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Introduction
According to the United Nations (UN) report ‘Gaza 2020’, the population density rate in Gaza is more than 5,800 people per square kilometre (UN, 2012a). With Gaza’s rapidly growing population – the enclave has an estimated annual birth rate of 60,000 – and buildings destroyed in repeated Israel Defence Forces (IDF) military operations, around new 100,000 residential units are needed by 2020 (UN, 2012b). The Israeli blockade of the Strip, the recurrent military assaults, the deteriorating economic situation and the lack of national banks to finance housing projects are further exacerbating the housing crisis in Gaza. In particular, the destructive military campaign in the summer of 2014, Operation Protective Edge (OPE), inflicted severe damage on the housing sector in the Gaza Strip. It completely or partially destroyed approximately 200,000 homes. Yet even before that conflict:
[…] the Gaza Strip was already suffering from a deficit of 70,000 housing units that were destroyed in the 2009 and 2012 conflicts, followed by a general failure to implement an effective housing reconstruction process which had ‘put the population in a situation of real disaster (Alashqar, 2014).
Combined, these factors produce a complex and acute housing crisis.
In responding to the great need for reconstruction in Gaza, for the past decade, the Government of Qatar has consistently been among the largest bilateral donors working in the territory. The Qatari Committee for the Reconstruction of Gaza was established in 2012, to carry out relief and reconstruction works in the Gaza Strip. It succeeded in providing jobs, hospitals, housing, infrastructure projects and roads (Gulf Times, 2018). The largest Qatari involvement in term of funding was the building of Sheikh Hamad city in the southern part of the Gaza Strip. Because of the Strip’s unique and protracted political situation, various phases of the project have faced complex challenges.
Despite the significance of Qatar as a global emerging donor and the unique context in Gaza, which is post-war and has experienced over a decade of blockade, reconstruction projects in the enclave are only modestly discussed (Barakat et al., 2018). This can be attributed to the difficulties researchers have to endure in accessing the Strip to conduct their research.
This paper studies an agency-driven housing project in the Gaza Strip carried out...