Beirut: A month of Israeli bombardment has inflicted a "disastrous" $3.6 billion (about Dh13 billion) worth of physical damage on Lebanon from which it could take years to recover, the country's reconstruction chief said on Friday.
Al Fadl Shalaq, head of the Council for Development and Reconstruction (CDR), compared the devastation from the 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah to the damage from the 1975-90 civil war that tore the country apart.
This time, bickering among fractious politicians is already slowing things down, he added.
"The divisions in the country are delaying the start of a serious reconstruction effort led by the government. What I was fearing is now beginning to happen. I had feared that the Lebanese would return to bickering among themselves," he said.
"Sometimes I feel tired and exhausted," Shalaq said. "Our ambitions and hopes of Arab unity and a free Palestine have not been realised but one continues to work. One has no choice but to work."
"I have witnessed all the wars in Lebanon but I have never seen a war this fierce and I do not see a response to clearing the rubble of war to match it," he told Reuters in an interview.
"When they say 900,000 people are displaced, that is a quarter of the population."
At least 1,181 people were killed in Lebanon by the war that ended this week. The Israeli death toll was 157.
More than 100 bridges were destroyed or damaged by Israeli air strikes along with roads, factories, ports, airports, the telecom network, schools, hospitals, petrol stations and military installations.
Entire villages in the south of Lebanon, which saw the worst of the fighting, were reduced to rubble.
"For a country like Lebanon to sustain such large losses in such a short time means the intensity of the fire, destruction, ruin and fighting was high," Shalaq said.
"The result is that you can compare these losses with the losses Lebanon sustained over 17 years except this time we witnessed it in one month."
Shalaq said 30,000 homes had been hit, a quarter of them in the crowded southern suburbs of Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold.
He said that if rebuilding began immediately, it would take at least a year to repair the infrastructure and three years to replace or repair damaged buildings.
In Israel, where some 300,000 people fled their homes because of Hezbollah's rocket attacks, the Bank of Israel has put economic damage in lost tourism and industrial activity at 5 billion shekels (about Dh4.2 billion), one per cent of forecast GDP.
