Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blincoln is visiting the Middle East this week, where he's trying to secure a ceasefire and hostage deal between Israel and Hamas.
This is a decisive moment, probably the best, maybe the last opportunity to get the hostages home, to get a ceasefire, and to put everyone on a better path to enduring peace and security.
As of Monday afternoon, Blincoln said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Nettannah, who had accepted the current proposal Hamas, has yet to officially respond. It's been ten months of war in Gaza, and according to the Gaza Health Ministry, over forty thousand Palestinians are confirmed dead. The entire Gaza Strip has been impacted. If an immediate ceasefire and eventual peace deal are achieved, the question then becomes, how could the
Gaza Strip rebuild. To get a sense of what this reconstruction could look like and what it might take, we reached out to several Bloomberg reporters who've been covering the conflict. One of them is Ferres Algol. He's a reporter from the Gaza Strip who's now reporting on the war in his hometown from Canada.
I look at the bigtures of the corner stone streets of Gaza, and they can't recognize them due to the scale of destruction.
Farrest told me one of his favorite places in Gaza was called East cohn Unice. It's an area that was once full of olive and citrus trees, where people knew each other so well that they referred to the neighborhoods just by the names of the families who live there.
It's there where you can smell fresh air. It's there where you can escape the dark, humid the houses of Gaza. But now looking at the images of this area, I can see that the houses that are there were demolished and the farm lands were livered by bulldozers.
One of the homes that was destroyed there belonged to a thirty seven year old woman named Rana Abou Nasira. Rana fled her home after October seventh and moved through the strip to avoid Israeli air strikes, but along the way, she told Ferris, she tried to keep an eye on it using Google Earth.
She was hopeful that her house was still standing because she was looking at Google Earth Images without knowing that the service doesn't update the real time. But eventually, when she was able to return to her house, she found it a pile of rebel.
Among Rana couldn't believe she was looking at her neighborhood, her street, her house. She described what she found as crazy, hardly imaginable. Months of dreaming about returning home one day were dashed in an instant. There was nothing left. Rana and her family hope they'll be able to rebuild their home someday, but in the meantime, they've pitched a tent
in the bombed out backyard of their house. Ferris told us that among the nearly two point two million people displaced by the conflict, this is a familiar story.
That's what most of the people will do today. We are talking about seventy percent of the houses of the Gaza Strip are destroyed and damage.
Today on the show, the enormous task of rebuilding Gaza and what role the international community play as the rubble clears. This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. It's been ten months since October seventh, ten months of air strikes, displacement and destruction in the Gaza Strip. There's been lots of reporting on the lack of basic supplies in the strip, no electricity, running water, shortages of food leading to famine. Parahs told me that's been the focus
of a lot of international aid efforts so far. But meanwhile, people are also struggling to access other necessities.
People are struggling with hygiene to stay clean. People don't have washing products, they don't have shamboo, they don't have body wash. Period of products are not available. For many women. There die bars for children.
Emergency services are strained. Hospitals are damaged and overfilled. People are also lacking access to medications that they used to take on a regular basis.
Pharmacists are running law on everything. I personally know about eight people who died just because they did not find the medication and treatment that they used to take before the war.
This is not the first time Gaza has had to rebuild after conflict. Hamas and Israel have gone to war five times just since two thousand and seven. But there are some unique things about this moment that make rebuilding Gaza especially difficult. For one, there's the scale of the destruction. In twenty fourteen, the conflict before this that caused the most damage. Sixty thousand homes were destroyed. Right now, the war has impacted seventy percent of the houses in the
Gaza Strip. About eighty thousand have been completely destroyed and three hundred and seventy thousand have been damaged. And this time the attacks have been more widespread. In that twenty fourteen conflict, the damage was focused on specific areas. This time, nearly all of the strip has been impacted. To understand what rebuilding would take, we also spoke with Fadwahdali, a
Bloomberg reporter based in the West Bank. Fadwa noted that this time there's also a new element of danger to the reconstruction efforts.
One of the major big issues that all experts are saying that this war is completely different is the explosive that have fallen into the strip that have not exploded and they're under the rubble. So this requires a certain experts to handle.
With all these challenges come huge costs. There have been estimates that it could take over eighty billion dollars to rebuild when you factor in hidden costs like the decimated labor market, and for it to happen Fadwa says, a lot of new materials and equipment are needed because right now Gaza doesn't have what it would need to complete this work.
Eighty percent of the machinery it's been destroyed.
Paras Algo says. Step one will be to remove all the debris.
We are talking about forty two million tons of rubble that has accumulated in Gaza since October. If you are to remove this rebel, you need a line of dump trucks starting from New York and ending in singabore.
Dump trucks stretched single file from New York to Singapore.
Can you imagine that? According to estimates, the removal of the rubbile only, which will be the first step in reconstruction, will take at least eighty years eight years.
