Rebuilding Gaza After the October 2025 Ceasefire and Who Pays for It

On October 13, 2025, three days after a ceasefire took effect in Gaza, the last twenty living Israeli hostages came home. In Tel Aviv, crowds that had gathered for two years watched the handovers on giant screens. In Gaza, buses carried home Palestinians released from Israeli prisons and detention, and on the coastal road thousands of people were already walking north, back toward neighbourhoods that, in many cases, no longer existed. Two things were true that week at once: an unbearable chapter was closing for the hostage families, and for two million Gazans the hardest practical question of their lives was opening. Where do you live when your street is a hill of concrete? And who will pay to change that?

In short: The October 2025 ceasefire ended the main fighting and returned the living hostages, but it left most of Gaza in ruins, with reconstruction needs that the UN, the EU and the World Bank put at more than $50 billion even before the war's final year. Money has been promised before and not delivered, and whether rebuilding succeeds this time depends less on pledges than on security, access for materials and who governs.

What the ceasefire was

The truce grew out of a twenty-point plan President Trump announced at the end of September 2025, negotiated through Egypt, Qatar and Turkey with US envoys. Its first phase was the one that took hold: a halt in fighting on October 10, a partial pullback of Israeli forces to an agreed line inside Gaza, the release of all living hostages, and the release by Israel of roughly two thousand Palestinian prisoners and detainees, including a few hundred serving life sentences. The remains of deceased hostages were to be returned too, a process that went much more slowly and caused repeated crises.

Later phases were more ambitious and much vaguer: the disarmament of Hamas, an international stabilization force, a transitional technocratic Palestinian administration overseen by an international board, and a path, on conditions, toward Palestinian self-determination. In November 2025 the UN Security Council endorsed the plan's framework in a resolution. Endorsing a framework and carrying it out are, of course, different things, and the gap between them is where reconstruction lives.

This post does not try to predict how those later phases turn out. Readers who want to see what forecasting markets currently expect on Middle East questions can check our predictions page, with the reminder that those are bets, not verdicts.

The size of the hole

Numbers about Gaza are contested, so here are the ones from the most cautious sources, used conservatively.

In February 2025, during an earlier and shorter ceasefire, the United Nations, the European Union and the World Bank published an interim rapid damage and needs assessment. It estimated Gaza's reconstruction and recovery needs at about $53 billion over a decade, with the largest share for housing. That assessment covered damage up to the end of January 2025. The war resumed in March 2025 and continued for most of that year, so the real figure in late 2026 is larger, though nobody has a precise one.

UN satellite analysis has found that most buildings in the Gaza Strip were damaged or destroyed. The UN Environment Programme has estimated the rubble in the tens of millions of tonnes, mixed with unexploded ordnance, asbestos and human remains. Clearing it is a job of years before most rebuilding can even begin. Water and sewage systems, the electricity network, hospitals, schools and farmland were heavily damaged. Much of the farmland and many of the greenhouses that once fed the strip were destroyed or became inaccessible.

To put the scale in plain terms: this is not a city repair. It is closer to building a small country's physical existence again, on a strip of land about twenty-five miles long, while the people who live there need somewhere to sleep tonight.

The last time: 2014 and the promise that wasn't kept

There is a precedent, and it is not encouraging.

After the fifty-day war in the summer of 2014, donors met in Cairo in October of that year and pledged about $5.4 billion, of which roughly half was earmarked for reconstruction in Gaza. A system called the Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism, brokered by the UN with Israel and the Palestinian Authority, was set up to let building materials in while keeping them away from Hamas's military use. Cement, steel and gravel are what the Israeli government calls dual-use goods: they build homes, and they also build tunnels.

What followed was slow. Many pledges arrived late or never. Materials moved through the mechanism in fits, buyers had to be registered and their purchases tracked, and the shortfalls left thousands of families in damaged homes or temporary shelters for years. The mechanism did let a great deal of material in, and some rebuilding happened. But the lesson of 2014 that every serious planner now repeats is that a pledging conference is the easy part.

Who says they will pay

The likeliest funders are the same ones as always, in different proportions.

The Gulf states, especially the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have money and a political interest in a stable Gaza. Several have said, in various ways, that they will not pay to rebuild only to see it destroyed again, and that they want a credible political horizon and security arrangements first. In March 2025, Arab leaders meeting in Cairo endorsed an Egyptian reconstruction plan, costed at roughly the same order of magnitude as the UN-EU-World Bank estimate, that envisaged Palestinians remaining in Gaza during rebuilding, rather than leaving it.

The European Union and its member states are historically the largest donors to Palestinian institutions and are likely to fund governance, salaries and services as much as concrete. The World Bank and the UN run trust funds that can pool money from many donors under shared rules. The United States has substantial influence through the ceasefire plan and its role in the stabilization arrangements, though the scale of direct American funding for rebuilding has been a subject of debate in Washington.

Israel's government has said Gaza will not be rebuilt in a way that lets Hamas re-arm, and controls the crossings through which almost everything must enter. The Rafah crossing on the southern border with Egypt depends on both Egyptian and Israeli agreement. Any plan that does not settle how materials move through those gates is not a plan.

The hard questions underneath the money

Three questions decide whether pledges become houses.

Security. Donors want to know that what they fund will not be bombed again and will not be taken over by an armed group. That depends on whether Hamas gives up its weapons, what an international force actually does, and whether Israeli forces withdraw further. Each of these is contested. Hamas has resisted full disarmament; Israel has said it will not withdraw until disarmament happens; the international force's mandate and contributors were still being worked out well after the truce.

