In the ruins of the Gaza Strip
and creating a potential health crisis for residents.
In his remarks last week, announcing a five-day extension of the ceasefire, Palestinian delegation chief Azzam alAhmed said that there had been significant progress in efforts to lift the Israeli economic blockade on Gaza – but that there were disagreements over reconstruction issues.
The debates will not only determine whether residents can rebuild after the war, they also promise to be an important tool in Israeli efforts to weaken Hamas’s hold on the territory. As Finance Minister Yair Lapid put it, Israel would demand that “there is no rehabilitation without some sort of demilitarisation (of Gaza)”.
The reconstruction effort would begin with a donor conference, which would probably be held in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh next month, Frode Mauring, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) special representative for Gaza and the West Bank, told Foreign Policy. The funds would be funnelled through the Palestinian Authority, which would be tasked with leading the reconstruction effort.
The challenge, however, is not simply drumming up enough money – it’s reconciling the needs of reconstruction with the political demands of Gaza’s two anti-Hamas neighbours, Egypt and Israel.
The importation of building materials to rebuild Gaza’s tens of thousands of destroyed homes is one of the most potentially fraught issues. Hamas used large quantities of cement, allegedly smuggled in across the border with Egypt during the presidencies of Hosni Mubarak and Mohamed Mursi, to build its extensive tunnel network, which posed one of the most deadly threats to Israel during the war. For that reason, Jerusalem has allowed only UN agencies to import cement – and it is going to be loath to ease restrictions on construction materials that could be used by the Palestinian Islamist group to rebuild its tunnel network. However, Mauring insists that the elaborate mechanisms to ensure the proper use of cement will have to be relaxed to accomplish the massive rebuilding task in store for Gaza.
The current system requires UN relief agencies to bring only the cement that is needed for a given project to a work site, and then to bring back the amount that isn’t used by day’s end to a central warehouse, all the while keeping records of the cement used and in the warehouses. That proved viable when the UNDP had only a handful of projects in Gaza, Mauring said, but it will be impossible during the reconstruction effort.
“(These mechanisms) will be a major, major bottleneck in terms of Gaza reconstruction if it is to continue,” he said. “We cannot personally be at 50 000 sites to monitor every single bag of cement.”
Mauring suggested a system in which the UNDP deliver cement to families whose houses had been partially destroyed. The families would then have an incentive to use the cement to rebuild their homes, he said, rather than handing the materials over to Hamas. Whether Israel would agree to such a policy, however, remains to be seen.
There are even more urgent problems than the supply of cement. Gaza’s only power plant was hit during the war, leaving most residents with only two to four hours of electricity a day. Mauring estimated that before the war, Gaza received about 300 megawatts from the plant and power lines from Egypt and Israel. With the power plant offline and the electrical grid from Israel damaged, he said Gaza was receiving about half of that.
The power plant isn’t important for keeping only the lights on. “The fact that the plant was hit means sewage pumps aren’t working, water pumps aren’t working,” said Nate McCray, a spokesman for Oxfam International. “So you see sewage and brackish water seeping up into the (refugee) shelters and contaminating the water systems.”
Mauring floated the possibility of bringing bargemounted power plants to the shores of Gaza while the plant is being repaired, which could take more than a year. As the Israeli Navy controls access to the Palestinian territory by sea, however, this is yet another topic that will be subject to drawn-out negotiations.
But back in Mohammad alTalbani’s al-Awda factory, turning the lights back on is the least of his worries. He has little patience for questions about how he will rebuild.
It all depends, he said, on the politics – if Israel lifts the blockade on Gaza. This factory, he said, took him 40 years to build, and it will take him four to five years to reconstruct, even if he has the necessary money and raw materials.
“I began from under zero, and now I have 5 percent (of what I had before the war),” he said. “So I will work to rebuild it – this is my life.” – Washington Post-Bloomberg
Kenner is Middle East editor at Foreign Policy.