Rebuilding Gaza Could Take Over $80 Billion, Global Cooperation

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After ten months of fighting in the Gaza Strip, Israel and Hamas could be close to a cease-fire deal. As of Monday afternoon, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Israel had agreed to a cease-fire proposal. Hamas had yet to officially respond.

If an eventual deal is achieved… the question becomes: How could the Gaza Strip rebuild? 

On today’s Big Take podcast, Bloomberg reporters Fares Alghoul, Fadwa Hodali, and Dan Williams take stock of the international cooperation — and money — it would take to reconstruct Gaza and how the future leadership of the Strip could complicate this already monumental task.

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Listen and follow The Big Take on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Here is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation:

Sarah Holder: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is visiting the Middle East this week, where he is trying to secure a cease-fire and hostage deal between Israel and Hamas… 

AP – Antony Blinken: This is a decisive moment, probably the best, maybe the last, opportunity to get the hostages home, to get a cease-fire and to put everyone on a better path to enduring peace and security.

Holder: As of Monday afternoon, Blinken said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had accepted the current proposal. Hamas has yet to officially respond.

It’s been ten months of war in Gaza — and according to the Gaza Health Ministry, over 40,000 Palestinians are confirmed dead. The entire Gaza Strip has been impacted.  

If an immediate cease-fire, and eventual peace deal, are achieved… the question then becomes, how could the Gaza Strip rebuild?

To get a sense of what this reconstruction could look like and what it might take, we reached out to several Bloomberg reporters who have been covering the conflict.

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One of them is Fares Alghoul.  He’s a reporter from the Gaza Strip who’s now reporting on the war in his hometown from Canada.

Fares Alghoul: I look at pictures of the cornerstone streets of Gaza, and I can’t recognize them due to the scale of destruction.

Holder: Fares told me, one of his favorite places in Gaza was called East Khan Younis. It’s an area that was once full of olive and citrus trees, where people knew each other so well that they referred to neighborhoods just by the names of the families who lived there.

Alghoul: It’s there where you can smell fresh air. It’s there where you can escape the dark, humid houses of Gaza. 

Holder: But now…

Alghoul: Looking at the images of this area, I can see that the houses that are spread there were demolished and the farmlands were leveled by bulldozers.

Holder: One of the homes that was destroyed there belonged to a 37-year-old woman named Rana Abu Nassira.

Rana fled her home after October 7 and moved through the Strip to avoid Israeli airstrikes. But along the way, she told Fares, she tried to keep an eye on it using Google Earth.

Rana Abu Nassira:(in Arabic) It was, well, I has always thought my home is still existing because I saw that on the satellite.

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Alghoul: She was hopeful that her house was still standing because she was looking at Google Earth images without knowing that this service doesn’t update in real time. But eventually, when she was able to return to her house,  she found a pile of rubble. 

Abu Nassira: (in Arabic) When I reached my neighborhood, I was like this is not our neighborhood, street, house. It was crazy, something imaginable. 

Holder: Rana couldn’t believe she was looking at her neighborhood, her street, her house. She described what she found as “crazy,” hardly imaginable.  

Abu Nassira: (in Arabic) After 9 months, I was dreaming of the day in which I would return to my home and its surroundings…

Holder: Months of dreaming about returning home one day were dashed in an instant. There was nothing left. 

Rana and her family hope they’ll be able to rebuild their home someday. But in the meantime, they’ve pitched a tent in the bombed-out backyard of their house.

Fares told us that among the nearly 2.2 million people displaced by the conflict…. this is a familiar story. 

Alghoul: That’s what most of the people, uh, will do. Today we are talking about 70 percent of the houses of the Gaza Strip are destroyed and damaged. 

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Holder: Today on the show: the enormous task of rebuilding Gaza — and what role the international community will play as the rubble clears.

This is the Big Take, from Bloomberg News. I’m Sarah Holder.

It’s been ten months since October 7. Ten months of airstrikes, displacement, and destruction in the Gaza strip. 

There’s been lots of reporting on the lack of basic supplies in the Strip—no electricity, running water, shortages of food leading to famine. Fares told me, that’s been the focus of a lot of international aid efforts so far. But meanwhile, people are also struggling to access other necessities.

Alghoul: People are struggling with hygiene, to stay clean.  People don’t have washing products, they don’t have shampoo, they don’t have body wash, period products are not available for many women there. Diapers for children.

Holder: Emergency services are strained; hospitals are damaged and over-filled. People are also lacking access to medications that they used to take on a regular basis.

Alghoul: Pharmacies are running low on everything. I personally know about eight people who died just because they did not find the medication and treatment that they used to take before the war. 

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Holder: This is not the first time Gaza has had to rebuild after conflict. Hamas and Israel have gone to war five times just since 2007. 

But there are some unique things about this moment that make rebuilding Gaza especially difficult. 

For one, there is the scale of the destruction: in 2014, the conflict before this that caused the most damage, 60,000 homes were destroyed. Right now, the war has impacted 70 percent of the houses in the Gaza Strip — about 80,000 have been completely destroyed, and 370,000 have been damaged. And this time, the attacks have been more widespread — in that 2014 conflict, the damage was focused on specific areas. This time nearly all of the Strip has been impacted. 

To understand what rebuilding would take, we also spoke with Fadwa Hodali, a Bloomberg reporter based in the West Bank. Fadwa noted that this time, there’s also a new element of danger to the reconstruction efforts. 

Hodali: One of the major big issues that all experts are saying that this war is completely different is the explosives that have fallen into the Strip that have not exploded and they’re under the rubble. So the, this requires a certain experts to handle.

