Questions About Gaza Reconstruction Submitted To Office Of The Prime Minister, Ministry Of Defense, And Ministry Of Foreign Affairs In Israel. Only MFA Responded, But Does Not Want To Discuss It.
Questions About Gaza Reconstruction Submitted Office Of The Prime Minister (PMO), Ministry Of Defense (MOD), And Ministry Of Foreign Affairs (MFA) In The State Of Israel.
Only MFA Responded, But Does Not Want To Discuss It.
Sent: 27 December 2023
To: pniot@mfa.gov.il (Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
Subject: Media Questions
Sent: 27 December 2023
To: nitzanc@Press.pmo.gov.il (Office of the Prime Minister)
Subject: Media Questions
Sent: 27 December 2023
To: pniot@mod.gov.il (Ministry of Defense)
Subject: Media Questions
Who does the government of the State of Israel believe should be responsible for the reconstruction of infrastructure and buildings in Gaza once the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the government of the State of Israel have achieved their goals in Gaza? Which public sector entities, private sector entities, government-controlled entities?
NOTE: No response from the Office of the Prime Minister or the Ministry of Defense.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Jerusalem, State of Israel
28 December 2023
Thank you for your e-mail. The State of Israel is cooperating with various international parties in order to improve the situation of Gazans. For example, Cyprus and Israel are currently jointly working an agreement, with the U.K, to establish a new humanitarian aid corridor to benefit civilians in the Gaza Strip. In addition, Israel reopened (December 12) the Kerem Shalom crossing between southern Israel and Gaza to improve the procedure for transferring humanitarian aid. The establishment of field hospitals in the Gaza Strip by the UAE and the transfer of equipment from Jordan are further examples of measures being taken to improve the humanitarian situation. Israel will continue to support the provision of international aid, as long as the Hamas terrorist organization does not commandeer the support intended to benefit civilians in Gaza, as has been happening. Thank you and warmest regards from Israel,
Sent: 28 December 2023
To: pniot@mfa.gov.il
Subject: Follow-Up To Answer Received For Media Questions
First, thank you so very much for the prompt response to my questions. Given the enormity of your workload, I appreciate the effort. Second, while the information provided included detail, the information was not answers to my specific questions. I was not asking about humanitarian assistance- I was asking about reconstruction strategy. I again provide my question and would appreciate a further review: Who does the government of the State of Israel believe should be responsible for the reconstruction of infrastructure and buildings in Gaza once the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the government of the State of Israel have achieved their goals in Gaza? Which public sector entities, private sector entities, government-controlled entities?
Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Jerusalem, State of Israel
28 December 2023
The state of Israel is currently fighting an involuntary war, imposed on it by Terrorist Organization Hamas after the horrible massacre on October 7th. Currently Israel is acting to overthrow Hamas rule, destroy its military capabilities, remove the threat from the Gaza Strip and return of the abductees, who have been brutally kidnapped to Gaza. We will be ready to discuss the issues mentioned in your email when these goals will be fulfilled. Thank you.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the State of Israel
January 2017 updates: Reconstruction in Gaza
“Israel is actively working to support reconstruction efforts in the Gaza Strip. Israel has undertaken these measures in the face of its valid concerns about the diversion of materials by Hamas for terrorist purposes.”
https://embassies.gov.il/MFA/FOREIGNPOLICY/Peace/HUMANITARIAN/Pages/Reconstruction-in-Gaza.aspx
Links To Related Analyses
United States Department of State
Washington DC
2 January 2024
Rejection of Irresponsible Statements on Resettlement of Palestinians Outside of Gaza
Matthew Miller, Department Spokesperson
The United States rejects recent statements from Israeli Ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir advocating for the resettlement of Palestinians outside of Gaza. This rhetoric is inflammatory and irresponsible. We have been told repeatedly and consistently by the Government of Israel, including by the Prime Minister, that such statements do not reflect the policy of the Israeli government. They should stop immediately. We have been clear, consistent, and unequivocal that Gaza is Palestinian land and will remain Palestinian land, with Hamas no longer in control of its future and with no terror groups able to threaten Israel. That is the future we seek, in the interests of Israelis and Palestinians, the surrounding region, and the world.
Reporting Background
The Wall Street Journal
New York, New York
30 December 2023
Gaz’s Destruction Stands Out In Modern History
By Jared Malsin and Saeed Shah
The war in the Gaza Strip is generating destruction comparable in scale to the most devastating urban warfare in the modern record.
By mid-December, Israel had dropped 29,000 bombs, munitions and shells on the strip. Nearly 70% of Gaza’s 439,000 homes and about half of its buildings have been damaged or destroyed. The bombing has damaged Byzantine churches and ancient mosques, factories and apartment buildings, shopping malls and luxury hotels, theaters and schools. Much of the water, electrical, communications and healthcare infrastructure that made Gaza function is beyond repair.
