HAMAS IS REVIEWING a proposal for a six-week truce with Israel, a source told AFP today, as fighting rages in southern Gaza and the UN seeks to restore aid funding.

Earlier this week, Hamas said it was mulling proposals drawn up by mediators in Paris for a second truce nearly four months since the fighting began.

While a November pause to the fighting lasted a week, the latest accord aims to pave the way for an initial six-week halt to the fighting.

Over that period, Israel would release between 200 and 300 Palestinian prisoners who are not deemed high-security detainees, in exchange for 35 to 40 hostages held in Gaza, a Hamas source close to Egyptian and Qatari mediators said.

Only “women, children and sick men over 60″ who are captive in Gaza would be freed at this stage, the Hamas source told AFP, declining to be named given the sensitivity of the issue.

Palestinian militants seized about 250 hostages during Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel.

The attack resulted in the deaths of around 1,140 people, mostly civilians.

Israel says 132 of the hostages remain in Gaza, including at least 29 people believed to have been killed.

Relentless bombardment by Israel and a ground invasion has killed at least 26,900 people in Gaza since then, most of them women and children, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

Gaza ‘uninhabitable’

The UN today said that around half of all buildings in Gaza have been damaged and that the Palestinian territory has been left uninhabitable.

The UN said that tens of billions of dollars will be needed to rebuild it, and added that the decline in living conditions had been “precipitous”.

The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) estimated that by late November, 37,379 buildings – the equivalent of 18% of the Gaza Strip’s total structures – had been damaged or destroyed in Israel’s military offensive.

And since then, satellite data indicates increased levels of destruction.

“The new data says that 50% of the structures in Gaza are (damaged or) destroyed,” said Rami Alazzeh, an UNCTAD economist focused on assistance to the Palestinian people.

He warned that “the longer these (military) operations in Gaza go on… the more severe the impact will be”.

“Gaza currently is uninhabitable.”

Even if reconstruction in Gaza were to start immediately, the UNCTAD said “there is no doubt that it will amount to several tens of billions of dollars by any conservative estimation”.

The UN agency stressed that any resolution of the crisis would require an end to the military operation and lifting of the blockade and movement towards a two-state solution.

The goal, it said, cannot be to simply “return to the pre-October 2023 status quo”.

“The vicious circle of destruction and partial reconstruction needs to be broken.”

Meanwhile, the BBC has also seen analysis which also reveals that half of Gaza’s buildings have been damaged.

Detailed before-and-after satellite imagery also shows how the bombardment of southern and central Gaza has intensified since the start of December.

The analysis suggested between 144,000 and 175,000 buildings across the whole Gaza Strip have been damaged, equating to between 50% and 61% of Gaza’s buildings.

Elsewhere, Alazzeh pointed out that the decline in GDP per capita seen in Gaza last year was equivalent to that suffered during the entire blockade period and through six prior military operations.

And while 45% of Gaza’s workforce were unemployed before 7 October, the jobless rate had surged to nearly 80% by December.

“All of the economic sector in Gaza has ground to a halt,” Alazzeh said, adding that  virtually the only people working are those involved in humanitarian operations.

 - © AFP 2024 and with additional reporting from Diarmuid Pepper