Inside a makeshift workshop in Gaza, rebuilt after it was damaged by Israeli air strikes, Suleiman Abu Hassanin stands among piles of broken concrete, trying to give them a new form. His voice over the phone sounds tired, carrying the weight of what he is trying to do: rebuild in a place where building materials are no longer available.

Gaza’s construction crisis did not begin with the latest war. For years, the Israeli blockade restricted the entry of cement, steel, and other building materials, slowing reconstruction efforts across the enclave. But after nearly two years of intensified bombardment, the scale of destruction has pushed the system far beyond collapse.

According to UN estimates, Gaza now contains more than 60 million tons of rubble, while hundreds of thousands of displaced people continue to live in tents with little protection from heat or winter chill and no clear prospect for reconstruction.

In that environment, rubble is no longer just debris. It is becoming one of the only construction resources left.

One local response is Green Rock, a project led by Abu Hassanin that aims to recycle the remains of destroyed buildings into usable Lego-like bricks. Similar interlocking brick systems have been used elsewhere, including in parts of Europe and in post-conflict settings such as Sudan and Iraq. But in Gaza, the project emerges under very different conditions: not as an architectural experiment, but as a response to the near disappearance of conventional reconstruction materials.

Abu Hassanin says the idea was born out of necessity rather than innovation. “We were facing a simple equation: destruction without solutions,” he says. “So we tried to turn it into a resource.”

The process involves crushing and sorting rubble, then mixing it with local soil and alternative binding materials developed inside Gaza before compressing it into blocks using a machine built by hand. The resulting interlocking bricks can be assembled without traditional mortar, reducing reliance on cement, which remains scarce.

Under normal conditions, this type of brick would require some cement, around 7 to 12 percent. But because access to it remains heavily restricted, the team says it developed a version using locally available replacement materials instead. Engineer Wajdi Jouda helped define the brick’s size and structure to meet engineering standards and connected the team with technical expertise from outside Gaza.

According to Abu Hassanin and Jouda, early tests show the bricks provide better thermal and sound insulation than the tents many displaced families currently live in. But the project remains experimental and has not been tested at the scale required for long-term reconstruction.

Current production ranges between 1,000 and 1,500 bricks per day—theoretically enough to build a small shelter in roughly two weeks. But every stage of the process remains difficult. Without heavy machinery, amid repeated power outages and damaged infrastructure, even transporting and crushing rubble becomes labor intensive.

The challenges are not only technical. They also include the lack of proper equipment and the broader political restrictions imposed by the Israeli blockade, which continues to limit access to essential construction materials. Despite the availability of skilled workers inside Gaza and technical support from outside, Abu Hassanin says funding remains the main obstacle preventing the project from moving more quickly toward implementation.

That reality has pushed some reconstruction efforts toward smaller, improvised local systems instead.

The project also carries risks and limitations. Humanitarian organizations and reconstruction experts have warned that rubble in Gaza may contain hazardous materials, including asbestos, heavy metals, and unexploded ordnance. Even if recycled blocks can help create temporary shelters, rebuilding entire neighborhoods would still require infrastructure, machinery, and material access on a vastly different scale.

Still, projects like Green Rock are emerging because few alternatives currently exist.

Compared to traditional reconstruction models that depend on imported materials and large international rebuilding programs, the project represents a hyperlocal response shaped by scarcity. It also reduces construction costs by roughly 50 to 60 percent, while creating work opportunities for displaced people involved in collecting, sorting, and producing materials.

Inside the workshop, the project feels less like a startup than an adaptation to collapse. The rubble of destroyed buildings moves through improvised machines and returns as walls, shelters, and stacked blocks waiting to be assembled again.

For Abu Hassanin, the significance of the project lies not only in the bricks themselves, but in what they represent. He describes a moment that repeats itself often: a man standing where his home once stood, helping rebuild it with his own hands.

“In that moment,” he says, “he is no longer just a recipient of aid, but part of the solution.”

In Gaza, where reconstruction materials remain unavailable and rebuilding efforts continue to stall, rubble is increasingly becoming one of the only resources. The result is a form of reconstruction shaped not by long-term planning but by the immediate realities of survival under constraint.

This story originally appeared in WIRED Middle East.