UN warns Gaza faces years of destruction and reconstruction work

UNOPS Executive Director Jorge Moreira da Silva said on January 15, 2026, after visiting Gaza, that there was “total destruction” and “not much is standing.” His warning framed a recovery problem that UN officials said had already grown into one of the largest debris-clearing jobs in the region, with more than 60 million tons of rubble left behind and a cleanup effort expected to take more than seven years.

The scale of the damage was paired with a continuing humanitarian emergency. In June 2026, OCHA said Gaza still faced profound uncertainty and immense human suffering, with civilians being killed daily. The agency said humanitarian operations remained heavily constrained, while the Israeli government was declaring its intent to control 70 percent of the Strip. That combination of destruction, restricted access and active fighting left the territory facing not only reconstruction, but the basic challenge of sustaining aid deliveries.

The death toll also continued to climb. In June 2025, a UN official said more than 1,000 Palestinians had been killed since mid-June alone. The UN said at that point that total Palestinian fatalities since October 7, 2023, had surpassed 56,500. Those figures put the destruction in Gaza alongside a casualty count that continued to rise even as the physical landscape remained flattened and difficult to survey.

UN officials have said the debris must be cleared safely before large-scale rebuilding can begin, a task complicated by the amount of wreckage and the continuing instability on the ground. Moreira da Silva said after his Gaza visit that he had returned from a place where the humanitarian crisis was deepening, underscoring how reconstruction, relief access and civilian protection have become inseparable parts of the same emergency.