UN: Israeli-Palestinian conflict sets development in Gaza back 60 years

The United Nations says Israel's war with Hamas has set Gaza's development back 60 years, and raising the tens of billions of dollars needed to rebuild the territory will be a daunting task.

In an interview at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, the head of the U.N. Development Program, Achim Steiner, said about two-thirds of Gaza's buildings have been destroyed or damaged, and the task of removing as much as 42 million tons of rubble will be dangerous and complex.

"We estimate that about 60 years of development were lost in this 15-month conflict," Steiner said. Two million people in the Gaza Strip have lost not only their shelter, but also their public infrastructure, their sewage systems, their freshwater supply systems, their public waste management. All this infrastructure and services just don't exist anymore."

Steiner said it is difficult to set a timetable for reconstruction because the cease-fire is still in doubt and the UN's top priority is humanitarian aid. "When we talk about reconstruction, we are not talking about one or two years, we are talking about year after year until you get to the stage of reconstruction, where rebuilding the infrastructure is a priority and actually rebuilding the entire economy," he said.

The physical reconstruction alone will cost tens of billions of dollars, he said, and how to pay for it is a big question. "We do face a huge uphill struggle over how to raise that amount of money."