Rebuilding Gaza and trying to get back to work

**Rob Young** (0:02)
You're listening to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm Rob Young, and today we're looking at the huge job of rebuilding Gaza and its people's livelihoods.
Akram crouches over a makeshift stove, brewing tea in the tent he now calls home. He's one of nearly one and a half million people still displaced by the war between Israel and Hamas. As Akram sips his tea, he and his grandchildren stare at a photo of the house they lost, now just rubble.

**Akram** (0:47)
This was approximately my 21st displacement during the war from street to street, neighborhood to neighborhood, city to city and north to south. 21 displacements suffering and getting to know how to move from one place to another.
I spent 58 years working, building it brick by brick and getting the house ready so I could feel settled when I got old, owning a whole property, only to find out that the house was gone, reduced to rubble.

**Rob Young** (1:23)
Across Gaza City, earthmovers grind through piles of waste, loading it onto trucks bound for a new landfill in the south. In neighborhood after neighborhood, rubble stretches into the distance. Rebuilding will take years and cost billions.
Into this devastation, amid a fragile ceasefire, come competing visions for Gaza's future, including one floated in January by Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, imagining skyscrapers in a new Gaza.

**Abdallah Ahmed** (1:55)
Let's just plan for catastrophic success. We signed a deal to demilitarize.

**Om Aya** (1:58)
That is what we are going to enforce.

**Abdallah Ahmed** (2:00)
People ask us what our plan B is. We do not have a plan B. We have a plan.

**Asma** (2:04)
We signed an agreement.

**Abdallah Ahmed** (2:05)
We are all committed to making that agreement work.

**Rob Young** (2:07)
There is a master plan.

**Om Aya** (2:08)
We will be doing it in phasing.

**Abdallah Ahmed** (2:09)
In the Middle East, they build cities like this in two, three million people.

**Asma** (2:13)
They build this in three years.

**Abdallah Ahmed** (2:14)
And so stuff like this is very doable if we make it happen.

**Rob Young** (2:17)
No rebuilding work under President Trump's Board of Peace plan has been started since the ceasefire began eight months ago. Aid agencies say they are doing what they can. The United Nations estimates reconstruction will cost over $70 billion.
Mahmoud Bissaiso is a Palestinian advisor to the UN and the European Union on reconstruction in conflict zones.

**Mahmoud Bissaiso** (2:39)
We know very well that the capacity of our local contractors in Gaza is very, very limited, it's already damaged. So we are expecting to engage original construction contractors, primarily from Egypt and Turkey. They are ready to take care of Gaza reconstruction in five years only with their heavy equipment and their resources.

**Rob Young** (3:00)
And their own workers as well, or would Gazans do the rebuilding work, or some of the rebuilding work at least?

**Mahmoud Bissaiso** (3:06)
The priority will be for our local workers. We have plenty of people.
Now, as you know, like 90% of Gaza people are unemployed. So this reconstruction will give job opportunity for the younger generation. So, and also the workers in Gaza, very skilled labor force in the construction. So the priority will be for Gaza people to reconstruct their country.

**Rob Young** (3:29)
What is your vision for what Gaza would look like once it is rebuilt?

**Mahmoud Bissaiso** (3:34)
People in Gaza, they are looking for a modest life. They don't want to live in luxury. They don't want to have skyscrapers in Gaza. They just want to live in dignity and be like other people in the world. We are learning from different experiences. We are learning, for example, from the reconstruction of refugee camps in Lebanon.
We are learning from the Iraq reconstruction in Mosul.
While the devastation is very bad, it gives us an opportunity for complete re-planning of Gaza. No slum areas, no crowded area. We like to design Gaza for sustainability, for smart city, to bring new things. Now we are expecting to add like sea taxi. We're talking about some highways in Gaza, tram, metro station, massive transit bus system. We are thinking about different solutions for Gaza than the old solutions in Gaza infrastructure.

**Rob Young** (4:33)
Mamoun Bisseso. Israel says no reconstruction can take place until armed groups, including Hamas, disarm, and for now doesn't allow construction materials into the less than half of Gaza that it doesn't control.
It's not just structures that need rebuilding, it is hope too. Asma teaches in a UN school, she knows she's lucky to still have work, but her home is damaged and her dream of becoming a university lecturer feels more distant than ever.