A major UN survey has found that up to 75,000 Palestinians remain homeless nearly two years after Israel's last devastating offensive on the blockaded Gaza Strip. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) made the findings in an unprecedented survey on Gaza's internally displaced families published Monday, warning that many families were now at breaking point. "After hearing from over 16,000 displaced families in the Gaza Strip, it is clear that most continue to live in desperate conditions," Robert Piper, UN Coordinator for Humanitarian Aid, said in a statement. "International support to end this situation is urgently needed." The survey found that more than 80 percent of the families had borrowed money over the past year to survive, with 85 percent buying food on credit, and as many as 40 percent decreasing their consumption of food. About 63 percent of the displaced Palestinians were renting living space, but nearly 50 percent ...

Until this summer, not a single one of the homes totally destroyed during Israel’s assault on Gaza last year had been rebuilt. Why? The Israeli rights group Gisha, which monitors Israel’s siege of Gaza, tries to provides answers in a recent analysis, “Where’s the housing boom?” The 51-day assault last summer destroyed or rendered uninhabitable 19,000 homes. More than 100,000 were damaged and more than 100,000 people in Gaza remain without permanent shelter. A major reason for the fact that reconstruction is only just beginning is that between last August’s ceasefire and the end of July this year, Israel has allowed into Gaza just 6.5 percent of the construction supplies needed to repair years of destruction and accumulated housing needs. But the story is more complex than that. “Dual use” A basic fact is that Israel still tightly regulates what comes in and out of Gaza, home to 1.8 million Palestinians. Starting in June 2007, Israel has totally banned or severely restricted the...

GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- A heat wave sweeping across the occupied Palestinian territories has brought further suffering to Gazan residents whose homes were destroyed during last summer's deadly Gaza war. "All the citizens who live in caravans are in very dire and disastrous living conditions," said 60-year-old Abu Ahmad, who lives in a mobile home in the Khuzaa neighborhood of Khan Younis in southern Gaza. "Death is better than our life." Abu Ahmad said that since the war ended a year ago, his children had left him to live with their grandfather as conditions inside the mobile homes were too poor. "We are humans, not animals, and we can't live in these caravans," he said. The 60-year-old urged the Palestinian authorities to help improve living conditions for displaced Gazans, saying: "We are not asking for the unattainable, and we don't want them to put us in paradise." "All we are asking for is to speed up reconstruction of...

The Palestinian Minister of Housing and Public Works announced Tuesday that reconstruction of the Gaza Strip has “started and will not stop” until all the homes destroyed by Israeli forces during its latest offensive on Gaza have been rebuilt. Hasayneh laid the first brick of the reconstruction effort at a home of a Palestinian family in al-Shujaiyya, an area east of Gaza City that was one of the w moreorst hit by Israeli shelling during the war. “We are here today in front of the Harara family home to declare starting actual reconstruction of the Gaza Strip," Minister Mufid al-Hasayneh said. The Harara home is the first to be reconstructed in the neighborhood, where the majority of residents were forced to flee their homes last summer due to heavy fighting between Hamas fighters and Israeli forces in what would later be known as the "Battle of Shujaiyya." A UN Commission of Inquiry reported last month that Israeli forces carried out indiscriminate attacks against fa...

GAZA CITY (AFP) -- Fouad Abu Asser and his family have returned to their neighborhood amid the rubble of the Gaza Strip -- but something resembling a shed is what they now call home. "We hear talk and more talk, but we still haven't seen anything," the 54-year-old father said, referring to the slow pace of rebuilding in the Gaza Strip, devastated by last summer's war with Israel. Wednesday marks a year since the war's start, and thousands of homes in Gaza still have not been rebuilt, forcing residents like Abu Asser to construct makeshift houses where they once lived out of prefabricated supplies or rubble. The delay has been blamed on a variety of reasons, including Israel's strict blockade preventing the shipment of construction material into the coastal enclave and the failure of promised money to arrive from international donors. The result has been Gazans seeking to house their families in whatever way they can, with some 18,000 homes either destroyed ...

