After more than 15 months of relentless Israeli air and ground assaults on Gaza, many of the tiny Palestinian enclave's 2 million residents are homeless and scrambling to obtain basic necessities. If last week's ceasefire holds, experts caution that rebuilding the devastated territory will take decades and cost tens of billions of dollars.
The three-phase ceasefire deal places the reconstruction of Gaza as the final phase, following a permanent end to the war. Dima Toukan, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute, says it's important to acknowledge that this last phase could be a long way off — or never happen at all.
"The path forward beyond the first phase of the agreement is fraught with challenges and remains unclear," she says.
The United Nations estimates that $50 billion will be required to rebuild Gaza, which occupies an area about the size of Philadelphia on the Mediterranean coast between Israel and Egypt. Even the rosiest of estimates project it would take a decade. But other predictions are much more dire. A U.N. report issued in September estimates $18.5 billion worth of damage was done to Gaza's infrastructure from the war's start through the end of January 2024, and that once a ceasefire is reached, "a return to the 2007–2022 growth trend would imply that it would take Gaza 350 years just to restore GDP to its level in 2022."
Here are five questions about the enormous reconstruction challenges faced by Gaza.
What is the scope of the destruction?
"At least a million people won't have homes to return to," says Shelly Culbertson, a senior researcher at the think tank RAND. Most utilities, such as electricity, sewage, water and communications are not working in Gaza, and the vast majority of hospitals and schools have been destroyed.
Somdeep Sen, an associate professor of international development at Roskilde University in Denmark, says, "What we have witnessed is not just the material destruction of Gaza but also the destruction of the very fabric of Palestinian life in the enclave."
In October, a year after the war began, the U.N. said Gaza's human development index, a statistical measure that summarizes a country's average human development, was expected to drop to a level not seen since 1955, "erasing over 69 years of progress" there.
Who will pay?
The biggest issue may be the most fundamental one: Where will the money come from? For obvious reasons, Israel is an unlikely source. Meanwhile, neither Egypt nor Jordan has the resources or political will to add much, Sen says.
Instead, wealthy Gulf states such as Qatar may have to step in, he says. Even so, "without a large cohort of donors committed to the long-term recovery of Gaza, reaching [the $50 billion] mark will be difficult," he says.
Even without offering funding, Israel does have an important role to play, Sen says. "How Israel chooses to implement and interpret the ceasefire agreement and subsequently the nature/extent of its military control over the Gaza Strip will determine how much and how quickly the enclave can recover."
As for funding, Culbertson, who has done extensive work on the West Bank and Gaza, says the U.S. and European Union are also likely to provide funds.
One key issue is whether Israel continues its "dual use" import restrictions for Gaza on items it deems could be used either for legitimate civilian purposes or to make weapons, Culbertson says. "The list … is fairly wide. It includes many materials necessary for reconstruction, like concrete, timber, rebar."
What will be the biggest challenges?
Simply clearing debris will be a monumental task. Not only are there massive amounts of rubble to contend with, but it will have to be carefully handled for such things as unexploded ordnance, says Mark Jarzombek, an architectural history professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Jarzombek has studied how cities such as Dresden, Germany — which was gutted by Allied bombing in 1945 — were able to recover after World War II.
War-era buildings were mostly made of brick and wood, he says. "When those were bombed, they left big piles of that stuff," Jarzombek explains. As a result, postwar Dresden witnessed "brigades of women who would have wheelbarrows and go to the brick piles and then dump them in particular places."
Not so in Gaza, where buildings are made out of steel and concrete, he says. "In other words, you can't get just local civilians [to] … take the stuff apart. You need special equipment: You need bulldozers. You need cranes," Jarzombek says.
Toukan, of the Middle East Institute, says the operation to remove rubble "will be a huge and costly endeavor" and will be complicated by occurring "in an area where the population cannot move freely."
Water, sewage and electricity systems are all vital. Gaza relied heavily on desalination plants to supply water before the war, but many have been destroyed. Meanwhile, since the start of the war, the electricity infrastructure has virtually collapsed, according to the United Nations. Restoring those services will be difficult.
Israeli bunker-busting bombs used to destroy Hamas tunnels may also have destabilized the ground under buildings, Jarzombek says. "Before you can even really do the housing, you need all the infrastructure that's going to be necessary. ... The pipes have to be laid."
Given limited resources, "rebuilding Gaza will entail prioritizing what to rebuild and when," Sen says. As a result, "the path to complete recovery will be drawn out."
Who will manage the work?
Gaza will likely emerge from the conflict without a functioning government. Even if Hamas remains intact, it will be severely weakened after Israel's relentless targeting of its leadership, and the Islamist group's grip on the territory will likely be tenuous at best.
"This would need to be led (at least ostensibly) by a Palestinian partner," Toukan says. The only viable partner is the much maligned Palestinian Authority, which she says has "a record of poor functionality and does not enjoy much legitimacy amongst Palestinians."
That means there won't be the kind of central bureaucracy needed to oversee rebuilding on such a massive scale, Jarzombek says.
In Ukraine, he notes by contrast, you also see "very badly damaged cities and towns and villages." But there's still a working nation-state in Kyiv "that can monitor the funds and the flows and have some commitment to the legality of it all."
That is necessary to facilitate countless basic and essential ground-level decisions — the ability to say, "'OK, that building has got to go … and for the next five years, we can house you here and then we can move you in there,'" according to Jarzombek.
He wonders who will make those kinds of decisions in Gaza. "It's not clear," Jarzombek says. "Who's going to make them in a way that the Israelis are going to accept and that the Saudis or the Qataris or whoever is financing this stuff will accept?"
Without a solid government in place, there will also be concerns about corruption, says Culbertson. "Reconstruction funding is going to be all hands on deck," she says, but drawing on the lessons that the U.S. learned about corrupt contractors and officials during reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, "it's going to be hard to spend money with accountability."
But setting aside these massive obstacles, it's important that Gaza holds a stake in its own reconstruction, says Sen, the Roskilde University professor.
"Palestinians in Gaza have gone through numerous cycles of destruction and rebuilding, not least since the start of the [Israeli] siege," he says. "This manner of rebuilding following immense tragedy has been a hallmark of national struggle."
When does temporary become permanent?
Providing for people in Gaza could prove all but impossible, as Israel's parliament has approved severing all ties with UNRWA, the U.N. refugee agency for Palestinians.
Toukan says dismantling UNRWA "would significantly impede the humanitarian response and recovery efforts, considering the organization's unique positioning and capacity to provide services."
The likely slow pace of reconstruction means that many Palestinians in Gaza could face a lifetime living in refugee camps. This has happened repeatedly across the globe, Culbertson says. Services grow up around the camps, where many people are forced to make the best of a bad situation.
"It's often a hugely flawed assumption that reconstruction will be fast." It rarely is, she says.
Beginning in 1948, a series of refugee camps in Gaza have already become more or less permanent communities, she says. "They built cinder block homes and other buildings where their tents had been, all in this initial footprint of a tent camp."
Jarzombek highlights yet another example. "In Syria, they built these temporary camps for the refugees coming out of Iraq and other places that have been there now for 10 years or more," he says. "They'll be there for another decade, if not more. ... We have this illusion that they're temporary, but temporary things inevitably become permanent."
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