Rebuilding Gaza was seen as a ‘Herculean’ task before Oct. 7; six months of bombing has led to crises that will long outlive the war

By Dima Nazzal, Georgia Institute of Technology

Over a decade ago, a United Nations report described the Gaza Strip as virtually unlivable, adding that it would require “Herculean efforts” to change that.

Today, after six months of bombardment, mass displacement and siege by Israel, the task of rebuilding Gaza seems practically unimaginable.

I’m a scholar and a systems engineer who, as research director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems at Georgia Tech, looks at the intersection of public health and education, with a focus on optimizing systems for effective and equitable access to essential services.

I know that in the best of times, designing complex systems that involve people, communities, technologies and limited resources – often with conflicting priorities and impacting multiple segments of society – is an extremely complex challenge. Doing so in the midst of a geopolitical conflict makes the problem seem infeasible.

But what we are dealing with now in Gaza is on a different scale altogether. The enclave is facing cascading crises – a condition in which multiple interrelated crises occur sequentially or simultaneously, each triggering or exacerbating the next. And as hard as it is to look beyond the daily horrors of warfare in Gaza, there will be a time when the world starts to turn to recovery and reconstruction. The concern is that the cascading crises will make this process that much harder and moreover amplify the human costs of this conflict for years to come.

Beyond the death toll

As the 2012 U.N. report questioning Gaza’s “livability” alludes to, the occupied enclave has long faced severe problems relating to providing for the people living in what is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. My mother, who lives in the West Bank, often visited Gaza in her capacity as a member of the Palestinian National Council and the General Secretariat of the General Union of Palestinian Women.

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