“Probably between 65 per cent to 70 per cent of buildings in Gaza have either been entirely destroyed or damaged,” Achim Steiner, head of the UN Development Programme tells AFP.

In an interview at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Steiner said the physical reconstruction of Gaza alone would cost “tens of billions of dollars”, and “we do face an enormous uphill struggle on how to mobilise that scale of finance”.

“When we talk about reconstruction, we are not talking about one or two years here,” he said. “We are talking about years and years, until you even come close to rebuilding, first of all, the physical infrastructure, but it’s also an entire economy.

“People had savings. People had loans. People had invested in businesses. And all of this is lost. So we are talking about the physical and economic, and in some ways even the psychosocial phase for reconstruction.”

“This is not a simple undertaking of just loading it and transporting it somewhere. This rubble is dangerous. There are often still bodies that may not have been recovered. There’s unexploded ordnance, landmines,” Steiner explained.