Sizing up the Gaza rebuild

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So there's this bridge, right?

It's one of five that links the east and west sides of the Iraqi city of Mosul.

The city's divided by the Tigris River, which basically runs through it north to south.

It's the biggest bridge in terms of traffic capacity, and it's the newest of the five, so it's called the fifth bridge.

For most of its lifespan, this bridge wasn't really on anyone's radar until in 2016 it found itself in the unfortunate position of being right in the middle of this.

Mosul is the biggest battle anywhere on the planet this century in terms of the numbers of troops engaged, but also in terms of the size of the city and the number of civilians around.

The Battle of Mosul was waged between the Islamic State Terrorist Group and

I mean basically everyone else.

The country's special forces reached the banks of the Tigris River for the first time but the western side of the city was still under IS control.

During the battle the fifth bridge did not fare very well.

Looking at satellite images, you can see that sometime in December 2016 a missile or an explosive punched a hole right through the middle of the span over the Tigris River.

By now the bridges had been destroyed.

You can see the water of the river straight through the hole.

Not only that, but the approaches at both ends have been destroyed too.

Six months later, in July 2017, the Battle of Mosul was over.

Satellite images reveal that by that time, the bridge and most of the buildings around it had been destroyed.

But if you watch the satellite feed in time lapse, you can see something incredible happen.

Three months after the battle, cars are driving over the bridge again.

A makeshift bridge, little more than a long steel plank, has been laid across the hole and cars are driving carefully across it.

By five months after the battle, there's a little daily traffic jam at the makeshift plank bridge.

By the two-year mark, there's a second plank bridge in place allowing two-way traffic through.

By the fifth anniversary of the end of the battle construction is underway to actually fix the hole, not just lay planks over it.

And by the sixth anniversary the bridge was fully reopened.

We can hear now the sound of

the choir from the church.

Again, we can hear the bells again ring in Musul and this is very powerful.

I think there is hope.

It will take time and the wounds of this city will take a lot of time to heal.

But Mosul is on its way.

Eight years on and all five bridges have reopened.

And in some parts of the city, people have returned to living somewhat normal lives.

I've been thinking a lot about Mosul ever since news broke of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

I think you're going to have tremendous success, and Gaza is going to be rebuilt.

In the ceasefire agreement, there is no mention of a plan to actually rebuild Gaza, but the US President Donald Trump is confident that someone is going to stump up the cash.

And you have some very wealthy countries, as you know, over there, and it would take a small fraction of

their wealth to do that.

But I think they want to do it.

it.

So, what kind of money and what kind of time are we talking about here?

I want to look at this in the context of Mosul, the last city destroyed by war.

What can its story tell us about what's to come for Gaza?

I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If you Listen.

So it's not uncommon in a mosque for a visiting Islamic leader to speak during Friday prayers.

Perhaps a famous Imam is in town, you might have him come and give a sermon.

Well, this happened at the Al-Nuri Grand Mosque one Friday in Mosul in 2014.

This man, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had never appeared in public before, but his reputation had preceded him.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is the second most wanted man in the world, with a $10 million reward posted by the US.

He was the head of the world's most terrifying terrorist group, ISIS.

In a word, ISIS.

In three words, holy f ⁇ ing ISIS.

ISIS militants are fighting for control of Tikrit and have been in control of Fallujah for five months.

These days we know that ISIS is extremely bad news when it comes to your town, but back in 2014 ISIS was kind of a mysterious group of hyper-religious Toyota Hilux fans who had seemingly come out of nowhere.

Baghdadi and his men now rule over a territory larger than Great Britain.

And in June of that year they arrived at the outskirts of Mosul, an ancient city of 1.8 million people.

In the city centre is the 850-year-old Al-Nuri Mosque, which is world famous for its squat and extremely crooked minaret, affectionately known as Al-Hadba or the Hunchback.

The minaret is so significant and famous that it features on the Iraqi currency and it's responsible for Mosul's nickname, the Hunchback or Humped City.

It was at the top of this minaret that ISIS raised its flag, and it was inside the mosque that al-Baghdadi came out of the shadows.

Baghdadi's speech was a pivotal moment.

He's declaring himself leader of the world's Muslims.

With a cheap pedestal fan spinning behind him to keep him cool, he declared the creation of the Islamic State, a caliphate, with him as the leader.

Islamic State essentially stamped itself as having come out of the shadows, no longer being a terrorist organization, but really being being what it claimed to be, a state.

At the moment they control the lives of eight million people across northern Syria and northern Iraq.

Now this was like 25 global crises ago, but you probably remember that these guys were very, very unpleasant.

For the past few months, Islamic State has held these men, women and children hostage as human shields.

An Iraqi police chief, first blindfolded, then beheaded.

They were so unpleasant that a coalition made up of basically everybody came together to take them down.

The advance of ISIS could see the United States and Iran fighting on the same side.

For two years, the anti-ISIS coalition gradually pushed the terror group back, boxing them into the city of Mosul.

At this aid station, just 15 kilometers east of Mosul, there's a steady stream of casualties.

Mosul is one of the oldest cities in the world.

