Feature: First Gaza displaced family back to their rebuilt home

Fifty-year-old Aatef Zaza and his family were extremely happy recently to get back to their home, which was rebuilt after it was totally destroyed in an Israeli airstrike during last year's 50-day conflict.

Zaza's 14-member family is the first ever family in the Gaza Strip who managed to get back to live in their completely rebuilt home after waiting for more than one year.

Rebuilt on the same ground of the old house, Zaza's one-story new house locates in eastern Gaza city close to the border with Israel. This neighborhood was one of the intensively hit areas in the coastal enclave.

"During the war, we escaped from our house and the entire neighborhood due to the intensive air strikes and bombs. When the war ended, we returned to our four-floor home, but we only found a pile of debris and rubble after it was struck by the Israeli warplanes," Zaza told Xinhua.

While lightening his cigarette, Zaza recalled the hard days of the war and how he, his wife and children left their home and escaped. "Destroying our home kept the family totally displaced and living in rented apartments for more than a year," he added.

According to the official Palestinian and international figures, more than 20,000 houses allover the Gaza Strip were fully destroyed during the war. Displaced families had no choices but to live in rented houses paid by the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA).

"The UNRWA paid for our rents over the past 13 months, and at the same time we provided the UNRWA with all the needed plans for rebuilding our destroyed house," said Zaza, adding that "later on I was told that Germany provided a donation through the UNRWA to rebuild our house."

Zaza hailed UNRWA's efforts, saying that "the UNRWA hurried up to help the displaced families who had their homes being totally destroyed and have applied all the needed documents to the Israeli side and then got the needed donations to help those families to rebuild their destroyed homes."

Although feeling lucky to have a new house, Zaza said his happiness is incomplete because there are tens of thousands of homeless people in Gaza.

During the air and ground military operation that Israel waged on the Gaza Strip in July last year, around 2,200 Palestinians were killed and more than 11,000 wounded.

Tens of thousands of houses, infrastructures, mosques, schools, agricultural and industrial establishments were either completely destroyed or partially damaged during the war, according to Naji Sarhan, the deputy minister of housing and public work.

"Our ministry fully understands the situation of the owners of the destroyed homes, their problems and their daily suffering," Sarhan told Xinhua.

According to him, a successful process of construction in Gaza needs two major factors: ensuring enough amounts of construction materials and finding enough money for rebuilding.

Although there has been an agreement between UN and Israel on the mechanism of allowing construction materials in the enclave, the shipment was too slow to meet the need.

Serhan said according to the construction plan, 9,000 houses need to be built in the next three years. Yet only 1,200 houses have been completed in the past year after the war.

Maher Taba'a, official in the Gaza Chamber of Commerce and an economic expert, told Xinhua that a real process of reconstruction hasn't started yet.

"All the amounts of cements allowed to the private sector in the Gaza Strip since October last year were not more than 234,000 tons. It was distributed only to the owners of the houses which were partially damaged according to the agreed plan," said Tabaa'a.

He added that the Gaza Strip needs at least 10,000 tons of cements everyday to rebuild all what had been destroyed during the war. Endit