GAZA CITY (AFP) -- The rebuilding of thousands of homes destroyed by Israel in last summer's Gaza war is to begin in the coming days, almost a year after the conflict began, the Palestinian housing minister said Wednesday. The July-August war in the besieged Gaza Strip destroyed or partially damaged tens of thousands of homes, leaving 100,000 Gazans homeless. "Some 90,000 partially-damaged homes have already been repaired in coordination with the United Nations," Mufid Hasayneh told journalists in Gaza City. "In the coming days, the operation of reconstructing those totally destroyed will begin," he said. Some 18,000 homes were destroyed or severely damaged, according to UN figures, and reconstruction of the war-wracked coastal territory has been slow. Israel's ongoing blockade of Gaza, now in its ninth year, has been blamed, as well as the lack of international donor support to the territory, which is ruled by Hamas. Hasayneh said that Israel had allo...

From the Electronic Intifada - Rizka Abu Rujeila, 70 years old, holds her grandson outside the hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, on 24 July. The boy was injured during an attack on the village of Khuzaa. Most residents fled following Israel’s ground invasion and some were attacked as they attempted to leave the village. Khuzaa was cut off for days from the rest of Gaza; Israeli soldiers prevented access to medical workers and journalists. Some residents sought refuge at the hospital, which was overwhelmed by the number of dead and injured. Most of Gaza’s population is very young: the median age is 18, and nearly 45 percent of the Strip’s 1.8 million residents are 14 years old or younger. Attention was rightly paid to the plight of Gaza’s children during Israel’s 51 days of bombing last summer. But elderly Palestinians are also among the population’s most vulnerable, and have been subjected to repeated trauma during their lifetime... Anne Paq is a French freelance photographer ...

The official UN death-toll for the 2014 war shows that 1,549 Palestinian civilians were killed in comparison to four Israelis, and 504 Palestinian children were killed for one Israeli child. PNN reports that, in the Gaza Strip, the seven weeks of hostilities between Palestinian armed groups and the Israeli military, during July and August 2014, resulted in an unprecedented level of loss and human suffering, which aggravated the already fragile situation that preceded the conflict. A total of 1,549 Palestinian civilians, a third of them children, were killed and around 11,000 people were injured; 13 per cent of the housing stock was damaged or destroyed, including some 20,000 homes totally destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, leaving over 100,000 people displaced; unexploded ordnance spread over Gaza pose a serious threat to the life of Palestinians and humanitarian workers; and access to already insufficient basic services has been further undermined. Four Israeli civilians were kil...

Six months after a ceasefire agreement ended Israel's 50-day military offensive on the Gaza Strip, Palestinians in the war-torn territory remain hostage to a UN-brokered reconstruction mechanism which has failed to deliver. On Sept. 16, Robert Serry, the UN envoy for the Middle East, announced a deal to ease restrictions on imports of construction materials to Gaza to enable the reconstruction of the territory. Over 100,000 homes were destroyed or damaged during the conflict, with thousands of other structures, including 24 schools, razed to the ground. The Shelter Cluster, an international group co-chaired by the UN refugee agency and the Red Cross, estimates that an average of 440 trucks of building materials would be required to enter Gaza each day to complete the reconstruction process within five years. Figures published by OXFAM on Thursday show that 1,661 trucks of the most essential construction materials -- aggregates, steel bars and cement -- have entered Gaza in th...

