The Reconstruction of Gaza: Who Pays?

Every time Gaza is destroyed, the world sends money to rebuild it. Every time it is rebuilt, it is destroyed again. The payer is never the perpetrator.

Each Israeli assault on Gaza ends the same way: the rubble cools, the cameras move on, and international donors begin counting the cost of another reconstruction. Western leaders speak of humanitarian concern, Arab states announce billion-dollar pledges, and aid convoys queue at the border. Yet the country that dropped the bombs never pays the bill. Gaza’s ruins have become a recurring line item on the balance sheet of others.

The Airport That Never Flew Again

When the Yasser Arafat International Airport opened in 1998, it was sold as a promise of normal life. Morocco’s king sent architects, Germany and Spain financed construction, and dignitaries spoke of peace dividends. Within three years, Israeli jets destroyed the runway, control tower, and radar. The cost nearly $100 million vanished in smoke. Donors quietly wrote it off. Israel never compensated anyone. A later European assessment estimated another €30 million would be needed to rebuild, but Israel refused to permit materials through the crossings. The wreckage still lies there a monument to the futility of aid under occupation.

The Power Plant and the Endless Fuel Crisis

In 2006, after the abduction of Corporal Gilad Shalit, Israeli aircraft bombed Gaza’s only power station, destroying its six main transformers. The plant had been financed through foreign loans; when it went dark, it was Qatar that paid emergency fuel grants, the European Union that subsidised electricity, and Turkey that sent tankers. Israel paid nothing. Each subsequent escalation has returned the plant to blackout. Donor money restores it; the next war erases it. Gaza’s infrastructure is now a revolving door of foreign generosity and domestic devastation.

The Billion Dollar Reconstruction Industry

After the 2014 war, donors met in Cairo. $5.4 billion was pledged; Qatar offered $1 billion, Saudi Arabia $500 million, Kuwait and the UAE $200 million each. Less than half ever arrived. By 2018, the World Bank found that barely $1.4 billion of the $3.5 billion allocated for reconstruction had actually been disbursed, stalled by Israeli import bans and bureaucratic obstruction. Still, the same choreography repeated in 2021 and again after 2023. Damage is assessed, conferences convene, and the same donors fund the same ruins inspected, delayed, and taxed by the very authority that caused the destruction.

Destruction Without Consequence

International law says an occupying power that destroys civilian infrastructure without military necessity owes reparations. The precedents from Iraq’s compensation to Kuwait to Bosnia’s post-war claims are clear. Yet no court has ever enforced this principle against Israel. The United States vetoes it at the UN Security Council, and Europe prefers funding relief to pursuing liability. Israel therefore wields the rare privilege of destruction without fiscal consequence: it can devastate a territory and know that others will foot the repair bill.

The arrangement is elegantly perverse. The greater the devastation, the larger the donor conference. The larger the pledges, the freer the hand of the destroyer. The international system has turned Gaza into a humanitarian subscription model: the bombs are paid by one set of governments, the rebuilding by another, and the victims by all.

Who Actually Pays

Qatar remains the largest single benefactor more than $1.3 billion in direct cash, fuel, and construction projects since 2012 and another $500 million pledged after the 2023 offensive. EU taxpayers have absorbed hundreds of millions more through UNRWA and humanitarian channels. The United States, while defending Israel diplomatically, finances the aid agencies that keep Gaza alive. Each Western state subsidises, in effect, the consequences of the policy it endorses.

The result is an inversion of accountability: those who destroy pay nothing, those who protest pay twice once in rhetoric, again in reconstruction. Even the administrative burden of aid is externalised. Israel controls entry permits, customs lists, and inspection points, yet the staffing, logistics, and security costs fall on the donors.

A Debt Deferred

By early 2025, the estimated $53 billion price tag for Gaza’s recovery had become a statistical abstraction too large for politics, too routine for outrage. UN engineers speak of a decade to clear the rubble, economists of a generation to rebuild the economy. What no one disputes is who will pay: the same coalition of foreign treasuries that have paid since 1998. Israel’s ledger remains blank.

The moral economy is stable because it suits everyone. Western governments buy political quiet by writing cheques; Arab donors purchase influence and legitimacy; Israel retains control without liability. The people of Gaza, meanwhile, live amid ruins that belong to everyone and to no one.