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Holder: With all these challenges come huge costs. There have been estimates that it could take over $80 billion to rebuild, when you factor in hidden costs like the decimated labor market.

And for it to happen, Fadwa says, a lot of new materials and equipment are needed. Because right now, Gaza doesn’t have what it would need to complete this work.

Hodali: Eighty percent of the machinery has been destroyed.  

Holder: Fares Alghoul says, step one will be to remove all the debris. 

Alghoul: We are talking about 42 million tonnes of rubble that has accumulated in Gaza since October. If you are to remove this rubble, you need a line of dump trucks starting from New York and ending in Singapore. 

Holder: Dump trucks stretched single file from New York to Singapore.

Alghoul: Can you imagine?

Holder: Wow.

Alghoul: A=ccording to estimates, the removal of the rubble only, which will be the first step in reconstruction, will take at least eight years. 

Holder: Eight years. Fares says, according to someone he spoke to at the Gaza Municipality, there are around 120 dump trucks currently in the Strip. So removing all that rubble will require outside help.

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And that would only be step one. The reconstruction of Gaza is a project that will require cooperation and investment from many different countries and organizations around the world. 

But getting in that new machinery will also require cooperation from Israel, which currently controls virtually all access to Gaza.

Hodali:  You have to get an approval for all the machinery to enter the Strip. You need to make sure constantly the borders are open. None of this will take place without the approval of the Israeli Authority. 

Holder: After the break… what role will the Israeli Authority play in rebuilding Gaza… and will other countries step in to help? 

The Israeli government currently controls access to Gaza, and so any machinery or materials the Strip needs to rebuild… that will require the approval of the Israeli government. 

But Israel has expressed concerns in the past about material it considers “dual-use” entering the area.

Williams: Any material that could conceivably be used for a secondary, unintended, or unwanted purpose of a military buildup, a security threat would be deemed dual-use. 

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Holder: We spoke about this dynamic with Dan Williams, a reporter out of Bloomberg’s Jerusalem bureau. 

Williams: It’s worth mentioning here that Hamas and other fighting factions in the Gaza Strip have proven very capable when it comes to using rudimentary materials and tools. And using these to build up an effective arsenal and even a citadel. 

So for example, we know from previous videos issued by Palestinian fighters that even water pipes can be extracted from the ground and converted into rockets. We know that tiles and concrete that may have been intended for, I don’t know, hospitals or schools can be used to line and buttress the hundreds of miles of tunnels, fighting tunnels that Hamas and Islamic Jihad and other groups have created underneath the Gaza Strip.

Holder: Fares Alghoul says, in the past, these sorts of restrictions have had a big impact on rebuilding efforts.

Alghoul: Even after 2014, Israel restricted and regulated the delivery and entry of construction material by, following a mechanism that would they track every bag of cement and will, uh, vet the beneficiaries, those who will, uh, receive the cement and would calculate how much cement or construction material this house needed.

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Holder: Dan Williams says, part of Israel’s willingness to allow materials into Gaza will depend on who takes over there, if and when an eventual peace deal is achieved.

Williams: Post-war discussions for Gaza are central to the issue of reconstruction for Gaza for a simple reason.  This is a mammoth task.  It’s a mammoth task that will fall to whoever is formally in charge of the Gaza Strip.

It’s not clear what the day after would look like, given that Hamas has no intention of yielding its rule of the Gaza Strip, if it can avoid it. Given that Israel has been balking so far at proposals to reintroduce the Palestinian Authority to the Gaza Strip. 

Holder: The Palestinian Authority, which was set up to govern Gaza about three decades ago, has had limited power over the territory since Hamas took over 17 years ago. But it’s continued to pay for nearly half of the Strip’s official government and public utility spending.

Dan told me that even if the Palestinian Authority were able to wrest control of the Strip fully back from Hamas… Israel may not trust the government to effectively oversee a rebuilding effort.

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Williams: Israel simply does not trust the PA to administer properly. Some elements of the Israeli government indeed want Israel to administer the Gaza Strip indefinitely and even to rebuild Jewish settlements there, which were removed in 2005 when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip and whose return would really be censured, throughout the world among world powers, given they consider the settlements illegal.

It’s very hard to know how anyone could reach a situation where there’d be enough stability and enough bureaucratic consensus and enough fiscal consensus around the Gaza Strip to enable even the beginning of a reconstruction process to address the sheer extent of the damage there.

Holder: “Fiscal consensus…” That lack of clarity on who will govern Gaza… it poses a problem when it comes to securing international aid and resources that are critical to rebuilding. Finding the tens of billions of dollars or more needed to rebuild could take longer with inflation high, and some nations already tired of sending continued aid to Ukraine for its war with Russia.

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And Fares says, many countries may be wary of committing funds towards Gaza as long as peace there remains unstable.

Alghoul: Look at Qatar, for example, it was the largest single donor for Gaza through 17 years of Hamas rule and Israeli blockade. But Qatar signals that it is not interested in getting involved in rebuilding because it had spent over a billion of dollars, uh, in infrastructure projects in Gaza, and all of that has led to nothing. 

Holder: Talks are ongoing this week and Blinken has been described as sounding optimistic.

But for Palestinians whose families, homes, and communities have been decimated, even that eventual rebuilding can never bring back all that they’ve lost. 

Hodali: These people have witnessed so many wars, not one or two or three. They need to find peace. They cannot move on with war after war after war.

Alghoul: If the removal of rubble will take 8 years, the curing of the damage done to the lives of people will take 80 years.

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