Gaza Herald – A United Nations special rapporteur has issued a stark warning that Gaza’s recovery following Israel’s two-year genocide will take generations, describing the destruction as “another Nakba.”
The UN expert on the right to housing, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, said Palestinians returning to the north are confronting “profound trauma,” finding nothing but rubble where their homes once stood.
Rajagopal stressed that Israel must immediately allow the delivery of tents, caravans, and urgent shelter materials to Gaza. He said that even basic humanitarian relief has been blocked by Israel’s ongoing siege, preventing aid from reaching hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians who have lost everything. “Even immediate relief is impossible as long as Israel controls every entry point,” he warned, calling the blockade a deliberate act of collective punishment.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians have begun returning to northern Gaza after Israeli forces withdrew as part of the ceasefire deal. What they are finding, however, is a landscape of total ruin, entire neighborhoods reduced to dust. The UN estimates that over 92 percent of Gaza’s residential buildings have been destroyed or damaged, leaving families to live in makeshift tents amid toxic debris and unexploded ordnance.
Rajagopal described the systematic destruction of homes as central to Israel’s genocidal campaign, referring to it as “domicide”, the deliberate annihilation of a population’s living spaces to render their homeland uninhabitable. “The destruction of housing is not collateral damage; it’s the very method of genocide,” he said.
Comparing the scale of devastation to the 1948 Nakba, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their land, Rajagopal warned that the trauma of this new catastrophe will echo for generations. “What has happened in Gaza is not just a tragedy,” he said. “It is history repeating itself, another Nakba unfolding before the world’s eyes.”
