Gaza’s actual topography has changed due to Israeli war, says UN official

Gaza Strip (QNN)- A UN official has said that the 907kg bombs dropped by Israel on the Gaza Strip are actually “altering the landscape.”

In a new report published on Monday, the UN official who is based in Gaza told the Guardian last week, “The damage to infrastructure is insane … In [the southern Gaza City] Khan Younis, there is not one building untouched.”

“The actual topography has changed. There are hills where there were none. The 2,000lbs [907kg] bombs dropped [by Israel] are actually altering the landscape,” the UN official added.

According to a June assessment published by the UN Environment Programme, a fleet of more than one hundred lorries would take 15 years to clear Gaza of almost 40m tonnes of rubble in an operation costing between $500m (£394m) and $600m.

The assessment found that 137,297 buildings had been damaged in Gaza, more than half of the total. Of these, just over a quarter were destroyed, about a 10th severely damaged and a third moderately damaged.

Massive landfill sites covering between 250 and 500 hectares (618 to 1,235 acres) would be necessary to dump the rubble, depending on how much could be recycled, the assessment revealed.

In May, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) said rebuilding homes in Gaza destroyed during the war could take until 2040 in the most optimistic scenario, with total reconstruction across the territory costing as much as $40bn. That assessment, which was published as part of a push to raise funds for early planning for the rehabilitation of Gaza, also found the war could reduce levels of health, education and wealth in the territory to those of 1980, wiping out 44 years of development.

Schools, health facilities, roads, sewers and all other critical infrastructure have all suffered massive damage.

The UNDP said the possible price tag of reconstruction of Gaza is now twice estimates made by UN and Palestinian officials in January and was rising every day.

The mountains of rubble are full of unexploded ordnance that leads to “more than 10 explosions every week”, causing more deaths and loss of limbs, Gaza’s Civil Defence agency has said.

In April, Pehr Lodhammar, a former United Nationals Mine Action Service chief for Iraq, said that on average about 10% of weapons failed to detonate when they were fired and had to be removed by demining teams.

Sixty-five per cent of the buildings destroyed in Gaza were residential, Lodhammar said, adding that clearing and rebuilding them would be slow and dangerous work because of the threat from shells, missiles or other weapons buried in collapsed or damaged buildings.