamental elements of construction, such as whether they will be able to bring in even basic materials.
Because, they say, Gaza won’t just have to be rebuilt from the ground up. Instead, construction will need to begin several metres below ground, in the subterranean channels where water and sewer lines once ran.
Water is scarce in Gaza: Israel's water utility sealed its pipes early in the war, and bombardments aimed at Hamas forces deep underground ruined more infrastructure.BASHAR TALEB/AFP via Getty Images
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In Gaza City, maybe 10 per cent of municipal sewage infrastructure continues to function, estimates Nabil Abu Muaileq, a civil engineer who has led the region’s contractor’s union and runs his own mid-sized construction company.
Buildings suffer in any war – walls gouged by bullets and roofs collapsed by mortar fire. But in Gaza, Israeli munitions are often intended to thrust explosive power below the ground, to the tunnels built by Hamas to hide its weapons and militants.
“The bombs destroyed water and sewage pipes. And water wells and sewage pump stations and everything,” Mr. Abu Muaileq said.
“Gaza, my dear, needs everything.”
His own house was destroyed in the first months of the war; he is currently in Cairo, where he fled with an injured daughter who required surgery.
Mr. Abu Muaileq intends to return when he can. But his personal situation mirrors that of Gaza: He cannot begin the work of rebuilding until it is safe enough for him to return, and until he is physically able to cross back into the strip.
This is also true of the basic building blocks of a new Gaza.
Cement, steel, wood, glass, nails, screws and countless other items are needed but cannot, at the moment, cross freely into the region. Fuel is not readily available. Warehouses previously used for supplies have been destroyed.
Rebuilding efforts in other badly damaged regions of the world, including Syria and Ukraine, have shown that considerable quantities of rubble can be recycled into new concrete.
But in Gaza, even the basic equipment needed to scoop and dump the enormous quantities of debris – machinery such as excavators, mobile crushers and heavy trucks – does not exist and cannot easily be brought in.
Mr. Abu Muaileq estimates that 95 per cent of the heavy equipment in Gaza has been destroyed by the war. “So we need new ones. A lot of them,” he said.
These excavators in Gaza are Israeli. It is harder for Palestinians to get their own because Israel restricts many kinds of machinery from entering Gaza.Leo Correa/The Associated Press
But Israel has classified many forms of equipment as dual-use, restricting their movement into Gaza lest they be employed for military purposes.
Even before the war, those restrictions led to considerable problems for Gazans who sought to acquire specific pieces of machinery. One Gaza mayor waited a full year to get a new tool for cleaning clogged sewage pipes, said a United Nations official who served in Gaza. The Globe is not naming the official because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
Heavy equipment has also been a target of Israeli attacks, in Gaza and elsewhere. As recently as last week, Israel struck a half-dozen machinery yards in southern Lebanon, destroying 300 vehicles, the state news agency reported. Israel said the equipment was being used to build Hezbollah infrastructure.
Firefighters douse the machinery yard in Msayleh, Lebanon, on Oct. 11, after air strikes that Israel said were aimed at Hezbollah.Ali Hankir/The Associated Press
Maher Al-Tabbaa, a Gaza-based economic analyst, said the biggest obstacle to reconstruction is not money – although that, too, will prove critical – but the political constraints that govern the movement of goods. “The biggest challenge is ending the years-long blockade on the Gaza Strip and opening all crossings to allow the entry of all goods and merchandise, especially cement and building materials, without restrictions or conditions,” he said.
Gaza has always relied heavily on goods from outside, and what little capacity it had to manufacture its own construction materials has been dramatically curtailed by the war. “Currently, nothing can be produced. All raw materials have run out of stock or expired after two years of war,” Mr. Al-Tabbaa said.
Numbers from the UN catalogue the loss: Nearly 300,000 homes and apartments damaged or demolished. More than 3,000 kilometres of road wrecked. More than 80 per cent of the power generation and distribution network destroyed or left non-operational. Hundreds of attacks on schools. “Approximately 70 years of development progress in the Gaza Strip were erased due to the war,” he said. Much of the economy, too, has been erased.
The exposed electrical cables and metal beams at this house in Bureij will be hard for Palestinians to replace without freer access to the outside world.EYAD BABA/AFP via Getty Images
For workers, the prospect of rebuilding is a welcome one. Palestinians “have the skills and experience needed to rebuild what the war has destroyed,” said Salameh Abu Zaiter, a member of the Palestinian Trade Union.
Past conflict has forged expertise. Gaza rebuilt after fighting in 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021.
“But they need a safe environment and real resources,” Mr. Abu Zaiter said. In some places, that means unexploded ordnance will need to be cleared before work can begin. Officials in Gaza have estimated there could be 20,000 such explosives.
Some areas are so badly damaged that they will not need to be reconstructed; they will need to be recreated.
“Neighbourhoods that have been completely destroyed, such as large parts of northern Gaza, eastern Khan Younis and Rafah need new urban planning – and to be built from scratch,” said Mohammed Jarad, a Gaza-based architect who has experience redesigning destroyed buildings.
What it all means, he said, is that “rebuilding Gaza is one of the greatest humanitarian and engineering challenges in modern history.”
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