Gazans displaced by war get 1,000 new homes

More than 1,000 Palestinian families have taken possession of new apartments as part of a large Qatari-funded housing project in the Gaza Strip.

Saturday’s units are the first batch of a 3,000-apartment complex that was announced when the former Qatari ruler, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, became the first head of state to visit Hamas-ruled Gaza in 2012.

“Today, we are inaugurating the first phase of the Hamad residential city (project),” Qatari envoy Mohammed al-Amadi told reporters in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis.

A total of 1,060 apartments have been completed and the title deeds were being handed out to their new owners, he said at a ceremony at the apartment complex.

Ismail Haniya, the Hamas chief in Gaza, called the completion of the first stage “a historic moment.”

During the 50-day war between Israel and Hamas in the summer of 2014, Israeli airstrikes and shelling flattened entire areas, leaving hundreds of thousands displaced.

The construction of the residential city is separate from the post-war rebuilding, but being the largest housing project ever makes it significant for the 1.8 million residents of the coastal enclave, who live under Israeli and Egyptian blockade and travel restrictions.

Israel restricts building materials to Gaza for fears that the coastal strip’s Islamic Hamas rulers will use them in building its attack tunnels. To overcome the restrictions, Qatar arranges with Israel and the Palestinian Authority directly to deliver the needed materials for its projects.

On Saturday, Qatari and Palestinian flags adorned the complex as buses dropped hundreds of people who will receive the apartments.

The families received certificates at the event, but won’t move in for another two months due to minor infrastructure work, such as paving the roads to the city and connecting it with the water network.

Among those who received certificates was Samia al-Nakhala, 39, who lives with her husband and son in a home that costs $250 a month in rent. Now she will pay the cost of the house in monthly installations of $170. “Instead of throwing my money in the air every month, now I will be paying for my own home,” she said.

Qatar has allocated a total of $407 million for the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, including homes, infrastructure and a hospital.

Around 9,000 homes were completely destroyed in the 2014 war. The UN says tens of thousands of other homes sustained damage in varying degrees.

In November 2015, Mufeed al-Hasayneh, the Palestinian minister of public works, said that most of the damaged homes had been repaired.

More than 2,200 Palestinians were killed during the conflict, the majority of them civilians, according to UN figures. Israel contends that about half of those killed were Hamas and other fighters and points to the Hamas practice of embedding military infrastructure in residential areas as the reason for the high civilian death toll. On the Israeli side, 73 people were killed, almost all of them soldiers.

Hamas, an Islamist terror group, seized control of Gaza in a violent coup against Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority in 2007. Committed to seeking the destruction of Israel, Hamas has fought three rounds of conflict with Israel, and fired thousands of rockets indiscriminately into the Jewish state. Israel withdrew all military forces and its entire civilian presence from Gaza in 2005.