Joan Mas Autonell |
Gaza (EFE) The latest, against Islamic Jihad in May, caused devastation that has barely been repaired and more than 1,200 Palestinians remain displaced, without funds to rebuild their homes.
“We are alone,” Faraj Banat, a 29-year-old farmer from the city of Beit Lahia, in the north of the enclave, told EFE as he watches how an excavator collects the rubble to which his house was reduced by an Israeli attack on May 13, which left some 50 people homeless.
It happened on the last day of a harsh five-day offensive, which left 34 Palestinians dead, 130 homes destroyed and 3,500 houses affected by material damage, according to the Gaza government, controlled by the Islamist group Hamas since 2007, when Israel imposed a land, sea and air blockade on the enclave that has isolated its almost 2.3 million inhabitants.
humanitarian crisis
In a small strip of land with growing impoverishment, 50% of the population unemployed and 80% of residents dependent on international aid, the escalation in May aggravated the existing humanitarian crisis and worsened the outlook.
The destruction caused by hundreds of Israeli bombardments is added to the unfinished reconstruction tasks of escalations of previous years.
These peaked in the 2014 Operation Protective Edge -with more than 2,200 Palestinian deaths- and other conflicts that have been repeated annually since 2021, in addition to the 2008-09 and 2012 wars, of which there are still consequences.
All of this plunged Gaza into a loop of devastation.
“Reconstruction is very slow” and “every year more families are added to the displaced,” lamented Jawad al Agha, deputy minister of Public Works and Housing for the Strip, to EFE, who urged the international community to “intervene urgently.”
shortage of funds
There are still some 2,000 houses destroyed and 90,000 damaged to be repaired. The budget for this rises to 200 million dollars, but contributions from donors – Arab or Western countries and international organizations – are scarce as they “direct their priorities elsewhere”, in the face of the perpetual crises in Gaza.
For this reason, there are still no funds to rebuild the infrastructure destroyed in May, damages worth 9 million dollars.
The deficit due to economic ruin prevents the Gaza authorities from paying their public employees, so assuming the cost of reconstruction “is impossible,” Agha complains.
All this keeps displaced more than 1,200 people – some 236 families – who lost their homes in May, in great uncertainty, renting or in the homes of relatives or friends.
“There is nothing to do with Gaza,” Suheil Banat, a 21-year-old boy who walks through the destroyed remains of his home in Beit Lahia, told EFE. Like other young people -the majority in an enclave where more than 70% of the inhabitants are under 30- he does not see any future and would try to emigrate if he had money.
But he only earns 40 shekels a day (10 euros), with an unstable job as a day laborer in agriculture, which is barely enough for family food expenses.
Like her relative Faraj, Suheil now lives in a rented house with her parents and has yet to receive any help to pay the rent, with electricity costs soaring in the enclave, mired in a chronic energy crisis exacerbated by high temperatures this summer, when there is barely five hours of electricity a day.
memory attacks
The psychological consequences of the destruction also affect minors like Hiba Banat, a 17-year-old student, who looks sadly at the ruins of what was her room, where she left at the last moment before an Israeli military plane left it in pieces.
“I had not seen such a thing in my life, I was shocked for a month,” she told EFE.
Like the rest of the Banat family, Hiba says Israel attacked his property despite no militants or Islamic Jihad activity.
For its part, the Israeli Army assured at the time that the place was “an operational command center,” and after consulting EFE, it said it was reviewing details of the case.
Denunciations of destruction of civilian infrastructure by Israeli forces in their offensives on Gaza are common.
In a recent investigation, Amnesty International denounced that in the latest escalation “Israel illegally destroyed Palestinian homes, often without military necessity”, which it sees as “collective punishment against the civilian population”.