It's known in the Bible, Torah, and Quran as Nineveh.

The buildings are a mixture of old and new, tightly packed, particularly in the area close to the Tigris River.

The urban density in the old city around the Hunchback Minaret made it difficult to penetrate, which is why this was where ISIS was going to make its last stand.

As the Iraqi army moves up from the south, Kurdish troops attack IS towns to the east and north of Mosul.

Gradually they pushed into the center of a city that was still full of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Eventually the part of the city east of the Tigris River was reclaimed by the Iraqi forces.

The battle for Mosul is only half won.

IS still controls the western side of the city.

So the five bridges across the river were blown.

ISIS was trapped in the old city on the western side of the river, the most densely populated populated urban area in Mosul.

Day by day, thousands of families stream out of West Mosul, shell-shocked, traumatised, and utterly exhausted.

This is the point where the similarities with the situation in Gaza get really obvious.

ISIS militants were surrounded inside a densely populated urban area, which they had fortified and booby-trapped.

The risk of civilian casualties is incredibly high because IS fighters deliberately hide in densely populated areas.

The majority of fighting was happening amongst busy streets lined with shops and apartments.

And the Good Guy Coalition, which included Australia, tried their best to avoid civilian casualties.

The degree of complexity in the current phase of the operation will be heightened also by the potential presence of up to 750,000 civilians who may be remaining in West Mosul.

But avoiding civilian deaths turned out to be impossible.

Eight months into the battle, two Australian jets dropped bombs on ISIS targets, which killed up to 35 civilians, including destroying a house where 11 members of a single family lived.

Members of Amjed al-Safar's extended family lived in the house, including five of his brothers and sisters.

Like Gaza, thousands of innocent people were killed in Mosul.

You don't get to drop bombs on cities and towns and not kill civilians, and it took a month before it it was safe enough to dig those bodies out.

But unlike Gaza, Mosul was teeming with international journalists documenting the destruction and daily death time.

Questions over Australia's secrecy in war are now being raised.

In our view, there's just no real transparency from Australia here and there's no real accountability.

The presence of these journalists meant that this particular family killed in an airstrike had their deaths investigated.

Everyone in Iraq and Syria has a cell phone.

Everybody is taking videos, photographs, uploading stuff onto the internet.

So we know a great deal about civilians, and it's become much more difficult for militaries to ignore that information now.

Rather than become anonymous numbers in an increasing death toll, the family members' names and photos were on the news, and the Australian military was forced to answer questions about it.

Several member states of the anti-ISIS coalition subsequently held investigations into civilian casualties from airstrikes in Mosul.

I don't think that post-ceasefire there is going to be similar investigations in Israel.

Gradually, the noose around ISIS's neck pulled tighter and tighter as they retreated closer and closer to the Al-Nuri Mosque, with their black flag still raised above the hunchback minaret.

A block-by-block battle in the west of the city.

Here, inching ever closer to the Al-Nuri Mosque, there are snipers on both sides.

ISIS decided if they couldn't have it, nobody could.

And late yesterday, as Iraqi security forces closed in on that mosque about 100 meters away, ISIS blew it up.

A mosque which sat there

since the 12th century.

ISIS blew it up.

Now, al-Baghdadi escaped before the end and lived in hiding for two years before the US finally got him.

Abu

Bakar al-Baghdadi is dead.

But really, the caliphate ended that day with the destruction of the Al-Nuri Mosque in July 2017.

The nine-month battle of Mosul was over.

A battle which was called the biggest urban battle since World War II.

Death toll estimates vary, but it's something like 20,000 combatants and 10,000 civilians killed.

One million Mosul residents were displaced.

Looking at drone footage of the destroyed mosque, you can see that it's simply the epicenter of a widespread catastrophe.

Almost as far as the eye can see, there are roofs caved in.

cars burned out, collapsed walls, whole buildings were taken down.

This mound of rubble is all that remains of a family home in the city of Mosul.

In the distance you can see the fifth bridge, one of its spans sagging, a hole blown straight through the road surface.

It looks really very bad, but it's hard to judge the scale of destruction from drone footage alone.

Thankfully, the United Nations has a unit called UNOSAT, whose job is to objectively quantify this kind of thing.

Often in times of crisis, it can be very chaotic, but once you get the satellite image, you are at least sure to get objective information.

They use satellite images to assess damage.

In Mosul, UNOSAT counted 19,888 damaged buildings, of which 4,773 were totally destroyed.

Most of the damage was concentrated in the old city.

Of course, many of the buildings were apartment buildings, meaning that the number of actual homes destroyed was more like 50,000.

Approximately 8 million tons of rubble was left by the battle, much of it riddled with explosives and booby traps and covering up thousands of human bodies.

But there was a strong motivation in Mosul to rebuild what had been destroyed and bring the city back to life.

And what you see on the streets today is people who are happy to be liberated starting the process of getting on with their lives.

Within days, the sound of gunfire had been replaced by the sound of jackhammers.

And those jackhammers have now been at work for eight years.

