Post Disaster Housing Reconstruction after 2014 Gaza Strip’s Conflict: Influencing Factors

Abstract

Housing reconstruction projects are complex in nature because of the many stages and also the many stakeholders they have. The objective of this study is to investigate the main factors influencing the reconstruction process of the housing sector following the Gaza Strip conflict in 2014. A literature review was conducted and factors affecting housing reconstruction were extracted. A questionnaire was developed by identifying the most important and reliable factors that achieve the research objective. Seven sets of factors were identified to facilitate the analysis of 64 factors with the help of a pre-test for the questionnaire with the help of the Ministry of Public Works and Housing in the Gaza Strip. 98 questionnaires were distributed, but only 90 questionnaires were collected. SPSS was used to analyze factors and relative important index (RII) was the tool that ranked the factors. The main influencing group was "Factors Related to Institutions Involved in Reconstruction Projects", but at the bottom of the ranking was the "Governmental Factors".The study concluded that the factors associated with institutions such as the international organization are the main key to support housing reconstruction in the Gaza Strip, which is clear in the case of the Gaza Strip as a developing country. The increasing efficiency of reconstruction will be illustrated by highlighting factors related to institutional participation, such as differences in experience among participants, especially engineers, sustainable machinery support, manpower with different experience, understanding of legislation and policies by engineers, each participant should have a good practice to manage any issue of reconstruction and a prepared a plan to mitigate the risk of post-disaster in the future. And other important factors for the other groups were determined for more efficient work when reconstruct such as having efficiency of the management of the government, emergency plans by the parties who concern of reconstructing the Gaza Strip, fitting between donors conditions and beneficiaries' needs, prepared program by the government to deal with these projects, effective role of municipality, effective disaster assessment to figure out the appropriate amount of funds, efficiency in defining the responsibilities for every participant in these projects and considering the justice when giving the priority to reconstruct to the beneficiaries.