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| A child watches a bulldozer on Beirut street in Gaza City, once a busy area that now lies in ruins. Photograph: Amjed Tantesh/The Guardian |
Sun 27 Sep 2026
It took all day to clear a section of road in the Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood in Gaza City. At the end of it, Ahmed Alyan, a UN engineer, was exhausted, surrounded by mountains of rubble despite the day’s work.
“I feel as if we are holding a spoon and trying to empty the sea,” Alyan said, beads of sweat trickling down his forehead after a long, hot summer day.
Alyan is part of a World Food Programme (WFP) team who have been working on Beirut Street, once a busy main thoroughfare lined with shops, offices and homes and filled with traffic and people. But now it is virtually deserted.
The road was blocked by piles of rubble, stones and the wreckage of destroyed shops. Nearby, a tower stood tilted after some of its concrete foundations were damaged, while displaced families continued to live inside. In some parts of the road, sewage flowed from the ground after the drainage system was damaged and blocked by Israeli bombardment.
The UN estimates that removing the bulk of the rubble in the Gaza Strip could take at least seven to 10 years and cost billions of dollars. That would make the removal of war debris in Gaza one of the largest rubble-clearance operations in modern history.
“The estimate of the total amount of rubble in Gaza is 61m tonnes. It is approximately 20 times the amount of rubble generated in all wars across the world over the last 18 years,” said Jaco Cilliers, the UN Development Programme’s special representative in Palestine.
The task is being carried out in extremely difficult and hazardous conditions. The clearance teams are working in ruins containing countless dead bodies and unexploded bombs. So far, 580km of roads have been cleared, which has in turn made possible the movement of aid trucks, relief teams and residents.
However, the reconstruction of Gaza is a huge challenge facing international and local organisations. After more than two years of work, about 907,000 tonnes of rubble have been removed and more than 300,000 tonnes recycled and reused. But this represents only about 1.5% of the total rubble.
To make things more difficult, the Israeli authorities have banned the necessary equipment from entering Gaza on the grounds that almost any aid that is not food or medicine could be “dual-use” ...READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/27/rubble-gaza-un-aid-workers-ruins-dead-bodies