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War-Ravaged Gaza Faces Multi-Billion Dollar Reconstruction Challenge

Destroyed buildings are seen through the window of an airplane from the US Air Force overflying the Gaza Strip, on March 14, 2024. (AP)
Destroyed buildings are seen through the window of an airplane from the US Air Force overflying the Gaza Strip, on March 14, 2024. (AP)
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War-Ravaged Gaza Faces Multi-Billion Dollar Reconstruction Challenge

Destroyed buildings are seen through the window of an airplane from the US Air Force overflying the Gaza Strip, on March 14, 2024. (AP)
Destroyed buildings are seen through the window of an airplane from the US Air Force overflying the Gaza Strip, on March 14, 2024. (AP)

Billions of dollars will be needed to rebuild Gaza after the war between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, according to assessments from the United Nations.

Israel and Hamas agreed to a deal to halt fighting in the enclave and swap Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners, an official briefed on the agreement said on Wednesday.

Here is a breakdown of the destruction in Gaza from the conflict prompted by the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas, which at the time ruled the Palestinian enclave.

HOW MANY CASUALTIES ARE THERE?

The Hamas attack on Israel killed 1,200 people, according to Israeli tallies. Israel's retaliation has killed more than 46,000 people, according to Gaza's health ministry.

HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE TO CLEAR THE RUBBLE?

The United Nations warned in October that removing 42 million tons of rubble left in the aftermath of Israel's bombardment could take years and cost $1.2 billion. A UN estimate from April 2024 suggested it would take 14 years to clear the rubble.

The debris is believed to be contaminated with asbestos, with some refugee camps struck during the war known to have been built with the material. The rubble also likely holds human remains. The Palestinian Ministry of Health estimated in May that 10,000 bodies were missing under the debris.

HOW MANY BUILDINGS HAVE BEEN DESTROYED?

Rebuilding Gaza's shattered homes will take at least until 2040, but could drag on for many decades, according to a UN report released last year.

Two-thirds of Gaza's pre-war structures - over 170,000 buildings - have been damaged or flattened, according to UN satellite data (UNOSAT) in December. That amounts to around 69% of the total structures of the Gaza Strip.

Within the count are a total of 245,123 housing units, according to an estimate from UNOSAT. Currently, over 1.8 million people are in need of emergency shelter in Gaza, the UN humanitarian office said.

WHAT IS THE INFRASTRUCTURE DAMAGE?

The estimated damage to infrastructure totaled $18.5 billion as of end-January 2024, affecting residential buildings, commerce, industry, and essential services such as education, health, and energy, a UN-World Bank report said.

An update by the UN humanitarian office this month showed that less than a quarter of the pre-war water supplies were available, while at least 68% of the road network has been damaged.

HOW WILL GAZA FEED ITSELF?

More than half of Gaza's agricultural land, crucial for feeding the war-ravaged territory's hungry population, has been degraded by conflict, satellite images analyzed by the United Nations show.

The data reveals a rise in the destruction of orchards, field crops and vegetables in the Palestinian enclave, where hunger is widespread after 15 months of Israeli bombardment.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization said last year that 15,000 cattle, or over 95%, of the total had been slaughtered or died since the conflict began and nearly half the sheep.

WHAT ABOUT SCHOOLS, UNIVERSITIES, RELIGIOUS BUILDINGS?

Palestinian data shows that the conflict has led to the destruction of over 200 government facilities, 136 schools and universities, 823 mosques and three churches. Many hospitals have been damaged during the conflict, with only 17 out of 36 units partially functional as of January, the UN humanitarian office's report showed.

Amnesty International's Crisis Evidence Lab has highlighted the extent of destruction along Gaza's eastern boundary. As of May 2024, over 90% of the buildings in this area, including more than 3,500 structures, were either destroyed or severely damaged.

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Palestinians Confront a Landscape of Israeli Destruction in Gaza’s ‘Ghost Towns’ 

Palestinians walk past the rubble of houses and buildings destroyed during the war, following a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, January 21, 2025. (Reuters)
Palestinians walk past the rubble of houses and buildings destroyed during the war, following a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, January 21, 2025. (Reuters)
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Palestinians Confront a Landscape of Israeli Destruction in Gaza’s ‘Ghost Towns’ 

Palestinians walk past the rubble of houses and buildings destroyed during the war, following a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, January 21, 2025. (Reuters)
Palestinians walk past the rubble of houses and buildings destroyed during the war, following a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, January 21, 2025. (Reuters)

Palestinians in Gaza are confronting an apocalyptic landscape of devastation after a ceasefire paused more than 15 months of fighting between Israel and Hamas.