If you go to Mosul now, you'll see that the Hunchback Minaret and the Al-Nuri Mosque have been rebuilt by UNESCO with funding from the United Arab Emirates.

We are very proud to do it for the community.

The minaret belongs to the 12th century and is very important.

They painstakingly restored the minaret to its original crooked shape using original bricks.

Other surrounding churches and mosques have also been rebuilt.

After eight years of tireless jackhammering and construction, the bridges have been rebuilt too.

Most of the city, particularly east of the river, has returned to normality.

But in the old city, at the center of the fighting around the hunchback minaret, thousands of homes are still in ruins.

Most of the destruction has not been cleared.

Despite a Japanese-funded effort to build a plant capable of recycling debris into building materials, there are still explosives hidden under the rubble.

Some reports indicate that as little as 7% of the homes destroyed in the battle have been rebuilt.

And it's important to note that's the level of progress in an area totally controlled by the sovereign, internationally recognised Iraqi government, with the cooperation of global partners and local citizens, without any interference from ISIS.

But despite all that, it's still slow going.

So that's the situation in Mosul, eight years after ISIS was defeated there.

How does that compare to what the people in Gaza face?

Well, we have a bit of an idea because UNOSAT has been keeping an eye on the war in Gaza from orbit.

And look, it's bad.

It's so much worse than Mosul, it's hard to wrap your head around.

Here's the latest info we have.

First of all, on the destruction, it is now in the region of 84%.

84% of all buildings and infrastructure.

In certain parts of Gaza, like in Gaza City, it's even up to 92%

of the destruction.

The UNOSAT analysis for the entire strip is a couple of months old, but they identified 192,812 damaged structures, of which more than half have been totally destroyed.

The United Nations says there are tens of millions of tons of rubble in Gaza, much of it contaminated by unexploded ordnance and asbestos.

Also under the rubble lie thousands of unrecovered bodies.

It's hard to visualize these numbers, so why don't we just do a straight comparison of the numbers in Gaza to the numbers from Mosul.

According to the UN, the war in Gaza has created 6.8 times more debris from 9.6 times more damaged buildings than the battle in Mosul.

In terms of buildings totally destroyed, Gaza has 21 times more than Mosul did.

And clearing all that debris is going to be much harder than it was in Mosul because UNOSAT has assessed that 77% of Gaza's road network has been damaged.

Fixing this is going to be very expensive.

Just to give you an estimate of the challenges that the reconstruction efforts will cost, estimate that about $70 billion will be required for the reconstruction of Gaza.

$70 billion.

But really, that figure is almost meaningless.

Even if someone transferred all that money into the UN Development Authority's bank account tomorrow, there are way bigger challenges than money.

For starters, before you can even start building, you've got a truly extraordinary amount of debris to clear and nowhere to clear it to.

The size is if you build a 12 metre wall around Central Park and fill that with rubble, that's about the amount of uh rubble that needs to be removed.

Removed to where?

Is Israel going to take it?

Is Egypt?

Are they going to just push it into the Mediterranean Sea?

And what are you going to do with the hundreds of thousands of people who are currently using that rubble as shelter?

There is no other place, there are no shelters.

They promised to bring us tents, but they didn't.

Every person wants to find shelter.

I took refuge in my house.

It's better than sitting in places where I can't live.

Two of this man's sons have been killed by Israeli bombs.

His daughter is trying to find her toys in their ruined house.

The thing I miss the most in my house is is my bedroom and my toys, my stuff and my bed.

As it stands, the current ceasefire agreement lays out no plan for what happens to the displaced Palestinians in the short term.

Can they go and live in Israel or Egypt or somewhere else while their houses are rebuilt?

And who is actually going to do that work?

The Israelis?

The Americans?

Hamas, which is apparently still around?

How would the locals feel about those solutions?

The UN has started clearing some of the rubble, but it's only to try and clear the roads and get hospitals and other vital services back up and running.

They're not even touching the destroyed houses.

When the UN talks about that job, they get extremely vague.

It's a really cumbersome process and will take many, many years to complete.

How many years?

You know, I mean, I think

one are looking probably in the region of a decade or decades and even longer.

Longer than decades?

I think he just means several decades there, but still, even if the ceasefire holds and the bloodshed in Gaza really is over, we now have 2 million people living in a tightly packed pile of debris, penned in by Israel, Egypt and the sea.

The situation is exponentially worse than Mosul and in Mosul they've only rebuilt 7% of homes over the course of eight years.

There is no plan in the ceasefire agreement for what to do about this enormous problem.

And if it's not dealt with properly, people are going to be very upset.

And people being upset is what started this whole mess in the first place.

If you're listening, is written by me, Matt Bevan.

It's produced by Adair Shepard.

Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon.

As you might be able to hear, my voice is mostly back, so I'm capable of actually answering the questions you've sent in to us.

There is too many to fit in one episode, but we'll answer a big chunk of them on Tuesday.

But one of the things that a lot of people are asking about is the AI boom and whether it's a bubble about to burst.

Lots of people are comparing it to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, but what was that all about?

And apart from both things being computer-related, are the two booms actually alike?

That's coming on Thursday.

I'll catch you next week.