The Electronic Intifada 2 November 2025
Palestinians in Jabaliya in the Gaza Strip walk alongside standing water and demolished buildings on 27 October.
APA imagesA year and a half into the relentless war on Gaza, one of my relatives tried to rebuild the fragments of his life by himself, defying the weight of destruction and loss.
In March 2025, he decided to marry and prepare a small room on the ruins of his destroyed home in Gaza City’s Shujaiya neighborhood. With nothing left but rubble, he gathered broken stones from his demolished house, cleaned and reshaped what could be salvaged, and built a small space where he and his bride could begin again.
Just a month later, Israeli forces invaded the neighborhood, forcing residents to flee once more and obliterating what remained.
His attempt, one among many similar efforts across Gaza, embodied the quiet determination of people struggling to stitch life back together amid a landscape of ruins. Each such act of rebuilding stands as resistance to the ever-growing mountains of debris produced by the ongoing campaign of annihilation that has engulfed Gaza since October 2023.
According to an October 2025 United Nations report, the volume of rubble generated by the war in Gaza has reached up to 60 million tonnes, an amount roughly equal by volume to 15 Great Pyramids of Giza or 25 Eiffel Towers. This unprecedented scale of destruction marks one of the most extreme environmental catastrophes on record.
This estimate exceeds the aftermath of any recent conflict or natural disaster. For comparison, the battle for Mosul in 2016–2017 left around 7-10 million tonnes of debris, while the 2010 Haiti earthquake generated about 13-15 million tonnes.
Gaza alone now bears more debris than both Mosul and Haiti combined, yet within an area barely 141 square miles, one of the highest concentrations of destruction ever recorded. United Nations assessments have even noted that Gaza contains more rubble than all of Ukraine’s frontlines, though the latter extends 600 miles compared with Gaza’s mere 25.
The result is a unique environmental and humanitarian catastrophe.
This rubble weight has risen sharply in recent months, driven by the newest wave of destruction. In September 2025, entire residential and commercial towers were flattened by the Israeli military in Gaza, among them the Mushtaha Tower (16 floors, 76 apartments), the Soussi Tower (15 floors, over 60 apartments), the Roya Commercial Tower (16 floors, 120 apartments and offices housing media and rights organizations), and the Roya Residential Building (seven floors, 30 apartments). The Israeli military continues its systematic destruction throughout the so-called “yellow zone,” a heavily militarized corridor that covers more than half of the Gaza Strip and remains under direct Israeli control.
Israeli forces are a direct danger to people in the Shujaiya neighborhood and in parts of al-Tuffah and al-Zaytoun in Gaza City, as well as in Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahiya and Rafah, where demolitions and bombardments persist. Since these areas are inaccessible to assessment teams, current rubble estimates exclude large sections still undergoing destruction, suggesting that the actual volume of debris resulting from the genocide is far greater than existing projections.
Public health hazard
The environmental catastrophe has long surpassed chemical contamination and entered what can only be described as the biological decomposition of the Gaza Strip itself. Beneath the estimated 60 million tonnes of rubble may still lie 10,000 or more bodies that could not be retrieved over two years, for want of heavy equipment and rescue teams.
These bodies’ gradual decomposition has blended with the debris, creating toxic, microbe-rich zones that emit dangerous gases and leach fluids into the soil, eventually seeping into Gaza’s sole aquifer, the principal source of water for two million people. With waste management systems crippled, the destroyed areas have become makeshift dumps where household, industrial and medical waste – including hazardous chemicals, expired drugs and contaminated syringes from bombed hospitals – are piled beside the rubble.
This chaotic mixture of human remains, garbage and construction debris has turned vast swaths of Gaza into open fields of biological and chemical contamination, threatening public health and raising the risk of epidemics and chronic diseases.
By Septemeber 2025, the UN Environment Programme estimated that 15 percent of Gaza’s debris could be contaminated with asbestos, industrial waste or heavy metals, rendering the entire environment acutely toxic. Experts warn that inhaling microscopic asbestos fibers released by airstrikes could cause severe respiratory diseases and aggressive cancers, the effects of which will last for generations.
UNEP has described Gaza’s pollution levels as unprecedented, reflecting an environmental and humanitarian crisis unparalleled in recent decades and exceeding the devastation recorded in post-war Mosul and Aleppo.
For Gaza’s residents, rubble is no longer merely a physical remnant of war, it has become a living archive of loss and resistance, bearing silent witness to bombardment, displacement and destruction. Its removal should not mean erasure, but rather transformation, a process in which recycling and reconstruction become acts of remembrance.
Scholars and urban planners therefore insist that rubble management in Gaza cannot be treated as a purely technical task; it must be a process of documentation and acknowledgment, one that preserves evidence and lays the groundwork for future justice.
Recycling and remembering
Gaza Municipality spokesperson Asem Alnabih has argued that the claim debris removal will take 15 years is overstated. According to his research, removing the rubble within a short period, possibly one year, requires a large-scale, coordinated effort that combines human, technical and institutional resources.
The plan calls for 1,000 trucks, 200 heavy bulldozers and 100 excavators working in two shifts, totaling 12 hours per day. It emphasizes partnerships with local, regional and international companies, strong reliance on the local private sector, and the active participation of Palestinian workers and contractors, especially from Gaza and the West Bank.
Amid this colossal destruction, new ideas have emerged to transform rubble from a burden into a resource for reconstruction. Reusing rubble is both feasible and necessary under blockade conditions and material shortages.
Concrete fragments can be sorted, crushed and mechanically treated to pave roads, fill foundations or produce low-grade concrete blocks, just as post-war Mosul and Beirut used recycled debris to rebuild roads and infrastructure.
Similar experiences in Sarajevo and Aleppo show that recycling rubble not only reduces dust and pollution but also creates local employment and reintegrates the physical memory of the destroyed city into its rebuilding.
Alnabih’s study suggests using Gaza’s war rubble as a valuable resource in coastal protection and reconstruction. Rubble can help strengthen eroded shoreline areas, expand the coastal zone by reclaiming between 740 and 1,235 acres, and develop Gaza’s port and possibly even artificial islands for tourism and infrastructure.
On land, the rubble can be recycled into eco-friendly construction materials such as pavement blocks, concrete and road base layers, turning destruction into a foundation for recovery and sustainable development.
Current proposals for Gaza include establishing mobile debris-processing stations, developing labs to test recycled materials for safety, and preserving selected ruins as memorials and documentation spaces. In this way, Gaza’s rubble could one day serve not merely as a reminder of devastation but as the raw material of a renewed future born from its own ruins.
Ultimately, however, all these visions depend on ensuring international accountability for what has become the largest deliberate environmental destruction in modern history. Gaza cannot rebuild while still under siege, nor can any technical plan succeed without unrestricted access to machinery and materials along with sustained global political pressure on Israel to cease its obstruction and exploitation of reconstruction.
For decades, Israel has used the reconstruction file as a means of control and blackmail, opening and closing crossings at will, dictating the pace of Gaza’s recovery or its continued paralysis. The persistence of this unprecedented environmental siege, now stretching into its third year, coupled, as it is said in Arabic, with Israel’s ongoing threats to “strike what is already struck and kill the already killed,” makes reconstruction not just an engineering challenge but a moral and global imperative.
Rebuilding Gaza is not merely about restoring walls, it is about restoring life, dignity and sovereignty over a land that refuses to die beneath its own rubble.
Islam Elhabil is a Palestinian from Gaza, a Malaysia-based microplastics specialist, PhD researcher and engineer specializing in engineering solutions for pressing global environmental issues.
