1,300 killed and 5,500 wounded in this great IDF victory....
Gaza rebuild 'to cost billions'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7839075.stm
Rebuilding the Gaza Strip after Israel's three-week offensive will cost billions of dollars, the UN has warned.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been left homeless and 400,000 people still have no running water, it says.
The UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, is currently visiting northern Gaza to see what assistance can be provided.
Ceasefires declared by Palestinian militant groups and Israel are holding, and Israeli troops are expected to complete their pull-out later.
Israeli political sources say the military aims to have withdrawn before Barack Obama's inauguration as the new president of the United States at 1700 GMT.
But analysts say big questions remain, such as who will police Gaza's southern border with Egypt and how much power Hamas still has.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said he wants troops to leave Gaza "as quickly as possible" and some have already left. Hamas has said it will hold fire until Sunday to give Israel time to withdraw.
Meanwhile, an Israeli man was shot and seriously wounded while driving near the Kochav Hashachar settlement in the West Bank.
A previously unknown group calling itself the "al-Bashair Army" told the Palestinian news agency, Maan, it had carried out the attack.
Rubble
At a news conference in New York, UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes said hundreds of millions of dollars of aid would be needed immediately to help Gaza's 1.4 million people in the aftermath of the offensive, which ended on Saturday.
Mr Holmes said some neighbourhoods had been almost totally destroyed and many homes reduced to rubble.
Sewage was flowing in the streets, there were huge medical and food needs, and unexploded ordnance was posing a big problem, he said.
While 100,000 people had their water supply restored on Sunday, 400,000 still have no water, he said.
Electricity is available for less than 12 hours a day, and 100,000 people had been displaced, he added.
A total of 50 UN facilities and 21 medical facilities were damaged, he added.
"It may not be very clear who actually won this conflict, if such a concept means anything in Gaza, but I think it's pretty clear who lost and that was the civilian population of Gaza, and to a much lesser extent the civilian population of southern Israel," Mr Holmes told reporters at UN headquarters.
When asked to estimate the costs, Mr Holmes said he could not give exact figures until UN teams in Gaza had completed their assessments, but the likely figure was hundreds of millions, and the overall reconstruction costs would run into billions....
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