According to the UN, 37 million tons of waste will be cleaned – Telquel.ma

NOWe estimated 37 million tons of waste, or about 300 kilograms of waste per square meter” in the Gaza Strip, which was very densely populated and urbanized before the war, explained Pehr Lodhammar, an official at UNMAS, the UN agency responsible for demining.

Starting from the hypothesis of using a hundred trucks, “it would take 14 years to clear“, he emphasized during the regular UN press briefing in Geneva.

He insisted that unexploded ordnance was mixed in with the rubble, which greatly complicated the task.

Pehr Lodhammar believes that “at least 10%“munitions fired in conflict do not explode and therefore pose a constant threat to the population and the teams responsible for searching the rubble to recover the bodies of the victims, as well as for the workers responsible for the clearance.

He also mentioned a recent meeting in Amman, with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and non-governmental organizations, devoted to the best way to manage this debris mixed with explosives.

It’s about “to prepare for what might eventually happen and for the intervention in Gaza“. The head of UNMAS speaks from experience. He was already solving the same kind of problem in Iraq.”but on a smaller scale“.

According to him, “65% of the destroyed buildings are residential buildings” in the narrow Palestinian territory.