Gaza's Next Disaster: No Cement for Rebuilding
To rebuild after its war with Israel, Gaza is going to need tons of cement. But Hamas has a history of using cement for military rather than civilian purposes, and importation of the vital building material is likely to be even more tightly controlled once hostilities end than it has been in the past. So big swaths of Gaza that have been devastated by Israeli bombardment will likely not be rebuilt for many years to come.
Troops of the Israel Defense Forces have been surprised by the number and sophistication of tunnels discovered during their ground incursion, considering that Israel and (sometimes) Egypt have gone to great lengths to prevent Hamas engineers from getting their hands on material for building tunnels. What’s clear now is that those efforts to keep cement strictly for civilian purposes failed miserably. As of July 21, the IDF had found 23 tunnels under the Gaza-Israel border with 66 access points. The soil in the area is soft, which means tunnels are easy to dig but frequently require concrete for reinforcement. The Israeli military estimates that 600,000 tons of concrete—made by mixing cement with sand, gravel, and water—may have gone into the tunnels.
The tunnels can be surprisingly sophisticated. Last October, for instance, Israel discovered an attack tunnel under the border that was 1.6 miles long and 66 feet below ground, equipped with electricity, a communications network, and “stockpiles of cookies, yoghurt and other foods to allow for stays of several months,” the website Al-Monitor reported.
The construction of attack tunnels and underground lairs came at a time when Gaza was appealing to the world to be relieved of limitations on the importation of cement on humanitarian grounds. The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem reported last year that “contractors and construction laborers in the Gaza Strip depicted a harsh reality in which projects are put on hold due to lack of materials. They related that contractors were forced to dismiss employees, so that thousands of people, most of whom support large families, lost their livelihood.”
A journalist for Al-Monitor, Rasha Abou Jalal, told the poignant story of a 22-year-old man who needed bags of cement last year to complete the construction of his marital home. The man had to buy them in secret, meeting his connection precisely at 10:30 p.m. at an arranged location. The article attributed the need for secrecy to the Hamas government’s “going after merchants monopolizing the cement market.” What seems clear now, however, is that the government’s real concern wasn’t fighting monopolistic merchants but keeping the cement for itself.
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http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-23/next-gaza-disaster-after-war-with-israel-no-cement-for-rebuilding#r=rss
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