More debris in Gaza than Ukraine: UN

GENEVA

Gaza is filled with more debris and rubble than Ukraine, the U.N. has said, with the mammoth task of clearing it made all the more costly and dangerous by the sheer amount of asbestos and unexploded ordnance.

The United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) estimated the amount of debris in the Gaza Strip at 37 million tons in mid-April, or 300 kilograms per square meter.

"Gaza has more rubble than Ukraine, and to put that in perspective, the Ukrainian front line is 600 miles [nearly 1,000 kilometers] long, and Gaza is 25 miles [40 km] long," said Mungo Birch, head of the UNMAS program in the Palestinian territories.

But the volume of rubble is not the only problem, said UNMAS.

"This rubble is likely heavily contaminated with UXO [unexploded ordnance], but its clearance will be further complicated by other hazards in the rubble," Birch told journalists in Geneva.

"There's estimated to be over 800,000 tons of asbestos, for instance, alone in the Gaza rubble." The cancer-causing mineral used in construction requires special precautions when handling.

It is generally estimated that 10 to 15 percent of the munitions fired do not explode on impact and therefore represent a lasting danger for civilian populations.

Birch said he hoped UNMAS, which works to mitigate the threats posed by all types of explosive ordnance, would become the coordination body for mine action in Gaza.

It has secured $5 million of funding but needs a further $40 million to continue its work in Gaza over the next 12 months. He emphasized that a complete cleanup would require more than $100 million.

UNMAS has said that 65 percent of the buildings destroyed in Gaza were residential, and it would take 100 trucks 14 years to clear the rubble so far.

Meanwhile, United Nations Development Program Administrator Achim Steiner said that if the war in Gaza stopped today, it would still take until 2040 to rebuild all the homes that have been destroyed in nearly seven months of the Israeli attacks.

“Every additional day that this war continues is exacting huge and compounding costs to Gazans and all Palestinians” said Steiner.

At least 370,000 housing units in Gaza have been damaged, including 79,000 destroyed completely, according to the new report by the UNDP.

Even if Israel allows a five-fold increase of construction material to enter Gaza, it would take until 2040 to rebuild the destroyed houses, without repairing the damaged ones, the report said.

In Gaza, the Israeli offensive has virtually shut down the economy, which contracted 81 percent in the last quarter of 2023. The report said the “productive basis of the economy has been destroyed,” with sectors experienced losses of more than 90 percent.