Nearly two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are leaving their refugee camps and crowded shelters to finally return home after the breakthrough cease-fire deal, only to find that their homes and neighborhoods are nothing but ash and rubble after 15-months of brutal warfare.
The United Nations estimates that 69% of all buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, including more than 245,000 homes — with the World Bank estimating that the first four months alone caused $18.5 billion in damages.
Researchers have compared say the scale of destruction can only be compared to cities that were leveled during the Second World War.
President Trump is now calling for the US to take “ownership” of the Palestinian enclave so that it can be rebuilt more quickly and developed into a gleaming region that will have “an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs.”
The administration said that it’s in Gazans’ best interest to be removed and permanently resettled to neighboring Arab countries, who have all refused to take in the refugees.
Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff previously estimated it could take 10 to 15 years to rebuild the damage from the war.
While the full extent of the damage in Gaza has yet to be fully evaluated, images on the ground and from satellites show that more than two-thirds of the enclave is in ruins following 15-months of Israeli bombardments.
Whole neighborhoods are destroyed, major roads have been blown to smithereens, most hospitals are no longer functioning, and critical water and electricity infrastructure are in ruins.
The worst damage is centered in northern Gaza and Gaza City, where Israel repeatedly tried to stomp out Hamas once and for all — but failed.
Researchers Corey Scher, of the City University of New York, and Prof. Jamon Van Den Hoek, of Oregon State University, estimate that 75% of buildings there are likely damaged or destroyed.
“The sheer amount of bombing in the north is unprecedented,” Van Den Hoek said. “In northern Gaza and Gaza City, we saw 60% of the buildings gone in the first two months of the campaign.”
Hamas terrorists have long used civilian buildings — including hospitals, schools and crowded apartments — as bases in an effort surround themselves with human shields and deter Israeli airstrikes.
The UN said Gaza is currently littered with more than 50 million tons of rubble, which would be enough to recreate the Great Pyramid of Giza 12 times.
Even with 100 trucks working full time, it would take more than 15 years to remove the debris.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres described the destruction, which displaced Gaza’s 2.3 million people multiple times, as the worst he’s ever seen.
“The level of suffering we are witnessing in Gaza is unprecedented in my mandate as secretary-general of the United Nations,” Guterres said in September. “I’ve never seen such a level of death and destruction as we are seeing in Gaza in the last few months.”
Researchers Scher and Van Den Hoek said the damage is comparable to the devastation in Warsaw during World War II.
“The pace and scale at which Gaza has been destroyed does not compare to any 21st century bombing campaign of any nation or land,” Scher, who studies the aftermath of natural disasters and political conflict, told The Post.
“There is no parallel to the speed of the damage we’ve seen,” Van Den Hoek added, noting that the destruction from the Second World War took years whereas Gaza’s took only months.
More than 47,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war, including thousands of women and children, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, which does not differentiate between civilians and terrorists.
Israel claims it has killed more than 17,000 militants, and has repeatedly defended its mass bombardment campaign by accusing Hamas of operating in civilian spaces.
The destruction in Gaza has ultimately led to a humanitarian crisis, with the issues only complicated by the fact that there is still no clear day-after plan for what rebuilding the enclave would look like.
The current three- to five-year reconstruction plan for Gaza remains up in the air as Israel and Hamas continue to negotiate the terms of a permanent cease-fire.
The agreement still has not settled who will govern the enclave afterward, or if Israel and Egypt will lift their 2007 blockade around the Strip.
Both nations restricted the movement and people and goods in and out of Gaza when Hamas seized power, which has kept resources limited in the enclave.
The UN estimates that it would take more than 350 years to rebuild Gaza if the blockade remains.
Further complicating the matter is Trump’s latest comments calling on Gaza’s 2.3 million residents to be evacuated from the enclave for the US to claim.
“The US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too,” Trump said Tuesday in a conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who praised the concept.
‘We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings — level it out and create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area,” he added.
Despite Trump’s claims that leaders in the Middle East “love the idea,” officials from the region have slammed the proposition, with Egypt and Jordan repeatedly rejecting the idea that they should take in Gaza’s population.
With Post wires
