Cement shortage delays Gaza rebuilding
Three months after the war in Gaza, Sadeeqa Naseer still lives in a bomb site. Airstrikes turned the two upper floors of her three-story apartment building in the Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanoun into a rubble-strewn ruin.
Thirty-five people shelter on the ground floor, where holes blasted in the wall by tank shells have been covered with plastic sheeting that does little to keep out the cold wind and driving rain of the fast-approaching winter.
Someone managed to extend an electric cable from a nearby building, providing just enough power to run a fridge and keep a single lamp on during the night. But there is no cement to rebuild, and no one can get a bulldozer to clear the rubble. Men were chipping futilely at concrete slabs with hammers.
"Who could live here?" asks Naseer, 60, who said she has received no aid from the United Nations or anyone else.
Since the July-August war between Israel and the Hamas Islamists that run Gaza, in which more than 2,100 Palestinians and 70 Israelis were killed, barely any progress has been made toward rebuilding the shattered territory, despite donors pledging $5 billion.
Israel tightly monitors imports of construction materials and equipment into Gaza, arguing that otherwise they could be used to rebuild tunnels used by Hamas militants to carry out attacks.
Palestinian officials and critics of Israeli policy say that has made it impossible to rebuild, leaving 40,000 of the strip's 1.8 million residents in temporary shelter and thousands more facing winter in barely habitable ruins.
"The cement and gravel are being regulated as if they were a nuclear weapon," said Sari Bashi, co-founder of Gisha, an Israeli organization that monitors access to Gaza and says only a tiny fraction of the cement needed to satisfy demand is reaching the strip.
An Israeli government official said Israel is willing to help in any way to ensure reconstruction in Gaza moved forward rapidly, but it wants to be sure that Hamas is not rebuilding its militant infrastructure.
According to Palestinian Housing Minister Mufeed al-Hasayna, Gaza needs 8,000 metric tons of cement a day to meet demand. A new system set up with the UN to comply with Israeli requirements lets through 2,000 tons at most, he said.
At that rate, reconstruction would take more than 30 years, said Hasayna, one of four members of the unity government based in Gaza rather than the West Bank.
"We have 18,000 fully destroyed buildings and about 50,000 partially destroyed ones," he said. "Gaza before the war needed about 70,000 apartments a year to keep pace with population growth. Now, after the war, Gaza needs 150,000 new apartments."
(China Daily 12/03/2014 page10)
