With the Israeli genocidal war on the besieged Gaza Strip in its eleventh month, a new report reveals that removing the trail of debris from the Israeli bombings will take $700 million dollars.
Removing Gaza debris from Israeli war to take $700m
19 Aug 2024 - 13:40
With the Israeli genocidal war on the besieged Gaza Strip in its eleventh month, a new report reveals that removing the trail of debris from the Israeli bombings will take $700 million dollars.
Bloomberg news agency has quoted the UN officials that the 42 million tons of debris in the war-stricken Gaza could fill a lime of dump trucks stretching from New York to Singapore.
The news agency said that rebuilding Gaza could cost over $80 billion, but such a task would be complicated by unexploded bombs, dangerous contaminants and human remains under the rubble.
Another report by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, estimated that clearing the Gaza Strip of the rubble caused by Israel’s latest war on the Palestinian enclave would take some 15 years.
At least 40,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip since October 2023; 70 percent of buildings have been destroyed and 2.2 million people, cut off from water, food and medical care, have been forced to leave their homes. In addition, more than half of the coastal enclave’s farmland has been destroyed and it will be extremely difficult to restore the agricultural sector, according to the agency.
“The cost of rebuilding will be prohibitive. Construction sites on this scale have to be empty of people, creating another wave of displacements,” Bloomberg quoted Mark Jarzombek, an architectural history professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as saying.
“What we see in Gaza is something that we have never seen before in the history of urbanism,” he said, adding, “It is not just the destruction of physical infrastructure, it is the destruction of basic institutions of governance and of a sense of normality.”
That comes second to more nearly 40,100 lives lost during the strikes with another 10,000 still missing, presumed to be trapped under the rubble.
Story Code: 646865