Omar al-Mukhtar road used to be Gaza City’s high street. It was lined with shops and hotels, the main mosques, the city hall and the public library, leading from Palestine Square to the Port of Gaza. It was the main artery through Zeitoun, the commercial centre. This footage shows how the street looked before the war:
Now both the street and the surrounding district are a landscape of debris. Some buildings have collapsed under bombardment, the multiple storeys pancaked on top of each other. This video shows the moment of impact of an Israeli strike on 8 October, and how the road looked from street level in the days that followed:
This annotated satellite image shows the neighbourhood from above on 6 December. The yellow labels show some of the damaged and destroyed buildings:
This footage from 12 October shows the area in the satellite image to the south of Omar al-Mukhtar Road covered by the largest white circle:
The damage to the buildings around Omar al-Mukhtar Road is just one example of the destruction across Gaza since the conflict began. According to a UN assessment on Tuesday, nearly 40,000 buildings or about 18% of all pre-conflict structures have been damaged or destroyed since 7 October.
Even in optimal conditions, all this would take years to restore, and these circumstances are far from optimal. No one knows when the war will end or when reconstruction can begin. Then there is the question of who would pay for it.
Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials suggest that Arab neighbours, particularly in the Gulf, could fund the rebuilding of Gaza, but even if they agreed, they would have conditions, most importantly concerning the shape of a reborn Gaza. Some would want the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority to be in charge. Qatar might want a reconstituted form of Hamas in charge. Neither of those options would be acceptable to the Israeli government.
Netanyahu talks about long-term Israeli military occupation, much to Washington’s consternation. It is very hard to imagine any reconstruction funds being forthcoming in such a scenario.
Meanwhile, the people of Gaza are doomed to live in the wreckage of their homeland. More than 1.8 million Palestinians, 80% of the total Gaza population, are no longer in their homes. Most of the displaced are women and children. They are exposed to the elements, as winter arrives in stormfronts. Poor sanitation and the cold threaten epidemics and pneumonia. Starvation hangs over the whole territory. All these threats are made all the more lethal because their victims no longer have homes to shelter in.
For many years, some legal experts have argued that “domicide”, the deliberate destruction of homes, should be classified as a crime against humanity. If it were, Israel’s intentions would be the key. Israeli officials insist that are merely pursuing Hamas leaders and gunmen, and that “collateral damage” is justified by the stakes: Hamas’s obvious readiness to slaughter Jewish civilians and destroy the Jewish State.
If the matter ever went to an international court, a lot would turn on the question of intent. If Israeli commanders deliberately set out to destroy buildings to deny Palestinians the right of return, there could be a case for potential war crimes. The Netanyahu government has angrily rejected that its goal is to drivePalestinians over the border into Egypt’s Sinai Desert or beyond, though individual members have expressed enthusiasm for such an outcome.
Egypt has reinforced its border to avoid a mass transfer of population and to avoid a potential threat to the precarious stability of the Sinai. As long as the dam holds, Palestinians are trapped among the ruins of their own homes.