Most of the strip’s 36 hospitals are shut down, and only eight are accepting patients. Citrus trees, olive groves and greenhouses have been obliterated. More than two-thirds of its schools are damaged.
Israel says that the bombing campaign and ground offensive has inflicted thousands of casualties on its intended target, Hamas. That U.S.-designated terrorist group’s cross-border assault on Oct. 7 killed 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, according to Israeli officials. The attackers tortured residents and burned homes as they went.
In Israel’s response, its bombs, artillery shells and soldiers have killed more than 21,000 Palestinians, according to health officials in Gaza. The figure doesn’t distinguish between civilians and militants. Most of them are women and children, those officials said.
The destruction resembles that left by Allied bombing of German cities during World War II. “The word ‘Gaza’ is going to go down in history along with Dresden and other famous cities that have been bombed,” said Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and the author of a history of aerial bombing. “What you’re seeing in Gaza is in the top 25% of the most intense punishment campaigns in history.”
Three months ago, Gaza was a vibrant place. Despite decades of Israeli occupation, sieges and wars, many Palestinians enjoyed living there beside the Mediterranean Sea, where they gathered in cafes and seaside restaurants. Families played on the beach. Young men crowded around TVs in the evening to watch soccer.
Today, Gaza is a landscape of crumpled concrete. In northern Gaza, the focus of Israel’s initial offensive, the few people who remain navigate rubble-strewn streets past bombed-out shops and apartment blocks. Broken glass crunches underfoot. Israeli drones buzz overhead.
In the south, where more than a million displaced residents have fled, Gazans sleep in the street and burn garbage to cook. Some 85% of the strip’s 2.2 million people have fled their homes and are confined by Israeli evacuation orders to less than one-third of the strip, according to the United Nations.
The Israeli military said it is targeting Hamas and taking steps to avoid killing civilians, including by encouraging residents to leave areas it is attacking. The Israeli air force has said its bombing campaign is causing “maximum damage.” Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said in October that “while balancing accuracy with the scope of damage, right now we’re focused on what causes maximum damage.”
Israel has accused Hamas of using civilian buildings to hide entrances to tunnels in which it stores weapons and hides commanders. “When you ask why civilian infrastructure is being damaged in Gaza, look at where Hamas built its military infrastructure, then point your finger at Hamas,” Eylon Levy, a spokesman for the Israeli prime minister’s office, said on Dec. 17 on X, formerly Twitter. The U.S. recently pressed Israel to try to limit the number of civilian casualties.
With the war zone mostly closed to the outside world, experts are surveying damage by analyzing satellite imagery and using remote sensing, which monitors physical characteristics by measuring reflected and emitted radiation at a distance. Their findings, they said, are initial and will need verification on the ground, but are likely an underestimate.
According to analysis of satellite data by remote-sensing experts at the City University of New York and Oregon State University, as many as 80% of the buildings in northern Gaza, where the bombing has been most severe, are damaged or destroyed, a higher percentage than in Dresden.
He Yin, an assistant professor of geography at Kent State University in Ohio, estimated that 20% of Gaza’s agricultural land has been damaged or destroyed. Winter wheat that should be sprouting around now isn’t visible, he said, suggesting it wasn’t planted.
A World Bank analysis concluded that by Dec. 12, the war had damaged or destroyed 77% of health facilities, 72% of municipal services such as parks, courts and libraries, 68% of telecommunications infrastructure, and 76% of commercial sites, including the almost complete destruction of the industrial zone in the north. More than half of all roads, the World Bank found, have been damaged or destroyed. Some 342 schools have been damaged, according to the U.N., including 70 of its own schools.
An assessment by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence found that Israel dropped 29,000 weapons on Gaza in a little over two months, according to U.S. officials. By comparison, the U.S. military dropped 3,678 munitions on Iraq from 2004 to 2010, according to the U.S. Central Command. Among the weapons provided by the U.S. to Israel during the Gaza war are 2,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs designed to penetrate concrete shelters, which military analysts said are usually used to hit military targets in more sparsely populated areas.
Gaza has a rich 4,000-year history. It was a Canaanite and Pharaonic port city that served as a waypoint on trade routes between Africa and Asia. Through history, it built back from wars, sieges, plagues and earthquakes. In 332 B.C., it was the last city to resist Alexander the Great’s march to Egypt—an act of defiance that fueled a mythology of a people who would never bow. The municipality of Gaza’s symbol is a phoenix.
