Intrnational desk:
Around two-thirds of all buildings in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed or damaged, and removing the estimated 42 million tonnes of rubble will be dangerous and complex, the head of the UN Development Programme told AFP.
“Probably between 65 percent to 70 percent of buildings in Gaza have either been entirely destroyed or damaged,” Achim Steiner said in an interview at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in the Swiss ski resort town of Davos.
“But we’re also talking about an economy that has been destroyed, where we estimate that roughly 60 years of development have been lost in this conflict over 15 months.
“Two million people who are in the Gaza Strip have lost not only their shelter: they’ve lost public infrastructure, sewage treatment systems, freshwater supply systems, public waste management. All of these fundamental infrastructure and service elements simply do not exist.”
And for all these towering numbers, Steiner stressed: “Human desperation is not just something that you capture in statistics.”