Across the tiny coastal enclave, where built-up refugee camps are interspersed between cities, drone footage captured by The Associated Press shows mounds of rubble stretching as far as the eye can see — remnants of the longest and deadliest war between Israel and Hamas in their blood-ridden history.

"As you can see, it became a ghost town," said Hussein Barakat, 38, whose home in the southern city of Rafah was flattened. "There is nothing," he said, as he sat drinking coffee on a brown armchair perched on the rubble of his three-story home, in a surreal scene.

Critics say Israel has waged a campaign of scorched earth to destroy the fabric of life in Gaza, accusations that are being considered in two global courts, including the crime of genocide. Israel denies those charges and says its military has been fighting a complex battle in dense urban areas and that it tries to avoid causing undue harm to civilians and their infrastructure.

Military experts say the reality is complicated.

"For a campaign of this duration, which is a year’s worth of fighting in a heavily urban environment where you have an adversary that is hiding in amongst that environment, then you would expect an extremely high level of damage," said Matthew Savill, director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think-tank.

Savill said that it was difficult to draw a broad conclusion about the nature of Israel's campaign. To do so, he said, would require each strike and operation to be assessed to determine whether they adhered to the laws of armed conflict and whether all were proportional, but he did not think the scorched earth description was accurate.

International rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, view the vast destruction as part of a broader pattern of extermination and genocide directed at Palestinians in Gaza, a charge Israel denies. The groups dispute Israel's stance that the destruction was a result of military activity.

Human Rights Watch, in a November report accusing Israel of crimes against humanity, said "the destruction is so substantial that it indicates the intention to permanently displace many people."

From a fierce air campaign during the first weeks of the war, to a ground invasion that sent thousands of troops in on tanks, the Israeli response to a Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, has ground down much of the civilian infrastructure of the Gaza Strip, displacing 90% of its population. The brilliant color of pre-war life has faded into a monotone cement gray that dominates the territory. It could take decades, if not more, to rebuild.

Airstrikes throughout the war toppled buildings and other structures said to be housing fighters. But the destruction intensified with the ground forces, who fought Hamas fighters in close combat in dense areas.

If fighters were seen firing from an apartment building near a troop maneuver, forces might take the entire building down to thwart the threat. Tank tracks chewed up paved roads, leaving dusty stretches of earth in their wake.

The military’s engineering corps was tasked with using bulldozers to clear routes, downing buildings seen as threats, and blowing up Hamas’ underground tunnel network.

Experts say the operations to neutralize tunnels were extremely destructive to surface infrastructure. For example, if a 1.5-kilometer (1-mile) long tunnel was blown up by Israeli forces, it would not spare homes or buildings above, said Michael Milshtein, a former Israeli army intelligence officer.

"If (the tunnel) passes under an urban area, it all gets destroyed," he said. "There’s no other way to destroy a tunnel."

Cemeteries, schools, hospitals and more were targeted and destroyed, he said, because Hamas was using these for military purposes. Secondary blasts from Hamas explosives inside these buildings could worsen the damage.

The way Israel has repeatedly returned to areas it said were under its control, only to have fighters overrun it again, has exacerbated the destruction, Savill said.

That’s evident especially in northern Gaza, where Israel launched a new campaign in early October that almost obliterated Jabaliya, a built up, urban refugee camp. Jabaliya is home to the descendants of Palestinians who fled, or were forced to flee, during the war that led to Israel‘s creation in 1948. Milshtein said Israel's dismantling of the tunnel network is also to blame for the destruction there.

But the destruction was not only caused from strikes on targets. Israel also carved out a buffer zone about a kilometer inside Gaza from its border with Israel, as well as within the Netzarim corridor that bisects north Gaza from the south, and along the Philadelphi Corridor, a stretch of land along Gaza’s border with Egypt. Vast swaths in these areas were leveled.

Amir Avivi, a retired Israeli general, said the buffer zones were an operational necessity meant to carve out secure plots of land for Israeli forces. He denied Israel had cleared civilian areas indiscriminately.

The destruction, like the civilian death toll in Gaza, has raised accusations that Israel committed war crimes, which it denies. The decisions the military made in choosing what to topple, and why, are an important factor in that debate.

"The second fighters move into a building and start using it to fire on you, you start making a calculation about whether or not you can strike," Savill said. Downing the building, he said, "it still needs to be necessary."