The numbers coming out of Palestine, and the language we seek to describe what has been happening in Gaza and the West Bank since 7 October, leave most Palestinians numbed. While the scale of physical destruction, human loss and socio-economic crises mount daily, reports by international organisations and NGOs cannot keep up with the count.
The most recent assessment by the World Bank put the cost of the destruction of housing and physical infrastructure at $18.5bn, but this only covered the first months of the war, before it spread south towards Khan Yunis and Rafah. Today, we can only estimate that this toll has already doubled and continues to mount as all areas of the Strip have come within Israeli gunsights. The UN warns of a 40-year setback to Palestinian human development, and that it could take at least 15 years to remove the 40 million tonnes of rubble left in the wake of Israel’s total war. Gaza has lost its annual GDP of around $3bn (its pre-2023 level), 90 per cent of Gazans are living in poverty while 12 months of emergency humanitarian aid have been costed in UN appeals since October at over $3bn. And that’s only for 2024. This is the true picture of Israeli victory.
As regional and global players fret over the “day after” of what they presume will be an Israeli defeat of Palestinian resistance, the US claims this moment will entail a “pathway” to long-denied, and often falsely promised, Palestinian independence. Different formulas for governing Gaza separately from the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory (the West Bank including East Jerusalem) continue to be floated in Western media. These cite regional powers, international agencies, private-sector players and Palestinian politicians in exile, none of whom appear to be willing to step into the vacuum that Israel’s senseless war has created. The only globally recognised Palestinian government, created by the Palestine Liberation Organisation, has been marginalised, or demonised, in Israeli planning and actions.
Beyond the transformation of Gaza into a wasteland of biblical proportions and trapping the Israeli people in the revenge mindset of 8 October, Israel’s declared war aims have not been achieved. Extreme right-wing ideologues set on denying Palestinian statehood and rights dominate an Israeli government whose West Bank colonial expansion policies, fuelled by the violence of settler militias, were alarming even before the war and expand daily in intensity and scope.
Once relief and recovery are foreseeable, comparative experiences of successful nation-building emerging from catastrophe – such as in postwar Germany and Japan – certainly seem pertinent with respect to the scale and complexity of this catastrophe. A global reconstruction consortium at a “Marshall Plan” level of international response is the correct entry point to recovery, for replanting hope and envisaging a new economy for a new state. Israeli reparations should not be excluded, however politically distant that might seem.
In the case of Palestine, justice will only be served – and a viable economy can only emerge – if this terrible war leads to a global reckoning with the inevitability of Palestinian self-determination and statehood. This means an end to occupation and the dismantling of illegal settlements, as called for by UN resolutions for many years and as ruled most recently by the International Court of Justice. The emergence from the rubble of Gaza of such a pathway to a two-state solution awaits a transformed Israeli political configuration, and an Israeli public as ready for a historic partition compromise as the Palestinian people have been for decades.
Raja Khalidi is an economist and director general of Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS)
This article is part of the series Losing Gaza
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