Two sisters from Gaza have won a prestigious international innovation prize for a process that converts rubble from bombed buildings into reusable bricks. The award, announced in Geneva on Wednesday, recognises a low-cost, low-tech solution to one of the most pressing problems facing the besieged strip: mountains of debris and a chronic shortage of building materials.

Rana and Jameela al-Haddad, aged 24 and 27, developed a method of crushing concrete, stone and ceramic waste into a fine powder, mixing it with a binding agent made from local plant resins, and pressing it into durable blocks. Their prototype, tested on a small scale in Gaza City, has withstood compression tests equivalent to those used for conventional concrete blocks. The prize, worth €50,000 from the Innovate for Humanity foundation, will allow them to scale up production.

“We look at the destruction every day and we see not death, but possibility,” said Rana al-Haddad in an interview via video link. “Our people need homes, schools, hospitals. The only thing we have plenty of is broken buildings. So we thought: why not use them?”

The sisters, who both studied civil engineering at the Islamic University of Gaza, began experimenting in their family’s backyard in 2023, using a manual crusher and wooden moulds. The war that erupted in October that year brought the project into sharp focus. By February 2024, the UN estimated that over 70 per cent of homes in Gaza had been damaged or destroyed, leaving more than 1.7 million people displaced. The volume of rubble exceeded 50 million tonnes, according to satellite analysis by researchers at the University of Nottingham.

Traditional reconstruction faces immense obstacles. Israel’s blockade restricts imports of cement and steel to a trickle, citing security concerns. The cost of a single truckload of cement has soared to $12,000 on the black market, far beyond the means of most families. Meanwhile, the rubble itself poses a health and environmental hazard: dust laden with asbestos, heavy metals and unexploded ordnance.

The al-Haddads’ process, which uses no imported materials and requires only a manual press and solar-powered grinding mill, sidesteps those barriers. The resin binder comes from a local shrub, the haraz tree, which grows wild along the coastal plains. The blocks are cured in the open air, needing no kiln or fuel.

“This is exactly the kind of innovation we need to reward: local, sustainable and directly addressing a humanitarian catastrophe,” said Dr. Henrietta Moore, a judge for the prize and a professor of engineering at Imperial College London. “The sisters have demonstrated that necessity is truly the mother of invention. Their solution is not just a technical fix, it is a symbol of resilience and dignity.”

The prize money will be used to purchase a motorised crusher and hire a small team. The sisters plan to train unemployed young people in rubble collection and block-making. They aim to produce 10,000 bricks per month by the end of the year, enough to repair around 50 homes annually.

But scaling up will not be easy. The war is ongoing, and access to raw rubble is dangerous and unpredictable. Israeli airstrikes still target areas where civilians are collecting salvageable materials. The sisters themselves have been displaced twice: they now work from a rented room in Rafah, near the Egyptian border.

“We do not know if our factory will be bombed tomorrow,” said Jameela al-Haddad. “But we also know that hope is a form of resistance. Every brick we make is a brick for the future.”

The award has drawn a response from the international community. The European Union’s ambassador to the UN announced a €2 million grant to the project, contingent on a ceasefire. A charity in the UK, Architects for Peace, has pledged to send engineers to train local workers once security permits.

For the sisters, the prize is validation after years of working in obscurity. “We are often told that Gaza is just a problem to be solved from the outside,” said Rana. “We want to show that the solution is already here, in the hands of its people.”