Rebuilding Gaza

BEIT LAHIYA, Gaza Strip (AP) — The seven foul-smelling lagoons of sewage near Gaza's coast were supposed to be replaced by a globally funded waste treatment plant. Instead, they epitomize the nightmare faced by foreign donors as they seek to rebuild the territory and open a pathway to peace.

The multimillion dollar project has been delayed by violence and a 20-month-old border closure that have made it difficult to bring supplies into Gaza. Now, after Israel's devastating military offensive, clearing the lagoons is just one part of a much bigger challenge.

On Monday, some 80 donor countries meeting in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheik will be asked to pledge at least $2.8 billion in aid to Gaza.

There's plenty of good will — Saudi Arabia has already promised $1 billion and the U.S. $900 million — and the level of representation will be stellar, including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and French President Nicholas Sarkozy.

But for reconstruction to move forward smoothly, toward pacifying Gaza and opening new horizons for Mideast peace efforts, a series of improbable events would need to happen.

Gaza's Hamas rulers would likely have to reconcile with their moderate West Bank rivals led by President Mahmoud Abbas. The Islamic militants would then have to soften their violent anti-Israel ideology and agree to share power with Abbas.

Israel and Egypt would have to recognize Hamas' governing role and reopen the borders they closed after Hamas seized Gaza by force in June 2007. Recently, Israel has also linked a border opening to long-stalled negotiations on a prisoner swap with Hamas.

But the more likely prospect is that the Palestinians will fail to heal their split and Gaza's borders will remain largely closed. In this case, Israel will continue to keep tight control over concrete, steel and other supplies needed for rebuilding 15,000 homes destroyed or damaged in the offensive it launched to halt Hamas rocket fire.

As it is, the Saudi pledge — along with a $250 million pledge from Qatar and $100 million from Algeria — has not materialized because of disagreements between Fatah and Hamas, an Arab League official said, speaking on condition of anonymity Saturday because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

A Hamas-Israel truce being mediated by Egypt envisions open borders. But Israel says it can't allow supplies in freely, for fear Hamas — a group committed to the destruction of the Jewish state — would hijack concrete and steel to build bunkers and rockets. Instead, Israel is willing to allow in specific hardware consignments, in close coordination with international aid agencies.

"We want the accountability of the international community," said Peter Lerner, spokesman for the Israeli military branch that deals with Palestinian civilians. "There can be different types of creative solutions."

Such an arrangement was in place for the Beit Lahiya sewage project, given emergency status after one of the lagoons overflowed in 2007, killing five people. Still, completion of a pumping station and a four-mile pipeline was delayed by 2 1/2 years, and now the pipeline has been damaged by Israeli air strikes, according to Naziq Rihan, a project engineer. Work on the crucial water treatment plant hasn't even begun.

Another monument to thwarted aid is a housing project, funded by the United Arab Emirates for Gazans made homeless in previous Israeli offensives. The work has stalled since the blockade.

"I think in 10 years, they still won't be finished," said security guard Nasser Abu Amouna, 27, who lost his home in an Israeli airstrike in 2007 and was in line for rehousing in the new project. Abu Amouna would like to marry but can't until he has a proper home.

Benita Ferrero-Waldner, a top European Union diplomat, called Friday for an unconditional opening of Gaza's borders, but she and other donors won't say what steps they would take to bring that about, and it's not clear what arrangements, if any, will be agreed on at Monday's conference.

One possibility is to collect pledges and focus for now on the ongoing emergency relief, in the form of dozens of supply trucks entering Gaza every day.

Donors will be asked to fund a $2.8 billion reconstruction plan put together by Abbas' prime minister, Salam Fayyad, an internationally respected economist. Hamas was not invited.

Fayyad wants most of the money funneled through his West Bank-based government. He already administers huge sums of foreign aid — $7.7 billion for 2008-2010 — and has been sending $120 million to Gaza each month for welfare and salaries of Abbas' former civil servants. Other aid, such as for rebuilding homes, would go directly to the bank accounts of Gazans.

Hamas prepared its own 86-page Gaza reconstruction plan and sent copies to the Arab League. But even if bypassed by the donors, as is likely, Hamas would benefit from any aid that eases pressure on it to help the needy. Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum suggested the Gaza government would be cooperative.

"We will provide all the logistical help to the donors to implement this huge project," he said. "We are not asking anyone to send money into our accounts."

Meanwhile, border restrictions are hindering even emergency relief, said John Ging, the top U.N. aid official in Gaza. Thousands of tons of donations are stuck, he said, because Israel can't handle a large truck volume at the small passages it's running in place of the main Gaza cargo crossing shut down after the Hamas takeover. Ging said aid agencies can't distribute food to 900,000 Gazans as quickly as needed.

Israel says the U.N. isn't sending as many trucks as it could, and that some 117,000 tons of aid have reached Gaza since the Jan. 18 cease-fire, in addition to 2.7 million gallons of fuel for Gaza's power station.

In the three weeks of fighting, Israeli tanks and bulldozers turned vast stretches of factories and multistory homes into mountains of rubble and twisted metal.

Cinderblock shacks and white tents have sprung up, but most of the homeless have rented apartments or moved in with relatives, living on one-time Hamas payments of about $5,000 per displaced family. During the day, many return to the ruins to line up for handouts of blankets, mattresses and diapers.

Last week the heavily damaged Salam neighborhood of the town of Jebaliya bustled with activity. Eighty bags of cement, along with some sewage and water pipes, had just been delivered to the neighborhood by the Hamas government — prewar supplies from Gaza warehouses, according to Hussein Jneid, a town inspector.

Mahmoud Dardoni, 60, and several relatives mixed cement to repair shaky supporting columns of their damaged three-story family home. Dardoni has been living in his ground-floor apartment, for lack of an alternative, even though he was told it's not safe.

Ging warned that anything less than open borders would spell disaster and set the stage for more violence. Gaza was in bad shape even before the war, he noted, with three-fourths of 1.4 million Gazans receiving some aid because the blockade deepened poverty and wiped out private industry.

"Unless the crossings open, we cannot expect any improvement of the situation," he said. "It's more urgent today than it has ever been before to find the solutions to get the crossing points open, to get the materials in."

Hadeel al-Shalchi contributed to this report from Cairo.