Gaza Has Been Reduced to 42 Million Tonnes of Rubble. What Will It Take to Rebuild?
August 21, 2024 at 12:09AMAs US-backed ceasefire talks take place in Doha, calls to reconstruct the Gaza Strip are becoming louder. Due to relentless Israeli air strikes, there is now “enough rubble to fill a line of dump trucks stretching from New York to Singapore.” This graphic-laden feature from a team at Bloomberg Equality considers the overwhelming challenge ahead:
Rebuilding Gaza, and the lives of its residents, will require a complete overhaul of its entire physical infrastructure and some form of political solution over what a new Gaza will look like. But before any of that can happen the collection and disposal of all the rubble—after the war ends—will be of paramount importance.
Property rights and difficulties in finding disposal sites for contaminated debris will further complicate the process. Rebuilding Gaza could cost far more than $80 billion, when taking into account hidden expenses like the long term impact of a labor market devastated by death, injury and trauma, according to Daniel Egel, a senior economist at California-based think tank RAND. “You can rebuild a building, but how do you rebuild the lives of a million children?”
And it’s not clear who is going to pay.
“What we see in Gaza is something that we have never seen before in the history of urbanism,” said Mark Jarzombek, an architectural history professor at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied post World War II reconstruction. “It’s not just the destruction of physical infrastructure, it’s the destruction of basic institutions of governance and of a sense of normality.”
“The cost of rebuilding will be prohibitive. Construction sites on this scale have to be empty of people, creating another wave of displacements. No matter what one does, for generations Gaza will be struggling with this,” Jarzombek added.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/08/20/gaza-has-been-reduced-to-42-million-tonnes-of-rubble-what-will-it-take-to-rebuild/
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