Ahmed Bahar, vice president of the Palestinian Legislative Council (Parliament), warns that reconstruction depends on Israel’s will to comply with international law. But the promised foreign aid is not reaching Gaza. “We are open to a permanent ceasefire and prisoner exchange agreement,” said Bahar, 72, one of the founders of Hamas.

The vice president of Parliament, a body that has not met since 2009, confirms that there are mediation initiatives by Egypt and the United Nations, “but they all collide”, he maintains, “against Israel, which does not offer concrete proposals.” “The current Israeli government is very fragile,” he warns, “and the tension is constant: at any moment another conflict could break out.”

“When I woke up I was in the hospital,” recalls 55-year-old Palestinian electrician Mohamed Amir Kola. “They told me that I had been under the rubble for more than four hours until they found me. I have a very deep sleep. 44 lives in the Rimal neighborhood, in the capital the Gaza Strip. Then he points to the open-plan crater at 46 Al Wajda Street, and looks up at the sky for the third floor, where his clan lived in three adjoining apartments. “My wife, 52 years old; my father, 90; my mother, 84; my brother, 63; my sister, 57, my nephews… ”, reels off the litany of absences that he documents with a bunch of photocopies.

No one gave them advance notice of the guided missile firing from the F-16 fighters. The Army’s declared target was a Hamas tunnel network that never appeared underground. The death of dozens of civilians in the commercial district of Rimal is one of the alleged war crimes pending investigation by the International Criminal Court, based in The Hague, derived from the military escalation registered between May 10 and 21 in 256 Palestinians, including 66 children, perished in hundreds of bombings on Gaza, and 13 people perished in Israel after more than 4,000 rockets were fired from the Strip.

Since then, the electrician Kola has been renting with other surviving relatives. “They assure us that they will begin to rebuild the building soon,” he says skeptically while smoking incessantly and sipping thimbles of strong coffee. On the sidewalk, a surveyor takes measurements of the site. “There are 1,500 homes that have been razed, 880 that have been left uninhabitable and another 56,000 damaged, not counting those that were still to be repaired from previous conflicts,” says engineer Nayib Yusuf Sarhan, vice minister of Public Works and Housing and director of reconstruction. from Gaza. This is the fourth war he has faced since he joined the department in 1994. “We have had to build some houses three times; nowhere else in the world are homes destroyed with this viciousness. We are already fed up. The deterioration is endless, ”he rebels at the herculean task that spills over onto his table.

“Egypt, Qatar and Kuwait have pledged to contribute $ 500 million [423 millones de euros] each one, but nothing has yet arrived to start the most urgent works ”, Sarhan justifies the paralysis of the works. “Israel, moreover, has only allowed partial entry of construction materials in the last few days. And we’ll need another $ 2 billion [1.692 millones de euros] to recover basic infrastructures ”, abounds in the shortcomings of a territory plagued by an unemployment rate of 54%, which rises to 70% for those under 25 years of age; that suffers scheduled blackouts every eight hours, and where 95% of the water that flows through the taps is not drinkable.

He is confident that the most urgent relocation cases will have been solved within a year. “No one here is going to stay in tents. The memory of the Nakba [desastre, en árabe: la expulsión de 700.000 palestinos de sus casas tras el nacimiento de Israel en 1948] she is very much alive in Gaza [con casi dos tercios de sus dos millones de habitantes reconocidos como refugiados por la ONU]”, He points out.

Mohamed abu Masud, 43, wants to leave Gaza. “To Italy. To Canada. Anywhere. But with papers, not in a boat ”, he proclaims while showing the remains of the supermarket facilities business that his family ran, also in the Rimal neighborhood of the Gazati capital. Half the building collapsed while the rear facade miraculously remained standing. During the early morning Israeli attack, there were no employees.

“This is not safe. We’d better talk in the yard ”, hurries looking at the cracks in the walls, this mechanic who worked in Saudi Arabia and is the father of two young university students. “I do not think I will see peace and prosperity in Palestine, but I hope my daughters can achieve it,” she laments the ruin of her family’s business caused by the bombs.

The Deputy Minister of Public Works acknowledges that there are no funds for the reconstruction of the destroyed factories and shops: “It has only been possible to recover 5% of the economic activity damaged since the first war (2008-2009).” At Cerámicas Rama, in the industrial zone of northeastern Gaza, they have not waited for better times to come.

“We reached an agreement to reduce the annual quota of orders with suppliers in Spain while we rebuilt the warehouses on our own,” explains Rami Hamada, 33, manager of the construction materials company. “The sales area is now ready and with the warehouses we are going to start from scratch, with an investment of eight million dollars,” he details in a visit under the new metal structures, which replace those that were burned in the May conflict. . “Now we will have to travel to renew stocks,” he shows on his mobile phone a copy of the letter sent by the Valencian factory Pamesa to guarantee his visa before the Consulate General of Spain in Jerusalem. “It was not a lost projectile. Why did they attack us with five missiles? Here we sell ceramic materials, not rocket parts ”.

The road to rebuilding Gaza is strewn with obstacles due to internal Palestinian disputes. The Palestinian Authority backed down on Friday and deviated from the deal reached with Qatar to send aid funds to Gaza through the West Bank banking system. Those in charge of the government of Ramallah, confronted with the Islamist leaders of Gaza, fear that they could be sanctioned by the United States for transferring the money to the Strip, ruled de facto by Hamas, a group classified by Washington as a terrorist.

Qatar sent the funds in cash – about $ 30 million a month – with Israel’s authorization, but after the outbreak of war in May, the Israeli government suspended this route, to prevent part of the aid from being diverted to Hamas, and demanded that were controlled by the United Nations and the Palestinian Authority. Now it is the UN that has promised to distribute it. The stoppage of Qatari financing has affected the supply of fuel for the enclave’s only power plant, the delivery of aid to 100,000 families without resources and the payment of salaries of local civil servants of the Gaza Administration.

Despite the succession of violent incidents – the last one at dawn yesterday, with the bombardment of Hamas positions in the south of the Strip in retaliation for the firing of a rocket into Israeli territory – Israel has lowered the intensity of the blockade. imposed since 2007 to the enclave. It has issued 7,000 entry permits for Palestinians into Israel, nominally as businessmen and merchants, although in practice they are used for agricultural or construction jobs. The Strip’s fishing zone has also been extended to 15 nautical miles from the coast (27 kilometers).

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