The current war hasn’t spared treasured historic sites. The Great Omari Mosque, an ancient building that was converted from a fifth-century church to a Muslim place of worship, has been destroyed, its minaret toppled. An Israeli airstrike in October hit the fifth century Church of Saint Porphyrius, killing at least 16 Palestinians sheltering there. “The loss of the Omari mosque saddens me more than the destruction of my own house,” said Fadel Alatel, an archaeologist from Gaza who fled his home to shelter in the southern end of the strip.
Israel says many of its airstrikes have targeted Hamas’s network of tunnels underneath Gaza, which they say also hid hostages taken on Oct. 7. Those tunnels lie beneath densely populated areas in ground that contains important municipal infrastructure, making for a challenging battlefield.
“It’s not a livable city anymore,” said Eyal Weizman, an Israeli-British architect who studies Israel’s approach to the built environment in the Palestinian territories. Any reconstruction, he said, will require “a whole system of underground infrastructure, because when you attack the subsoil, everything that runs through the ground—the water, the gas, the sewage—is torn.”
Europe’s cities were rebuilt after two world wars. Beirut rose again after civil war and Israeli bombardment. Iraq’s Mosul and Syria’s Raqqa have limped back to life after U.S.-led air campaigns leveled them during the war against Islamic State, though reconstruction has been slow for both.
Gaza faces unique challenges. No one knows who will take control if Israel achieves its aim of destroying Hamas. Israel has said it opposes a U.S. plan to place the Palestinian Authority, which runs parts of the occupied West Bank, in charge of the strip.
The enclave’s unusual status as a territory with borders controlled by Israel further complicates any road to recovery. After other recent wars in Gaza, Israel has sometimes blocked the entry of construction materials, arguing Hamas could use them for military purposes. In 2015, a full year after a 2014 cease-fire, only one house had been rebuilt—not because of a lack of funds, but because cement wasn’t allowed in.
An analysis by the Shelter Cluster, a coalition of aid groups led by the Norwegian Refugee Council, concluded that after the current war, it will take at least a year just to clear the rubble, a task complicated by having to safely remove unexploded ordnance.
Rebuilding the housing will take seven to 10 years, if financing is available, the group said. It will cost some $3.5 billion, it estimates, not including the cost of providing temporary accommodation.
The level of damage in Gaza is almost double what it was during a 2014 conflict, which lasted 50 days, with five times as many completely destroyed buildings, according to the Shelter Cluster. In the current conflict, as of mid-December, more than 800,000 people had no home left to return to, the World Bank found.
“In a best-case scenario, it’s going to take decades,” said Caroline Sandes, an expert in postconflict redevelopment at Kingston University London.
Alaa Hasham, a 33-year-old mother living in Gaza City’s upscale Rimal neighborhood, used to enjoy sitting in her apartment’s rooftop garden, taking her children to a seaside resort on the weekends and playing chess with friends. She fled with her family soon after the bombing began, joining the small minority of Palestinians who were able to leave for Egypt.
Though her home is destroyed, she is clinging to hope that someday she will return to Gaza. “People think I’m crazy for wanting to go back,” she said. “Gaza is a special place.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said in October that “while balancing accuracy with the scope of damage, right now we’re focused on what causes maximum damage.” An earlier version of this article incorrectly quoted Hagari as saying that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.” Also, in a map showing damage as of Dec. 16 in the Gaza Strip, damaged tree crops cover 8.8% of the area. A map with a previous version of this article incorrectly labeled as damaged the undamaged tree crops, which covered 24.9% of the area. (Corrected on Dec. 30)
Associated Press
New York, New York
22 December 2023
JERUSALEM (AP)- The Israeli military campaign in Gaza, experts say, now sits among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history. In just over two months, the offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II. It has killed more civilians than the U.S.-led coalition did in its three-year campaign against the Islamic State group.
The Israeli military has said little about what kinds of bombs and artillery it is using in Gaza. But from blast fragments found on-site and analyses of strike footage, experts are confident that the vast majority of bombs dropped on the besieged enclave are U.S.-made. They say the weapons include 2,000-pound (900-kilogram) “bunker-busters” that have killed hundreds in densely populated areas.
With the Palestinian death toll in Gaza surpassing 20,000, the international community is calling for a cease-fire. Israel vows to press ahead, saying it wants to destroy Hamas’ military capabilities following the militant group’s Oct. 7 cross-border rampage that triggered the war, in which it killed 1,200 people and took 240 others hostage.
The Biden administration has quietly continued to supply arms to Israel. Last week, however, President Joe Biden publicly acknowledged that Israel was losing international legitimacy for what he called its “indiscriminate bombing.” NOTE: “In December 2023, the Biden Administration bypassed the United States Congress to unilaterally approve US$106.5 million and then US$147.5 million in military equipment Israel.” Here’s a look at what is known so far about Israel’s campaign on Gaza.
