Rebuilding shattered Gaza may require a new Marshall plan

The Guardian

07-02-2025

In the week that Donald Trump called for what has been described as an 'ethnic cleansing' of Palestinians from Gaza to rebuild it as a US 'riviera' – an idea as unworkable as it is unhinged – the issues of how, if and when Gaza will be reconstructed have returned to the fore.
The reality is that, for all the promises to rehabilitate the coastal strip after previous conflicts, reconstruction – when it has happened – has at best been very partial and always subordinated to Israel's demands.
One of the most striking cases in point was the aftermath of the Gaza war in 2014, when a complex system was put in place to monitor the distribution of materials for rebuilding in the strip.
After Israel's objection that Hamas would redirect concrete, steel and other resources to tunnel building, a UN oversight process known as the Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism was put in place.
Vetted projects and contractors would present themselves at monitored warehouses. Papers and IDs checked, they could take away what they had been allocated.
Hugely overcomplicated, under-resourced and ultimately set up for failure, the GRM never functioned properly. Instead it allowed a hidden market to quickly emerge, sometimes at the very doors of the secure warehouses where deals would be done for bags of cement.
All of which explains some of the enormous complexities facing the rebuilding of Gaza. It is not simply a physical problem, huge though that undertaking is. It is a political problem as well.
The experience of past reconstruction in Gaza, and Israel's veto on the process, as academics have noted, has been used as a vehicle for sustaining domination and ultimately conflict.
A ban on building materials entering the Gaza Strip has been a feature of Israel's blockade since it was put in place in 2007. Hundreds of items, from drilling equipment and epoxy to concrete moulds, asphalt and wiring, have been designated as dual-use items.
This time the task, and Palestinian needs, will be almost immeasurably larger.
In the first instance there is the question of rubble. According to an estimate from UN-Habitat and the UN Environment Programme, there were 50m tons of rubble and debris in Gaza in December, 17 times more than all the debris generated by other hostilities in the territory since 2008.
The rubble, if collected in one place, would cover five square kilometres. UNEP estimates that disposing of it will take up to 20 years and cost $909m (£730m).
After previous conflicts, Palestinians in Gaza relied heavily on recycling concrete rubble, processing it in sites in open areas, a bone of contention because Israel has said Hamas has taken advantage of recycled concrete for military purposes.
How long reconstruction may take is another issue. While some experts have suggested several decades, the reality is that it entirely depends on political conditions.
After the second world war, German cities – with the benefit of the Marshall plan – were reconstructed in about a decade, although some rebuilding continued until the 1990s.
With a quarter of all structures in Gaza destroyed or severely damaged – including schools and hospitals – and 66% of buildings sustaining at least some damage, the first issue will be to survey what is salvageable and identify the potentially 1 million people in need of long-term shelter and support.
Setting aside Trump's calls to permanently displace Palestinians from Gaza, one risk in reconstruction – experienced in London's East End after the blitz – is the social damage that can be done in moving communities with close social networks.
One successful UN innovation in Jordan's refugee camps during the Syrian civil war was the deployment of mobile shelters, which residents were allowed to reposition to preserve communities and social structures.
In many ways, however, housing may not be the most serious issue. Gaza's water and sanitation system – on the brink of failure even before the onset of the war – has collapsed. It is estimated that up to 70% of water, sanitation and hygiene facilities in north Gaza have sustained damage.
In Gaza City, damage to those same facilities exceeds 90% including to the desalination plants in a coastal strip where residents rely on electric pumps to supply roof tanks and where the power system is also badly damaged.
Beyond the physical infrastructure there is other, less obvious, damage. More than half of Gaza's critical agricultural land has been degraded by conflict and 95% of cattle have been slaughtered along with nearly half the sheep.
That suggests something like a Marshall plan will be required, although almost certainly without the involvement of the Trump administration, which has indicated that it will not pay and has wound up USAid, its development agency.
All of which raises multiple questions including how, with Hamas still a presence in Gaza, a mechanism can be found to allow large-scale rebuilding while holding off Israel and the Trump White House. Only that will bring the nightmare of Palestinians in Gaza to an end.