How Gaza Engineers Are Rebuilding With Rubble

Suleiman Abu Hassanin runs a workshop in Gaza called the Green Rock project. His team takes destroyed building material—broken concrete, bricks, and rubble from damaged homes—and turns it into interlocking blocks that snap together like Lego pieces. These blocks are being used to rebuild homes and shelters across Gaza.

The need is urgent. Two-thirds of buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, creating roughly 42 million tonnes of rubble. At the same time, normal building materials like cement cannot enter Gaza because of a blockade put in place by Israel and Egypt. The blockade has limited supplies for years. That is why engineers are turning to the rubble itself as raw material.

How the Blocks Are Made

The interlocking blocks are created from crushed concrete and brick fragments. Think of them like LEGO bricks for building—they click together without needing cement or mortar between them. This matters because it speeds up construction and requires less training for workers to assemble a building.

The design also has a practical advantage: the blocks can be taken apart and moved or reused elsewhere. That makes them useful for temporary shelters that might need to relocate.

Making the blocks from rubble is labor-intensive. Workers manually separate metals and other materials mixed into the debris, then process the clean concrete into blocks. The quality of the finished blocks depends on how consistent the starting material is and how the blocks are compressed during manufacture.

Other parts of Gaza are using similar approaches. In northern Gaza, workers have been making clay bricks to rebuild a destroyed police station, showing that different communities are solving the same problem in different ways.

A Broader Pattern

This is not the first time crisis has sparked innovation in how we build fast and cheap. Over the past few decades, disasters have triggered new ideas in portable construction—from temporary homes after tsunamis to new earthquake-resistant building techniques. When materials run short and time is tight, engineers find practical solutions.

Mobile block-making machines offer another example of this trend. A company called Mobile Crisis Construction, started in 2019, builds machines that cost around $80,000 each and can produce up to 8,000 bricks per day. In one week, a single machine can make enough blocks to build one school, one medical center, three large houses, or ten smaller homes.

Two teenage sisters from Gaza gained recognition for their work turning rubble into reusable bricks, showing that knowledge of these techniques is spreading across the population, not just among formal engineers.

The Economics of Scarcity

The blockade on cement and building materials has created an economy where rubble becomes the main source for new construction. The rubble cannot leave, so it must be used locally. This constraint has pushed engineers and workers to develop new skills and systems.

The large concrete blocks removed from demolished buildings have already been reused for shoreline protection along Gaza's beach, which shows that recycled concrete can handle the loads required for building.

Turning rubble into material for new construction also changes the cost calculation. Instead of paying to remove and dispose of debris—which the UN estimates would cost $18 million just for sorting and clearing the current rubble—the material becomes the feedstock for rebuilding. Destruction becomes the foundation for renewal.

The United Nations estimates it would take 15 years and half a billion dollars to fully clear roughly 40 million tonnes of rubble and rebuild what was destroyed. About 1.5 million tons of concrete would be needed for full reconstruction, though about 71,000 structures have already been rebuilt with available resources.

What This Means Going Forward

The question now is whether these innovations will last. In my view, the technical knowledge that has emerged here—how to sort debris, how to shape blocks that interlock, how to manufacture them locally—is knowledge that will survive beyond this crisis. Other places facing disasters or material shortages could adapt these methods.

Whether the Gaza rebuilding effort itself succeeds depends on politics. The blockade and restrictions on materials would need to ease. But the engineering itself has moved beyond improvisation into repeatable systems that other people can use and improve.

This shift in thinking is worth noting: rather than viewing war rubble as garbage that costs money to remove, the Green Rock project and others treat it as the raw material for building back. That changes what rebuilding can look like in places where conventional supplies cannot reach.