The United Nations said that the Israel-Hamas war has refunded development in Gaza for 60 years and it would be a difficult task to raise tens of billions of dollars required for reconstruction.
About two-thirds of the buildings in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed or damaged, and removing the estimated 42 million tons of debris will be dangerous and complex, the head of the United Nations Development Program told the AFP.
Achim Steiner said in an interview at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in the Swiss Ski Resort city of Davos, “Perhaps 65 percent to 70 percent of buildings have either been completely destroyed or damaged in Gaza among buildings.”
“But we are also talking about an economy that has been destroyed, where we guess that about 60 years of development has been lost in this struggle in 15 months.
“Two million people who are in the Gaza Strip have not only lost their shelter: they have lost public infrastructure, sewage treatment system, freshwater supply system, public waste management. All these fundamental infrastructure and service elements only Not present. “
And for all these huge numbers, the steinner insisted: “Human frustration is not just something you capture in the figures.”
‘Year and year’
The delicate ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza war on Sunday made effective.
The steiner stated that the “unstable” nature of the ceasefire was difficult to put a time limit on reconstruction due to the nature of the ceasefire, and because the United Nations is immediate attention on life-saving assistance.
“When we talk about reconstruction, we are not talking about one or two years here,” he said.
“We are talking about years and years, until you also get close to reconstruction, first, the physical infrastructure, but it is also a whole economy.
“People had savings. People had loans. People had invested in businesses. And all this is lost. So we are talking about physical and economic, and in some ways also the psychological social Also phase. “
He said that physical reconstruction alone would spend “tens of billions of dollars”, and “we face a huge hard struggle on the way of raising that scale of finance”.
‘Extraordinary’ destruction
The estimated amount of debris can still increase and will give up an attempt to rebuild with huge challenges.
“This is not just a simple venture to load it and take it somewhere. This debris is dangerous. Often there are bodies that are probably not recovered. There is an unexplained Ordnance, landmine,” the steinner explained.
“An option is recycling. With reconstruction, there is an important degree from which you can recycle these materials and use them in the reconstruction process,” the steinner said.
“The interim solution will be to move the debris to temporary dump and deposit from where it can later be taken for either permanent processing or disposal.”
Meanwhile, if the ceasefire ends and eliminates the firms, the steinner said that a huge amount of temporary infrastructure would be required.
“In fact every school and every hospital have either been severely damaged or destroyed,” he said.
“This is an extraordinary physical destruction that has happened.”
(Except for the headline, the story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is published by a syndicated feed.)
