New York (UNA/WAM) - International organizations and a number of donors have begun to consider aid plans and financing and development programs that should be launched with the entry into force of the ceasefire agreement in Gaza, to confront the enormous challenges left by military operations over nearly 15 months of war that caused unprecedented human suffering.
One of the most prominent of these challenges lies in the process of removing and cleaning the rubble and massive remnants of war resulting from the destruction of entire neighborhoods and residential areas and the majority of infrastructure institutions throughout the Strip, including hundreds of schools, hospitals, and the financial, economic, agricultural, industrial, production sectors, among others.
Initial estimates circulating within the UN system indicate that the massive amounts of rubble resulting from the destruction in Gaza may exceed 42 million tons, while the initial cost of transporting and disposing of it has been estimated at about one billion dollars, not to mention the huge cost that the reconstruction process in the Strip may require, which may exceed 80 billion dollars.
The United Nations, in a report recently prepared by a number of specialized international and UN organizations, considered the huge amounts of rubble in the Gaza Strip, including accumulated war remnants, to be a major threat to health, the environment, development programs, and the return of the population to their normal lives.
Within the framework of its humanitarian and development mandates in the Palestinian territories, the United Nations stresses that removing the rubble of war and rebuilding Gaza requires international cooperation and joint coordination efforts that contribute to strengthening the confrontation of the set of enormous challenges of this process, which calls for innovative solutions and sustainable international support for reconstruction in the sector, which restores hope and normal life to its afflicted residents.
As a first UN step towards this direction, the UN agencies operating in the field, headed by the UN Development Programme and the UN Environment Programme, formed a UN working group tasked with developing a comprehensive framework to coordinate the unprecedented removal of rubble throughout the Gaza Strip, at a time when the UN confirms that the amounts of rubble resulting from the recent military operations in the Strip are larger, in terms of volume, than the amounts of rubble resulting from previous Israeli military operations in Gaza since 2008.
The working group includes the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, UNRWA, WFP, UNMAS, UNDP, UNESCO, UN-Habitat, UNEP, UNOPS, the World Bank and other relevant international entities.
Dr Hanan Balkhi, WHO Regional Director for the Eastern Mediterranean, expressed the organization’s hope that the current ceasefire in Gaza will continue to the level of a permanent cessation of hostilities, noting in particular the extent of the psychological trauma that the entire people of Gaza are currently suffering from due to the unprecedented violence, forced displacement and starvation they have been subjected to, saying: “All people in Gaza are currently living in a state of unprecedented grief.”
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