Tuesday, October 23, 2024 - A new report from the United Nations has warned that it could take multiple decades to rebuild Gaza after Israel's offensive against Hamas, one of the deadliest and most destructive military campaigns since World War II.
The U.N. Conference on Trade and Development said that if
the war ends tomorrow and Gaza returns to the status quo before Hamas' Oct. 7,
2023, attack on Israel, it could take 350 years for its battered economy to
return to its precarious prewar level.
Before the war, Gaza was under an Israeli and Egyptian
blockade imposed after Hamas seized power in 2007. Four previous wars and
divisions between Hamas and the Western-backed Palestinian Authority in the
West Bank also took a toll on Gaza's economy.
The current war has caused staggering destruction across the
territory, with entire neighborhoods destroyed and roads and critical
infrastructure in ruins. Mountains of rubble laced with decomposing bodies and
unexploded ordnance would have to be cleared before rebuilding could begin.
“Once a ceasefire is reached,
a return to the pre-October 2023 status quo would not put Gaza on the path
needed for recovery and sustainable development,” the report said. “If the
2007–2022 growth trend returns, with an average growth rate of 0.4 percent, it
will take Gaza 350 years just to restore the GDP levels of 2022.”
Even then, GDP per capita would decline “continuously and
precipitously” as the population grows, it said.
Israel says the blockade is needed to prevent Hamas from
importing arms and blames the militant group for Gaza's plight.
“There is no future for the
people of Gaza as long as their people continue to be occupied by Hamas,”
Israel's ambassador to the U.N., Danny Danon, said in response to the report.
Three hundred and fifty years is a long time. It would be as
though England and the Netherlands were only now recovering from the wars they
fought against each other in the late 1600s.
Rami Alazzeh, author of the report, said he based the
calculation on the decimation of the economy during the first seven months of
the war, and how long it would take to restore it at the GDP growth rate Gaza
averaged from 2007 until 2022. Gross domestic product, or GDP, is the sum total
of all goods and services produced in a country or territory.
“The message is the recovery
in Gaza depends on the conditions in which the recovery would happen,” he said.
“We’re not saying that it will take Gaza 350 years to recover because that
means that Gaza will never recover.”
At the end of January, the World Bank estimated $18.5
billion of damage nearly the combined economic output of the West Bank and Gaza
in 2022. That was before some intensely destructive Israeli ground operations,
including in the southern border city of Rafah.
A U.N. assessment in September based on satellite footage
found roughly a quarter of all structures in Gaza had been destroyed or
severely damaged. It said around 66% of structures, including more than 227,000
housing units, had sustained at least some damage.
The Shelter Cluster, an international coalition of aid
providers led by the Norwegian Refugee Council found that it would take 40
years to rebuild all the homes.
Even in best-case circumstances, recovery could take decades
The report says that even under the most optimistic
scenario, with a projected growth rate of 10%, Gaza’s recovery would still take
decades.
“Assuming no military
operation, and freedom of movement of goods and people and a significant level
of investment, and population growth of 2.8 percent per year, UNCTAD estimates
that Gaza’s GDP per capita will return to its 2022 level by 2050," it
said.
A separate report released Tuesday by the U.N. Development
Program said that with major investment and the lifting of economic
restrictions, the Palestinian economy as a whole, including the West Bank,
could be back on track by 2034. In the absence of both, its predictions align
with those of UNCTAD.
Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly
civilians, and abducted another 250 when they stormed into southern Israel on
Oct. 7, 2023. Around 100 hostages are still inside Gaza, a third of whom are
believed to be dead.
Israel's offensive has killed over 42,000 Palestinians,
according to local health officials, who don't distinguish combatants from
civilians but say more than half the dead are women and children. It has
displaced around 90% of Gaza's population of 2.3 million, forcing hundreds of
thousands into squalid tent camps.
“Everybody now calls for a
cease-fire, but people forget that once the cease-fire is done, the 2.2 million
Palestinians will wake up having no homes, children having no schools, no
universities, no hospitals, no roads," Alazzeh said.
All that will take a long time to rebuild, and could prove
impossible under the blockade.
“If we go back to where it
was before, and we shouldn’t go back to the way it was before,” he said,
"then I think it means that Gaza’s done.”
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