Gaza’s recovery will take a lifetime – and its people must be allowed to start that now | Lucy Easthope
AWorld leaders receive threats End the ceasefire In Gaza this week, the Palestinians will survey the ruins of their homes and pray. Donald Trump’s suggestion that “”We are just cleanPeople were from Gaza and sent them to live in Jordan and Egypt Widen All over the world. But my experience indicates that he will not be the only leader who is thinking about it.
Behind his words, a number of assumptions lie, and the largest is that no one wants to stay here. The aid agency workers have described Hellscape. In surrounding On January 30, Maha Khatib, the health coordinator of the International Rescue Committee, described the health system as “completely destroyed,”. She said that what the Palestinians immediately need is medical supplies, water and food. But what they also need is “long -term work” for a possible life in Gaza.
If Trump is on his way, this will not be the first time that people have been transferred due to war. Two million people It was forcibly displaced During the 1992-1995 conflict in Bosnia-Hergovina; More than 2 million are still internally submitted inside Iraq. This will not be the first time that people have been transferred as a strategy in response to goodwill emergency situations. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleanzwiz residents filled the buses and distributed in other states as “internal refugees”, in a brutal act that reminded some of A. Slavery time.
Disaster contractors often like to work with what I call the “Mars model” for human reconstruction: as if they were using a planet. They preferred this if there were no human beings on the way with their chaotic demands, only the rubble of the grinding and the methods you put. Disaster capitalism Widespread Due to the presence of huge amounts of money that can be achieved in the aftermath of the war. Mars model has no truck with homeland ideas. The relationship between the person and the soil under it.
My repeated experience after environmental disasters is the movement of the entire societies to temporary housing in other places, which cause a complete fracture in their lives and societies. Although they have left, they can only hope that the contractors appointed to the ethics of care – and not something they can always rely on. a report Published After three years of finding floods in 2007 in Hull: “Many people had to deal with the dual shock that occurs when the first disaster (flood) was exacerbated by a secondary disaster in the form of ill -treatment from various companies and agencies that are supposed to help recover . “There may be a human spirit and fears related to real safety-as if you saw the movement of survivors from” red areas “that hit earthquakes in Kreystech, New Zealand in 2011-but it could still cause uprooting the cause Long -term problems.
Some have described that the damage that they find to return to Gaza “as” as “”Total destructionBut such rhetorical risks add weight to the argument of “cleaning”: it is easy to raise the issue that no one wants to live in a place where it is difficult to see what was there. But love is what is going on around what can be seen.
Humans around the world, regardless of culture or belief, do noticeably similar things when they return to their devastating place; “Emotional” behaves like connecting flowers with traffic cones and lever arm. In Italy and New Zealand after destroyed earthquakes, I watched community cooks, occasions, recovered laundries and sculpted spaces for daytime care for young children. Someone usually begins to sell from a coffee truck – all things that slow the work program and disappearances and disaster capital.
Physical “recovery” gives the priority of roads, water, sanitation and energy. Not wrong: With hygiene, the risk of developing the disease comes. But the first thing people want to do, wherever you work in the world, is to find the dead and then bury them. The Civil Defense Agency in Gaza is estimated that there More than 10,000 bodies It is still lying under the rubble, and no society can be rebuilt on a mass grave. But the bones in the way of the roads to be built, many families will be condemned with a mysterious loss, which means that they are not comfortable again.
Last month, the Middle East envoy in the United States, Steve Witkeov, suggested that it be required 10 to 15 years old To rebuild Gaza. Of course, rebuilding may all depend on what Israel will tort. After that, any physical construction will be released by continuous setbacks – tensions, politics and greed and also a continuous flow of migration. Literature after disasters and conflict He described the type of immigration that occurs when people cannot stay in the place they love. Trump may see his cleaning, but he will be slow: he has sent young people far to study or earn money elsewhere; He leaves the old because it can stand up, risks, or tensions, no longer.
The truth is that it is not impossible to rebuild Gaza – if Israel allows this, and the rest of the world has the will. The mothers interviewed last week said they would live in tents forever, as long as they could continue to live in this soil. But tents will not be enough. In addition to urgent food, water and medicine, as well as long -term infrastructure and rebuilding, Gaza residents will need help, time and space to recover. Dr. Mahim QuraishiThe NHS blood vessels who worked in a hospital residency in Gaza in April and October 2024 says that most shocking it was that children have lost the amazing reaction after hearing the bombs that decreased for several months. You talk about an effect between generations that will last for decades. Along with BowSERS Water, Working Theaters and Bakeries, places and support for these children will be required to recover very slowly and partly.
When working in the aftermath, you learn to take one day every time and celebrate every small step forward. You rejoiced on the coffee and flower truck in traffic cone. To return to the place of “total destruction” and stay there is one of the most important things I see. I pray to God that the world supports this work and resists the temptation of “cleaning”, but until the children flourish again GazaIt will take the largest diplomatic effort in the world ever.
