Oxfam unveils $71 billion plan for reconstruction of Gaza
by Joe Fisher · UPIJuly 23 (UPI) -- A group of non-governmental organizations shared with world leaders a plan for the reconstruction of Gaza with an estimated cost of $71.4 billion, according to a report released Thursday.
Oxfam, an international coalition of non-governmental organizations, said in its report that the cost to rebuild Gaza is seven times the cost of every other reconstruction effort there over the past 20 years.
The report, "Building Gaza Anew," shares a "blueprint" of what that construction will look like. It draws from the analyses of World Bank, European Union and United Nations assessments following military offensives by Israel in Gaza in 2008, 2009, 2014 and 2021.
The U.N., EU and World Bank's Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment for the Gaza Strip published in April estimates that the region has suffered about $57.9 billion in damage and economic losses. It will require $71.4 billion for recovery and reconstruction over the course of the next decade.
"Gaza has never been allowed to finish rebuilding," Amitabh Behar, Oxfam International executive director, said in a statement. "A decade after Israel's 2014 offensive on Gaza, families were still waiting for homes that never came, and then the bombs returned. This is not fate. It is Israel's illegal occupation and blockade, and the impunity producing the same result, war after war. Every government that funds the rubble but never the reckoning is complicit in it."
Oxfam called on the U.N. General Assembly and President Donald Trump's Board of Peace to lead a charge in funding reconstruction.
The press release from Oxfam said more than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed and another 173,000 have been injured. About 1.9 million people have been displaced by the Israeli military.
While the cost of reconstruction lays out the costs associated with rebuilding infrastructure, buildings and homes, the Oxfam report said human development in Gaza has been set back 77 years. This stems from the destruction of institutions of health, education, religion and culture.
"Nearly all schools are destroyed or damaged, universities levelled, thousands of teachers, professors and researchers have been killed, and libraries and archives of Palestinian history lost," the report said.
"What was destroyed in Gaza was not merely steel and concrete," Mohammad Skaik, Gaza program manager for PalTrade, said in a statement. "Israel eradicated an entire social and economic world, built up over generations, and only Palestinians can rebuild it."
The non-governmental organizations have set out a five-year framework for reconstruction "underpinned by rights-based principles and a single national vision linking Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem." They argue that models for reconstruction "imposed from the outside will fail."
In February 2025, President Donald Trump proposed the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust. The plan proposes further displacing the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip through voluntary relocation to neighboring countries while the United States takes over the strip. The U.S. government would then govern over the strip for 10 years, developing the region with outside investments.
After blowback from leaders in the Middle East, Trump walked back his proposal, referring to it as a recommendation.
"Reconstruction is not only a humanitarian task; it is a political one," Misyef Jamil, senior researcher at the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute, said in a statement. "A plan designed in foreign capitals, however well-funded, would be a cosmetic exercise -- simply another form of control over Palestinian land and lives. Our consultations across Gaza carried one unmistakable message: nothing about our future without us."
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