What a Cease-Fire in Gaza Would Look Like

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For somebody like me who has lived four years in Gaza, and I know every street in Gaza. When I look at the pictures of the neighborhoods, I hardly recognize them due to the scale of destruction.

Faras Algol is a Bloomberg reporter from the Gaza strip.

That's where I was born, That's where I grew up.

He's been living in Canada since July twenty twenty one, and he's covering the war from his home there week to week. He says, the satellite images he sees change dramatically.

They were grayish, because you know, the color of the buildings in Gaza is mostly gray. But when you look at the same picture at the same location after a week or two, you find it has become like yellowish because of the sand. Because this means that the homes were blown up or were livid to the ground.

Since the start of the war in October, most of Faris's family has left Gaza. His mother made it to Egypt last month, but his sister is still there with her children and she's pregnant. Ferris has been trying to help her get out. Before the baby is due in two months.

I hate listening from her because the first thing she asks is what happened? When are we leaving Gaza? Have things worked out? And they really have no answer. She hopes that if she was still in Gaza by the time of her delivery, there will be ceasefire so she can at least get the minimum care.

For millions of people. Like Faris's sister, the promise of a ceasefire, even a brief one, could be critical. About a quarter of Gaza's two point three million people are facing starvation according to the UN. For weeks there have been ceasfire talks involving the US, Egypt, Qatar, Israel, and Hamas. The goal was to secure a ceasefire deal by the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, but now that deadline has been missed and questions remain about when

Mosques are usually full with people, the month is marked by festivities, by family gatherings for large meals. All these things are unattainable in Gaza these days.

The White House had hoped to reach a deal in time for Ramadan.

It happens to be a time when passions political religious nationalists often run high, and so the goal was to avoid the conflict being underway at a time like that, and also to offer relief of some kind of course to those under siege in Gaza.

That's Ethan Brauner, Bloomberg's Israel Bureau chief. He told us it was a long shot goal to begin with Hamas, which controls Gaza, is designated a terrorist organization by Israel, the US, and the EU. It's October seventh attack on Israel killed over one thousand people and took hundreds hostage. Israel has stated that it won't end this war until

There is a big gap.

Israel wants a temporary pause, Hamas wants an end and square in that circle has been the big challenge all.

The about is even Hamas and Israel, they talk either about hostages or fighting. Unfortunately, they are not paying attention to the suffering of the civilians of the people.

More than thirty thousand Palestinians have been killed since the start of the war in Gaza, according to the Hamas run health ministry. Every day that talks dragon the situation on the ground gets more desperate. We asked Ferris and Ethan what people are most in need of right now in Gaza.

Most people in dire need of food. They are hungry most of the time. People depend on unhealthy foods such as cans, and they eat also helps it that are unsafe. Diseases are spreading in the south of Gaza Strip because of the jamming of people into displacement locations and intense cities.

Temporary housing, power and internet come and go, water comes and goes, and of course the difficulty of getting reliable food has been increasingly a problem, especially in the north. There are somewhere between three hundred and five hundred thousand people still in northern Gaza living among the rubble without access to reliable aid convoys, so they are at greatest risk.

NGOs and countries around the world are at the ready to provide aid. In some cases they're already doing what they can.

So there's the entire European Union, Spanish Front, the British, and then there's the entire well off Sunni world, that is to say, the United Arab Membrate, Saudi Arabia, Jordan. So these are all countries that are involved. They are already involved in setting up field hospitals in Gaza and floating hospitals offshore.

The US has air dropped aid into Gaza, but President Biden has also committed to building a floating pier to deliver resources to Gaza from the water.

They're going to build it at sea and then sort of push it toward northern Gaza, and then there's going to be this corridor of aid coming on ships from Cyprus. The expectation is that those ships would be the equivalent of about two hundred trucks a day, so that's nearly half of the need. But it's not going to happen quickly.

Crucially, any of these plans would require the support of the Israeli military on the ground to distribute aid, but there is deep distrust between Israeli troops and the Palestinian people who now need them for basic necessities. Of violent incident late last month exposed how fraught the situation is.

This was in North Gaza Strip. Israel allows a few trucks of the aid at the into North Gaza, and this is way lower than what the people need there. That's why people go and wait for the trucks.

As a convoy of aid trucks reached a crowd of people waiting, the crowd reportedly surged toward the trucks.

There was a mela around a convoy early in the morning, and Israeli soldiers felt threatened and fired.

A stampede broke out.

You can imagine how this pushing and the stambiding and when thousands gathered waiting for the food the spirit. You can imagine such incidents will happen.

Hamason Israel dispute exactly how many people died from Israeli fire and how many died from the subsequent stampede, but over one hundred people were killed. In the best case scenario, a six week ceasefire could provide a crucial moment for humanitarian relief to flood into the region.

What I understand is some hundreds of trucks need to come in every day, Okay, they need to have stuff to get people back on their feet in terms of nutrition and in terms of other basic necessities.

In normal times, five hundred the truckloads of goods, food and other supplies used to get into Gaza. Now this number is varying around one hundred the truck.

In a moment, we unpack the on the ground challenges across Gaza to distributing aid and what a ceasefire could mean for surveying what it would take and what it would cost to rebuild Gaza after the war. The deadly incident in Gaza City in late February revealed how desperate the situation on the ground is and also how reliant people in Gaza are on the Israeli military to distribute aid, and it's hard to overstate how fraught that dynamic is.

Ethan says after October seventh, which was a deeply traumatic day for Israelis, there's not a great deal of patience for that conversation in Israel today.

And in fact, one of the slightly shocking things being here is how little attention the misery in Gaza has drawn in Israel. It's almost never on the front page, it's never on television, and it's just, you know, there's a war from their perspective, because there are one hundred plus hostages still held there, and there's still just an incredible amount of emotional and political damage that this country is undergoing and feeling as a result of that attack.

