Rebuilding all the homes destroyed by Israeli military offensives in the Gaza Strip could take until the next century if the pace of reconstruction is to reach levels seen after the 2014 and 2021 wars, according to a United Nations report released on Thursday.
The United Nations report quoted data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics as saying that as of April 15, approximately 370,000 houses in Gaza were damaged, of which 79,000 were destroyed. A report by the United Nations Development Program and the United Nations Economic and Social Council predicts that if these destroyed homes were rebuilt at the same rate as after the two previous wars – an average of 992 homes per year – it would take 80 years. West Asian Social Council.
The report details the socio-economic impact of the war on the Palestinian people and says “the extent of destruction in Gaza is so great that the scale of aid needed to rebuild will be on a scale not seen since 1948” to replace, including schools and public infrastructure including hospitals.
Even if Israel allowed five times more construction materials into Gaza after this war than in 2021 after the war (the “best case scenario”), it would still take until 2040 to rebuild all the destroyed homes, the report said. The forecasts do not take into account the time it will take to repair the hundreds of thousands of homes that were damaged but not destroyed.
The cost of rebuilding Gaza is increasing “exponentially” with every day of fighting, Abdullah Al-Dadari, director of the UN Development Program’s regional bureau for Arab countries, said via video call at a news conference in Amman, Jordan, on Thursday. .
Mr. Dadari said that before Palestinians in Gaza could return to “some normality”, an estimated 37 million tons of debris must be cleared to build temporary shelters and eventually rebuild their homes.
The report also found that after six months of war, Palestinian unemployment in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip soared from about 26% to about 46%.
Over these six months, the poverty rate in the Palestinian territories more than doubled, from an estimated 26.7% to an estimated 57.2%. According to the report, this means that 1.67 million Palestinians have been pushed into poverty since the war began. Its estimate is based on a poverty line of $6.85 per day.
The impact of the war on Palestinians in Gaza and beyond “will last for many years,” the report said.
