A round table to discuss the difficulties facing the owners of demolished homes in rebuilding them

Gaza, Publication and Information Unit:
Within the project "Providing legal information, counselling and aid", the Palestinian Center for Democracy and Conflict Resolution held a round table meeting to discuss the legal difficulties facing the owners of demolished homes in rebuilding their houses, attended by many intellectuals and researchers and representatives of civil society organisations.
Rushdi Al-Shaltouni, representing the Ministry of Public Works and Housing in Gaza City, spoke about the numbers of homes destroyed in the 2008-2009 war and the homes destroyed in the eight-day war at the end of 2012, whether totally or partially. He explained the mechanisms the Ministry of Public Works and Housing follows in compensating those affected, by providing a sum of money equivalent to the scale of the losses and rebuilding the damaged premises or replacing them with one of the residential flats to be built within the Gaza reconstruction projects.
On how the damage is surveyed, Al-Shaltouni said the ministry formed technical and engineering teams to make field visits to assess and repair the damaged buildings, and that a database was prepared through a high-precision computerised programme linked to GIS, containing all the data on the war damage to buildings. This database is the foundation relied on by all the bodies working in reconstruction, in coordination with the Ministry of Public Works and Housing.
In the same context, lawyer Bakr Al-Turkmani, legal adviser to the AMAN Coalition in Gaza, spoke about the documents and papers required to provide assistance to those affected regardless of the funding bodies, and about a flaw in how these papers are examined to verify them. He pointed out that there is no clear standard for compensation and that there is inconsistency in determining the proportion of damage, which has caused confusion among citizens between the funding provided by the ministry and by other bodies.