Gaza, March 22: The UN agency for Palestinian refugees hopes that a housing project in the Gaza Strip approved by occupying-power Israel can unlock reconstruction efforts in the besieged territory.
The new apartments will house 150 families.
“We have estimated very accurately all the quantities because we do not want to be accused by the Israelis of exaggerating,” said Munir Manneh, head of construction in Gaza for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
“We will give an excellent example and prove that we will control the process 100 percent,” he said, adding that all materials would be clearly documented from the moment they enter the territory.
UNRWA has carried out other limited pilot projects but this will be the largest housing construction carried out since the end of the war.
The partly finished apartment blocks stand in neat rows on a stretch of sand near the beachfront outside the town of Khan Yunis, in an area that used to be an illegal Jewish settlement before Israel withdrew its troops from inside Gaza in 2005.
But according to international law, Gaza is still considered under Israeli occupation as Israel controls air, sea and land access to the Strip.
Gaza also remains part of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, which include the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Thousands of homes in Gaza were demolished during a blistering 22-day Israeli offensive launched in December 2008, and almost no reconstruction has taken place because of border closures that keep out building materials.
But Israel said that if a mechanism could be found to bypass the democratically elected Palestinian movement Hamas then more materials could be allowed in.
Manneh brushed off such Israeli claims, arguing that Hamas and other resistance groups could smuggle in cement through tunnels beneath the Gaza-Egypt border anyway.
“Nobody is interested to take any of the materials that will be permitted into Gaza… Because everything is available. If Hamas wants cement, it’s there,” he said.
If the project succeeds, UNRWA may be able to proceed with plans to build homes for nearly 6,000 Palestinian families whose houses were destroyed by Israeli forces before or during the war.
In the meantime UNRWA, which provides humanitarian aid to Gaza’s more than one million Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Middle East war, has been building shelters out of mud bricks to highlight the closures.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon hailed the project during a visit to the site on Sunday, but said it was a “drop in the bucket” and that more needed to be done.
Israel, which wants to crush any Palestinian liberation movement, responded to Hamas’s win in the elections with sanctions, and almost completely blockaded the impoverished coastal strip after Hamas seized power in 2007, although a ‘lighter’ siege had already existed before.
Israel’s war on Gaza killed nearly 1,400 Palestinians, mainly civilians, and wounded 5,450 others.
The war also left tens of thousands of houses destroyed, while their residents remained homeless.
Human rights groups, both international and Israeli, slammed Israel’s siege of Gaza, branding it “collective punishment.”
–Agencies