GAZA (Palestine Foundation Information Center) 10 months of war on the Gaza Strip has left 42 million tons of debris in the war-torn territory and removing it is expected to cost as much as $700 million and will take many years, Bloomberg news agency reported recently, quoting UN figures.
“That is enough rubble to fill a line of dump trucks stretching from New York to Singapore,” according to Bloomberg.
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.
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.”
