“Long, long way forward”: Gaza recovers from zero

Walk or by car, Trek’s home has started.

For the gas, displaced for the 15 months, the distance is not far away, the Gaza is a small place-but today’s trip is only the beginning of a desperately uncertain future for this destroyed place.

The scale of the coming humanitarian challenge is difficult to understand.

“There are no facilities, no services, no electricity, water, no infrastructure,” said journalist Gazan Gada El-Carr, as she was preparing to make her way back north of the El-Bala’s Acer El, where she had been sheltered for months.

“We have to restore again from the beginning, from zero.”

Immediate needs – food and shelter – begin to turn.

“The help is running at levels that we have not seen since the beginning of the conflict,” Sam said by the Palestinian UN Refugee Agency, UNRWA.

“So we are able to fulfill the largest minimums in terms of food, water, blankets, hygiene objects. But beyond that, it’s a long, long way.”

Finding shelter in the apocalyptic ruins of Gaza will be the first of many huge, long -term challenges.

About 700,000 people fled the city of Gaza and the surrounding areas during the first weeks of the war. An unknown number, maybe up to 400,000, remained placed.

Some of the areas behind them were deleted while others survived.

The UN estimates that about 70% of the Gaza Strip buildings have been damaged or destroyed since October 2023, as much of the most severe destruction in the north.

Jabalia, the home of a pre-war population of 200,000, about half of which lived in one of the oldest and largest refugee camps of Gaza, has virtually destroyed.

It is clear that for many people the days of life in a tent are far from over.

Hamas’s government office, run by Hamas, postponed an emergency complaint to 135,000 tents and caravans.

The UN says it is now able to bring 20,000 tents that have been stuck on the August border, along with large quantities of tarpaulins and mattresses. But it is said that it will struggle to respond to the sudden search for shelter.

“There’s just not so many tents produced for help all over the world,” said G -N Rose.

People who have been able to stay north throughout the war are afraid that the pressure to accommodate, already sharp, will get worse when civilians return and look to move back to homes abandoned more than a year ago.

“There is a huge problem because people have stayed at home of relatives or friends who are in the south,” says Asmaa Taie, whose family had to escape from Jabalia, but never left the north.

“Now they have to empty these houses and return them to their owners. So a new kind of shift has started.”

Asmaa says four families already live in their building with three more expected. The lack of space and privacy, according to her, has already led to tension.

The return of refugees has other strokes.

“Today I went to the market to buy frozen fish for the first time,” says Asmaa. “But already sellers are raising prices.”

The pressure on already scarce supplies of water and electricity is also expected to increase.

But for all the widely expected difficulties, those who return, speak, sometimes widely optimistic, about their relief and a sense of expectation.

“We are pleased to return north, where we can finally find comfort,” a woman told the BBC.

“Leaving behind the suffering we endured south and returned to the dignity of Bate Hanun.”

According to Bate Hanun’s recent accounts, in the far northeast corner of the Gaza Strip, near the border with Israel – the city is unrecognizable.

What of Donald Trump’s proposal to move temporarily or permanently to Egypt or Jordan?

The Egyptian and Jordanian officials quickly condemned the proposal. Both sides are afraid of the social and the safety of the effects of the sudden influx of traumatic refugees.

“Jordan is for Jordan, and Palestine is for the Palestinians,” said Jordan Ayman Safadi Foreign Minister. His country is already home to 2.4 million registered Palestinian refugees.

Among the Israeli prime minister of cabinet colleagues Benjamin Netanyahu, President Trump’s proposal received an enthusiastic welcome.

The Minister of Finance was unleashed, which favors Israeli annexation and arranging the Gaza Strip, called it a “great idea”.

Last year, talking to a conference of supporters, he talks about the creation of a “situation in which the Gaza population will be reduced to half of its current size in two years.”

Unless Gaza is quickly rehabilitated and the Gazanas do not get an idea of ​​a better future, I can have a fuss.

“I think in the first few months they will see what will happen,” says the journalist Gada El-Carr. “If they lost everything and the reconstruction process is slowed down, I think people will not stay in gas.”

About 150,000 people have already left since the start of the war in October 2023.

Ghada says she expects others who can afford to follow, looking for a future in or outside the Arab world, while the most, the most vulnerable are abandoned.

“I agree with Trump that people deserve a better life,” she says. “But why not in gas?”