HOW MUCH DESTRUCTION IS THERE IN GAZA?
Israel’s offensive has destroyed over two-thirds of all structures in northern Gaza and a quarter of buildings in the southern area of Khan Younis, according to an analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by Corey Scher of the CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University, experts in mapping damage during wartime. The percentage of damaged buildings in the Khan Younis area nearly doubled in just the first two weeks of Israel’s southern offensive, they said.
That includes tens of thousands of homes as well as schools, hospitals, mosques and stores. U.N. monitors have said that about 70% of school buildings across Gaza have been damaged. At least 56 damaged schools served as shelters for displaced civilians. Israeli strikes damaged 110 mosques and three churches, the monitors said.
Israel holds Hamas responsible for civilian deaths by embedding militants in civilian infrastructure. Those sites also shelter multitudes of Palestinians who have fled under Israeli evacuation orders. “Gaza is now a different color from space. It’s a different texture,” said Scher, who has worked with Van Den Hoek to map destruction across several war zones, from Aleppo to Mariupol.
HOW DOES THE DESTRUCTION STACK UP HISTORICALLY?
By some measures, destruction in Gaza has outpaced Allied bombings of Germany during World War II. Between 1942 and 1945, the allies attacked 51 major German cities and towns, destroying about 40-50% of their urban areas, said Robert Pape, a U.S. military historian. Pape said this amounted to 10% of buildings across Germany, compared to over 33% across Gaza, a densely populated territory of just 140 square miles (360 square kilometers). “Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history,” said Pape. “It now sits comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever.”
The U.S.-led coalition’s 2017 assault to expel the Islamic State group from the Iraqi city of Mosul was considered one of the most intense attacks on a city in generations. That nine-month battle killed around 10,000 civilians, a third of them from coalition bombardment, according an Associated Press investigation at the time. During the 2014-2017 campaign to defeat IS in Iraq, the coalition carried out nearly 15,000 strikes across the country, according to Airwars, a London-based independent group that tracks recent conflicts. By comparison, the Israeli military said last week it has conducted 22,000 strikes in Gaza.
WHAT TYPES OF BOMBS ARE BEING USED?
The Israeli military has not specified what it is using. It says every strike is cleared by legal advisers to make sure it complies with international law. “We choose the right munition for each target — so it doesn’t cause unnecessary damage,” said the army’s chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari. Weapons experts have been able to draw conclusions by analyzing blast fragments found on-site, satellite images and videos circulated on social media. They say the findings offer only a peek into the full scope of the air war.
So far, fragments of American-made Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) bombs and smaller diameter bombs have been found in Gaza, according to Brian Castner, a weapons investigator with Amnesty International. The JDAM bombs include precision-guided 1,000- and 2,000-pound (450-kilogram and 900-kilogram) “bunker-busters.”
“It turns earth to liquid,” said Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon defense official and a war crimes investigator for the U.N. “It pancakes entire buildings.” He said the explosion of a 2,000-pound bomb in the open means “instant death” for anyone within about 30 meters (100 feet). Lethal fragmentation can extend for up to 365 meters (1,200 feet). In an Oct. 31 strike on the urban refugee camp of Jabaliya, experts say a 2,000-pound bomb killed over 100 civilians. Experts have also identified fragments of SPICE (Smart, Precise Impact, Cost-Effective) 2000-pound bombs, which are fitted with a GPS guidance system to make targeting more precise. Castner said the bombs are produced by the Israeli defense giant Rafael, but a recent State Department release first obtained by The New York Times showed some of the technology had been produced in the United States. The Israeli military is also dropping unguided “dumb” bombs. Several experts pointed to two photos posted to social media by the Israeli Air Force at the start of the war showing fighter jets stocked with unguided bombs.
IS THE STRATEGY WORKING?
Israel says it has two goals: destroy Hamas and rescue the 129 hostages still held by militants. Eleven weeks into the war, Israel says it has destroyed many Hamas sites and hundreds of tunnel shafts and has killed 7,000 Hamas fighters out of an estimated 30,000-40,000. Israeli leaders say intense military pressure is the only way to free more hostages. But some families of hostages worry that the bombing endangers their loved ones. Hostages released during a weeklong cease-fire last month recounted that their captors moved them from place to place to avoid Israeli bombardment. Hamas has claimed that several hostages died from Israeli bombs, though the claims could not be verified. The level of destruction is so high because “Hamas is very entrenched within the civilian population,” said Efraim Inbar, head of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, a think tank. He also said intense bombardment of Hamas’ tunnels is needed to protect advancing Israeli ground forces from attacks.