(Reuters) - Aid agencies struggling to shelter thousands of Gazans made homeless by war have resorted to building makeshift temporary homes out of metal and wood to evade Israeli restrictions on imports into the territory. Around 150,000 families are still homeless after last year's war between Israel and Hamas, in which Israeli bombardment destroyed thousands of apartment buildings and homes. Israel tightly limits the flow of concrete, cement, iron bars and other materials into Gaza, as "dual use" items that could have a military purpose if they were seized by Hamas to rebuild tunnels used to launch attacks. That means few homes have been rebuilt despite international pledges of billions for reconstruction. Rather than wait to rebuild permanent homes, some relief agencies have decided to build temporary structures with materials they can get. "We designed the transitional shelters without any dual use items so that within the existing restrictions, we could get...

GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- The Palestinian minister of public works and housing said Tuesday that the ministry has laid a cornerstone for the reconstruction of a residential tower block in Gaza City. Mufid al-Hasayneh said: "The rebuilding of this tower is a significant event and is the start of the rebuilding of all towers destroyed during the war" "The ministry is continuing its efforts to distribute aid money to people whose houses were partially damaged, and hand out mobile homes and construction materials." Several multistory residential buildings in Gaza City were targeted by Israeli forces during the war, killing dozens of civilians. more

Around $12 million of aid donations will be distributed to Palestinians displaced by Israel's military offensive on the Gaza Strip last summer, a Palestinian official said Thursday. Minister of Public works Mufeid al-Hasanyneh said that the United Nations Development Programme will distribute $6 million in $300 payments to those affected by the conflict. Another $6 million will be distributed to Palestinians whose homes were destroyed. Rent payments will be covered for a further four months for those who had already been receiving support, while rent for those yet to have received money will be covered for eight months. The minister said he expects the money to be available early next week. more

GAZA CITY (AFP) -- The UN agency for Palestinian refugees said on Tuesday that it cannot afford to repair Gaza homes damaged in last year's war with Israel because donors have failed to pay. "The agency has exhausted all funding to support repairs and rental subsidies," the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) said in a statement. "$5.4 billion was pledged at the Cairo (aid) conference last October and virtually none of it has reached Gaza. This is distressing and unacceptable. "It is unclear why this funding has not been forthcoming," it added. UNRWA said that the homes of more than 96,000 Palestine refugees were destroyed or damaged during the conflict. They made up the vast majority of the more than 100,000 homes that were hit during the 50-day conflict between Israel and Hamas. UNRWA said: "Some funds remain available to begin the reconstruction of totally destroyed homes." But it added that cutting subsidies to displaced re...

From the Norwegian Refugee Council - Last week the residents of the Gaza Strip were hit by a cold winter storm. The strong winds, low temperatures and heavy rains caused damage and floods in different parts of the Gaza Strip. Gas heaters make a big difference for displaced families. The storm forced dozens of families to evacuate their flooded houses. Gaza’s basic infrastructure was already in a fragile state prior to further large-scale destruction that occurred during Israel’s military offensive against the Gaza Strip in July and August 2014. The storm, which started on Tuesday, 6 January 2015, and reached its peak by Friday, claimed the lives of four Palestinians in Gaza, three of whom were children, according to media reports. NRC has taken a leading role in coordinating the response in the most vulnerable communities in the Gaza strip following the storm, through facilitating distribution and installation of plastic sheeting to prevent water leakages, coordinating distribution ...

Muhammad al-Gharib says his life was turned upside down when his father and younger sister were killed in an airstrike during Israel’s 51-day offensive on the Gaza Strip this past summer. Shortly after his father, Baha, 58, and his sister, Ola, 16, stepped out of their home in Rafah on 29 July, they were directly struck by an Israeli missile. “They were only about two hundred meters [218 yards] from the house when they died,” al-Gharib, a first-year university student, told The Electronic Intifada. “We ran outside and couldn’t believe what we saw. They were dead.” “As the war got really bad during the last days of his life, it was like he knew something bad was going to happen,” al-Gharib said of his father. “He was laughing all the time and joking, but we had a bad feeling.” Amid a summer of soaring tensions and frequent clashes in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Israel launched its third major military operation in Gaza in the last six years. Armed Palestinian ...