Pharah says, according to someone he spoke to at the Gaza Municipality, there are around one hundred and twenty dump trucks currently in the strip, So removing all that rubble will require outside help and that would only be step one. The reconstruction of Gaza is a project that will require cooperation and investment from many different countries and organizations around
the world. But getting in that new machinery will also require cooperation from Israel, which currently controls virtually all access to Gaza.
You have to get an approval for all the machinery to enter the strip, unique to make sure constantly the borders are open. None of this will take place without the approval of the Israeli authority.
After the break, what role will the Israeli authority play in rebuilding Gaza and will other countries step in to help? The Israeli government currently controls access to Gaza, and so any machinery or materials the strip needs to rebuild that will require the approval of the Israeli government. But Israel has expressed concerns in the past about material it considers dual use entering the area.
Any material that could conceivably be used for a secondary, unintented or unwanted purpose of a military build up a security threat would be deemed dual use.
We spoke about this dynamic with Dan Williams, a reporter out of Bloomberg's Jerusalem bureau.
It's worth mentioning here that Hamas and other fighting factions in the Gaza Strip have proven very capable when it comes to using rudimentary materials and tools, and using these to build up an effective arsenal and even a citadel. So, for example, we know from previous videos issued by Palestinian fighters that even water pipes can be extracted from the
ground and converted into rockets. We know that tiles and concrete that may have been intended for I don't know, hospitals or schools can be used to line and buttress the hundreds of miles of tunnels fighting tunnels that Hamas and Islamic she Had and other groups have created underneath the Gaza strip.
Far As Algol says, in the past, these sorts of restrictions have had a big impact on rebuilding efforts.
Even after two and fourteen, Israel restricted and regulated the delivery and injury of construction material by following a mechanism that would track every bag of cement and will live it the beneficiaries those who will receive the cement, and would calculate how much cemith or construction material this house needed.
Dan Williams says part of Israel's willingness to allow materials into Gaza will depend on who takes over there if and when an eventual peace deal is achieved.
Postfal discussions for Gaza are central to the issue of reconstruction for Gaza for a simple reason, this is a mammoth task. It's a mammoth task that will fall to whoever is formerly in charge of the Gaza Strip. It's not clear what the day after would look like, given that Hamas has no attention of yielding its rule of the Gaza Strip if it can avoid it, given that Israel has been balking so far at proposals to reintroduce the parasit and authority to the Gaza Strip.
The Palestinian Authority, which was set up to govern Gaza about three decades ago, has had limited power over the territory since Hamas took over seventeen years ago, but it's continued to pay for nearly half of the strip's official government and public utility spending. Dan told me that even if the Palestinian Authority were able to rest control of the strip fully back from Hamas, Israel may not trust the government to effectively oversee a rebuilding effort.
Israel simply does not trust the peace to administer properly. Some elements of the Israeli government indeed want Israel to administer the Gaza Strip indefinitely, and even to rebuild Jurish settlements there, which were removed in two thousand and five when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, and whose return would really be censured throughout the world among world powers,
given they consider the settlements illegal. It's very hard to know how anyone could reach a situation where there'd be enough stability and enough bureaucratic consensus and enough fiscal consensus around the Gaza Strip to enable even the beginning of a reconstruction process to address the sheer extent of the damage there.
Fiscal consensus that lack of clarity on who will govern Gaza it poses a problem when it comes to securing international aid and resources that are critical to rebuilding. Finding the tens of billions of dollars or more needed to rebuild take longer. With inflation high and some nations already tired of sending continued aid to Ukraine for its war with Russia and Pharas says, many countries may be wary of committing funds toward Gaza as long as peace there remains unstable.
Look at Katar, for example, It was the largest single donar for Gaza through seventeen years of Hamas rule. Israeli blocated, but the Qatar signals that it is not interested in getting involved inarybuilding because it had been the over a billion of dollars infrastructure projects in Gaza and all of that has read so nothing.
Talks are ongoing this week, and blinkoln has been described as sounding optimistic. But for Palestinians, whose families, homes and communities have been decimated, even that eventual rebuilding can never bring back all that they've lost.
These people have witnessed so many wars, not one or two or three. They need to find peace. They cannot move on with a war after war after war.
If the removal over Robin will take eight years, the curing of the damage done to the lives of Lieoble will take eighty years.
This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by Julia Press. It was fact checked by Adrianna Tapia and edited by Caitlin Kenney and Caroline Alexander. It was mixed by Alex Sugia. Our senior producers are Kim Gettleson and Naomi Shadan. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso, Nicole biumsterbor Is Our executive producer. Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks so much for listening. Please follow and review The Big Take wherever you get
at your podcasts. It helps new listeners find the show. We'll be back tomorrow.