Access. Gaza can only be rebuilt with heavy machinery, fuel, cement and steel, entering at scale. Under any arrangement, Israel will want to inspect and limit those goods. The question is whether the inspection system is designed to let rebuilding happen with safeguards, or to slow it to a trickle. The 2014 mechanism was criticized from both sides: by Israelis for letting materials leak to Hamas, by Palestinians and aid groups for being so slow that people stayed homeless.

Governance. Someone has to run the water utility, issue building permits, pay teachers and collect the rubble. The ceasefire plan envisaged a technocratic Palestinian committee overseen by an international board, with a reformed Palestinian Authority eventually taking over. Who exactly, under what law, and accountable to whom, are open questions. Palestinians have also said, with some justice, that a reconstruction designed over their heads will fail.

What good rebuilding looks like on the ground

Post-war reconstruction is a field with its own hard-won knowledge, from Bosnia to Iraq to Ukraine, and some lessons travel well.

Clear the rubble with the people who will live there. Rubble removal is enormous, dangerous work, and it can also be one of the largest sources of paid jobs in a place where almost nobody has an income. Programmes that pay local workers, trained and protected, to clear debris and sort it for reuse put money into families' hands and turn a hazard into building material. Crushed concrete can become road base and fill. Done carelessly, rubble removal spreads asbestos and leaves unexploded bombs in the ground; done well, it is the first rebuilt industry.

House people before you plan the skyline. Families need decent temporary shelter, connected to water and sanitation, within reach of their own land, while permanent housing is designed. Reconstruction plans that start with glossy master plans and end with people living in tents for years have a poor record. Repairing partially damaged homes is usually faster and cheaper than building new ones, and lets people return sooner.

Restore water and power first. Desalination plants, wells, pipes, sewage treatment and the electricity to run them come before almost everything else, because without them disease spreads and nothing else works. Gaza's aquifer was already badly over-pumped and polluted before the war, so the water system has to be rebuilt better, not just back.

Let Palestinians lead the design. Gaza has engineers, architects, planners and contractors. Rebuilding that hires them and listens to residents about where and how to build is more likely to last, and less likely to be resented, than plans drawn up abroad. Property records matter too: many were destroyed, and settling who owns what plot will take courts and patience.

Keep the books open. Donors fear diversion; Gazans fear that money will be stolen or wasted before it reaches them. Public, itemized reporting of what came in, what it bought and who built it helps answer both fears.

None of this is exotic. It is the ordinary craft of recovery, and it is what most of the money will actually be spent on if it arrives.

The strongest case against funding it now

There is a serious argument for waiting, and it is worth stating fairly. If Hamas keeps its weapons and its grip on Gaza's streets, donor money may strengthen it: through taxes on goods, control over who gets contracts, and the plain fact that a rebuilt Gaza under Hamas is a Gaza where the next war can be prepared. On this view, paying before disarmament repeats 2014's mistake from the other direction, and conditions must come first.

Here is the response this site would make. Conditions are reasonable; collective punishment is not, and the line between them is the welfare of the people living in the rubble today. Shelter, clean water, sewage treatment, clearing unexploded bombs and rubble, and reopening clinics and schools are humanitarian needs that should not wait on the endgame of a political negotiation. They can be done through the UN and trusted agencies with strict monitoring. Larger permanent reconstruction can be phased and conditioned. The alternative, a population of two million living through another winter in tents beside the ruins, is not a security strategy. It is a recruitment poster.

And there is a self-criticism due on our side too. Progressives in the West have been far better at describing Gaza's destruction than at proposing how to finance and govern its repair, and the details are where lives are actually saved. The groups doing the unglamorous work, engineers, de-miners, water specialists, deserve our attention as much as the speeches do.

The people behind the numbers

It is easy, in a piece about billions and mechanisms, to forget that rebuilding is personal. It is a family returning to the address on their papers and finding a slab. It is a farmer whose orchard is now a buffer zone. It is a doctor deciding whether to stay. It is also an Israeli family in a kibbutz near the border, rebuilding homes burned on October 7, 2023, which has been its own reconstruction story, financed by the Israeli state. Both kinds of rebuilding are about whether people believe they will be safe enough to stay.

The thing most likely to make reconstruction last is the one least visible in budgets: a political future in which neither Israelis nor Palestinians expect the next war. Money cannot buy that. It can make it more or less likely. You can follow the reporting on all of this, from many sources, on our Gaza and Palestine page.

What you can do

• Ask Congress what America is paying for. The United States sits at the centre of the ceasefire plan. Find your representative and senators on the representatives page, which gives their phone numbers, contact forms and latest votes, and ask what share of reconstruction and humanitarian aid the US should fund, and through which channels.
• Track the money when it comes to a vote. Aid appropriations and related bills show up on our Congress votes and bills tracker. Note whether humanitarian funding is being cut or added and by whom.
• Support humanitarian and refugee-serving groups close to home. Our organizations directory lists nonprofits by cause in every state, including immigrant services and legal aid groups that help Palestinian, Israeli and other families with relatives caught up in the war.
• Learn the 2014 lesson. When you hear a pledging total, ask how much was disbursed, what came through the crossings, and who decided. Those three questions are where reconstruction succeeds or fails.
• Read the reconstruction debate across outlets. The human rights and foreign aid page brings together reporting on aid budgets and post-war recovery from many sources.