The head of the UN's Development Programme Achim Steiner says that the Israel-Hamas war has put back development in Gaza by 60 years. Around two-thirds of all buildings in the Gaza Strip have been "entirely destroyed or damaged", Steiner tells AFP in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
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00:00On the scale of destruction, we are not only talking about the infrastructure,
00:03where probably between 65 to 70 percent of buildings in Gaza
00:08have either been entirely destroyed or damaged.
00:11But we're also talking about an economy that has been destroyed
00:16where we estimate that roughly 60 years of development have been lost
00:20in this conflict over 15 months.
00:22You have to imagine 2 million people who in the Gaza Strip
00:26have lost not only their shelter, they've lost public infrastructure,
00:29sewage treatment systems, fresh water supply systems,
00:33public waste management.
00:35All of these fundamental infrastructure and service elements
00:39simply do not exist.
00:41When we talk about reconstruction,
00:43we're not talking about one or two years here,
00:45we're talking about years and years
00:47until you even come close to rebuilding, first of all,
00:50the physical infrastructure.
00:52But it's also an entire economy.
00:54People had savings, people had loans,
00:56people had invested in businesses
00:58and all of this is lost.
01:00So we're talking about the physical and economic
01:02and in some ways even the psychosocial phase for reconstruction.