Gaza’s recovery will take a lifetime – and its people must be allowed to start that now | Lucy Easthope

Developers like Trump often treat disaster recovery like colonising a planet. If the ceasefire holds, Palestinians must be at the heart of rebuilding

Lucy Easthope is an adviser on disaster response and recovery and author of The Recovery Myth

As world leaders throw around threats about ending the ceasefire in Gaza this week, Palestinians will be surveying the rubble of their homes and praying that it holds. Donald Trump’s suggestion that “we just clean out” the people from Gaza and send them to live in Jordan and Egypt has been widely condemned around the world. But my experience suggests that he won’t have been the only leader thinking it.

Behind his words lie a number of assumptions, the biggest of which is that nobody would want to stay here. Aid agency workers have described a hellscape. In a briefing on 30 January, Maha Khatib, the health coordinator of the International Rescue Committee, described the health system as “completely destroyed, collapsed”. What Palestinians need immediately are medical supplies, water and food, she said. But what they also need is “long-term action” for life to be possible in Gaza.

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