UN says Gaza needs biggest post-war effort since WWII as truce talks continue

Hamas says it is considering in a "positive spirit" a Gaza truce deal, while the U.N. warned rebuilding the devastated Palestinian territory would require efforts not seen since World War II.

After months of stop-start negotiations, Hamas has sounded an optimistic tone about the latest hostages-for-ceasefire proposal, raising hopes an agreement may soon be reached — even as medics in the besieged strip reported fresh strikes on Gaza's southernmost city of Rafah on Friday.

Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh said the group will "soon" send a delegation to Egypt to complete ongoing ceasefire discussions with a deal that "realises the demands of our people".

Haniyeh, the leader of the militant group's political wing, told Egyptian and Qatari mediators in calls on Thursday that Hamas was studying the latest proposal from Israel with a "positive spirit".

The stakes of the truce talks were thrown into sharp relief Thursday, when a U.N. report estimated it could take 80 years to reconstruct all the homes flattened over the course of the nearly seven-month war.

"The scale of the destruction is huge and unprecedented... this is a mission that the global community has not dealt with since World War II," Abdallah al-Dardari, the UNDP's Regional Director for Arab States told a briefing in Jordan.

Much of Gaza has been reduced to a grey landscape of rubble, and the U.N. estimated the cost of reconstruction at between $30 billion and $40 billion.

He said "72 percent of all residential buildings have been completely or partially destroyed".

Reconstruction is made more difficult by the presence of large quantities of unexploded ordnance that Gaza's Civil Defence agency says triggers "more than 10 explosions every week".

The...