Moataz Sukkar no longer runs to his home's balcony in the Gaza Strip to welcome the year's first autumn rain. The Palestinian young man had to carry out an urgent chore after rainwater spread through the floor of his house: fix the fragile spread of nylon sheets and cloth rags he had installed to cover the roof after it was blown off by Israeli warplanes during the latter's recently-ended devastating offensive on the coastal enclave. "This is exactly what we have feared; that the rain season will begin before the reconstruction process [for the strip] does," Sukkar, 23, told Anadolu Agency on Sunday. "This morning the rain ruined our only option for covering up the roof." In Gaza City's eastern Shujaya district, which had been heavily targeted by Israeli bombardments, Mohamed al-Moghni screams at his children to stay away from the streets surrounding their partially-destroyed home after they were flooded with rainwater. "We were flooded wit...

GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- Local organizations have donated 100 mobile homes to Palestinians displaced by Israel's military offensive on the besieged Gaza Strip, sources said Tuesday. The homes, which were built locally and funded by charitable organizations, were donated to families in the Khuzaa neighborhood in Khan Younis. Each home consists of two bedrooms, a kitchen, and bathroom and can house five people. Suad Najjar, who lost her home in Israel's assault, told Ma'an that the mobile homes were not big enough to accommodate her family and worries that they could replace the rebuilding of her home. "The mobile home fits only five. It is not enough for all my children, where would they live?" she said. The mobile homes are the size of one room in her destroyed house, she said, adding that the properties should not become a permanent solution for those displaced. "Where do we go if we do not rebuild our houses, to the sea? I will set up a tent next to ...

Palestinians in Gaza displaced by Israel's military offensive on the besieged enclave are still waiting for solutions as winter approaches. Israel's military assault left over 110,000 Palestinians homeless and the displaced are traveling from one place to another to find refuge. Muin Bahar, who lives amongst the rubble of his destroyed home, told Ma'an that it is difficult to find a place to live, eat or drink. "All we are able to eat is canned food and I do not have a job or money for us and for the kids in schools." He urged Palestinian authorities to start the rebuilding process before winter arrives. "Soon, we could be sleeping under the rain," he said. With indirect talks with Israel suspended until late October, life for Gazans is becoming more difficult by the day, as the necessary materials needed for reconstruction are not allowed entry into the enclave. "The (ceasefire) agreement imposes strict security on the materials allowed int...

One week after a ceasefire halting an Israeli military offensive against the Gaza Strip, tens of thousands of Palestinians remain displaced, sheltered in United Nations schools and other facilities. On Sunday, 58,071 people still lived in 36 UN schools across the coastal enclave, according to Chris Gunness, spokesperson for UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees. With 15,670 housing units damaged, including 2,276 completely destroyed, and up to 500,000 Palestinians displaced over the 51-day onslaught, the number staying with extended families, in temporary rentals and at government and informal shelters is probably higher. An estimated 108,000 Palestinians will need long-term solutions because their homes were too severely damaged to inhabit or destroyed altogether, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA). The crisis is compounded by the fact that there was already a deficit of 71,000 housing units for Gaza’s nearly 1.8 million reside...

“The military operations in the Gaza Strip, in which civilians and civilian objects were attacked, has led to the displacement of around 250,000 Palestinians who now live in public and UNRWA schools-turned-shelters,” said Vice-President of the International Federation of Red Crescent and Red Crescent Societies, and President of the Italian Red Cross, Francesco Rocca, Tuesday. According to WAFA, the news was announced during a meeting with President of the Palestine Red Crescent Society, Younis Al Khatib, at the National Society’s Headquarters in Ramallah, occupied West Bank. Al Khatib “touched on the effects of the conflict on Palestine Red Crescent Society teams, branches and ambulances in the Gaza Strip. Since the conflict began, two ambulances have been destroyed with a further 27 damaged, 46 staff have been injured and four branch offices extensively damaged,” the statement detailed. more