But even if Israel wants as little involvement as possible, it controls what goes in and out of Gaza, and increasingly, how aid moves through it. Pharaohs and Ethan helped us trace the complex path of relief aid into and through the country.

The aid flows into Gaza through Israel and Egypt in North Sinai. In Egypt, the Egyptians have opened an airport there and the dozens of cargo airplanes and military airplanes land in the airport in Alarish, and they send the aid to Gaza through trucks and the Egyptian side. The lines of the trucks waiting to enter Gaza are too long that they reached two kilometers of length.

The dispute between the Israelis and the international aid organizations over who is responsible for the lack of sufficient aid. The aid organizations say that Israel has imposed a series of security checks that have been prohibitive in getting the stuff in. If you talk to the Israelis, they will tell you that they are able to scan forty four trucks an hour. The trucks that are stuck on the border are not their fault. It's because of the other side.

Once aid trucks make it into the territory, they face roads turned into rubble and a lack of local security forces. In previous wars, hamas helped to distribute aid during ceasefires.

Usually when there is a seas fare, hamas police forces will go back into action. They will oversea and they guard the truck the aid convoys.

But during this war, Israel does not want Hamas to help distribute aid.

So one of the problems is that the entire social structure and political structure in Gaza is run by Hamas and has been run by Hamas, and Israel considers those people who work for hamas legitimate targets. So when some convoys began to come in and former Hummas police officers were involved in guarding them and so forth, the Israelis took those people out, pushed them aside and said, you guys are Hummas people. You're not going to do this.

The result is that aid isn't reaching the people who need.

It most young men, some are some not or most likely to get a hold of stuff, whether it's strapped from the air or comes in by truck. And those who are a frail and elderly and children are least lucky, and of course they're in greatest need.

And so the Israeli military on the ground has had to be part of bringing these supplies to people.

You can't ignore the fact that they are the ruling force on the ground, and it is therefore their responsibility. I think morally and legally to make sure that the aid gets the people who need it.

Israel does have international aid organizations it could theoretically partner with during a ceasefire, but there are complications there too.

There's an enormous amount of blood between UNRAH and Israel.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency UNRAH is one of the key partners bringing aid to Palestinians on the ground. A few weeks ago, the Israeli government alleged that some UNRA staffers were involved in the October seventh attacks.

We're talking about ten or twelve thousand or thirteen thousand employees of UNRA, and we're talking about I think a dozen or twenty known cases, so it's not overwhelming. But because of the bad blood, cooperation is going to be hard. And there are a bunch of a bunch of unra's staffers who were killed in Israeli bombardments in the first

The best case scenario for Palestinian civilians trying to survive this war, is that a six week ceasefire deal happens and it holds that time. As aid workers tend to immediate nutrition, housing, and medical needs, there might be a chance to assess the damage to the entire territory and to start to consider what it would take to rebuild it.

That six weeks maybe enough only to assist the deliver of destruction, the scale of destruction. That's it.

So it's not enough time to rebuild.

Slamgazan's estimate that if you lit in a heavy machinery and the workers and the money to start rebuilding, you need at least three years just to remove the rubel, to collect the rubel before starting actual rebuilding.

Confronting that timeline brings us back to a fundamental question about a ceasefire, how long could it hold.

One of the goals of the international community in creating the six week pause is to sort of hope to build on it and to sort of get everyone to calm down and to allow for this to keep going as a you know, then to have another pause and to effectively create a day after situation, whether there's a six week thing. And then another part of the war and then an end of the war or six week thing that begins the end of the war right away.

Long plans.

Looking ahead, Pharaes, do we have any sense of what it would take in terms of money and resources to truly rebuild Gaza after this war.

For this to happen, the blockade must be lifted in Gaza, and the blockade cannot be lifted if Hamas is to remain in Poa.

The blockade Pharas is referring to is an Israeli government controlled restriction on what goods and materials can come into Gaza.

Given the impact on the scale of the destruction. In order for a successful rebuilding process, all crossing points need to be opened to operate twenty four hours a day without any restrictions. The blockade has to be removed, and billions of dollars need to get into Gaza in the form of construction materials heavy machinery to start rebuilding. And all of this cannot happen without an agreement on the day one, the day after the war. We don't know who will run Gaza after the war.

It isn't clear what most Palestinians on the ground want in terms of post war leadership.

That's why there is no plan or vision for the reconstruction of Gaza. As long as there is no agreement on who will run Gaza.

And if the ceasefire deal does happen but it doesn't hold, people will be plummeted back into the situation they face now.

There was a ceasefire in November, and when it ended, the hostilities resumed momentarily, and they quickly they resumed the fighting and the suffering was back again. They disavered again, food disavered again. And I think this is the similar scenario, unfortunately that we might we may see in the coming weeks after.

This is fire.

Meanwhile, Farah says his sister, like so many Palestinians, is trying to figure out contingency plans for her health and safety.

She's trying to work on a plan B in case she is to deliver while she is still in Gaza. We are talking to a doctor there to see where if he can help in case of emergency and she's moving next week to stay at other friends olive closer to the hospital.

Well, my thoughts are with her and with your whole family, and we really appreciate you bringing us that personal story because I know it must be hardy, So thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for listening to the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by Julia Press and Alex Sugera. It was edited by Caitlin Kenny and Naomi Shaven. It was fact checked by David Fox and Julia Press. It was mixed by Alex Suguera. Our senior producers are Naomi Shaven and Jill Diddy Carly. We get editorial direction from Elizabeth Ponso. Nicole Beemsterbor is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is our head of podcasts. Thanks for tuning in. We'll be back tomorrow.

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