A reborn Gaza will take decades and cost billions. And the queue for the job starts here...

An Egyptian former militia leader is vying for Gaza clearance and construction contracts. Oliver Marsden in Beirut and Ruth Michaelson in Istanbul report

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The skies over Gaza are, for now, mostly clear. The bombing has abated and the guns have fallen largely silent. What remains after two years of relentless destruction is an appalling human toll and a landscape reduced to rubble.

Rebuilding a metropolis on top of the graveyard that is the Gaza Strip and turning smashed concrete back into towers would intimidate most developers. Not so Ibrahim al-Organi, a tycoon from neighbouring Sinai best known as the head of a company charging Palestinians up to $10,000 to flee the war in Gaza.

In little over a decade, Organi has transformed himself from a militia leader fighting forces from Cairo to an Egyptian regime loyalist with a business empire including construction, security and importing BMWs. He has even signed development deals with Belkacem Haftar, the son of Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar.

"Now he's wearing a suit but he used to have an automatic rifle in the Sinai desert," said Mohannad Sabry, the author of Sinai: Egypt's Linchpin, Gaza's Lifeline, Israel's Nightmare. "He was a militia leader protecting cement factories and other major investments in the Sinai. Those origins were the first stage of normalisation between him and the Egyptian state after he promoted himself to wealthy businesspeople by protecting their investments in the Sinai."

Organi is at the front of a queue of entrepreneurs angling for contracts in a colossal clearance and construction project likely to take decades, even if the ceasefire holds.

The UN said last year that it could take 30 years to clear the debris. An official with the aid group Humanity & Inclusion said this week that it could take a similar amount of time to clear unexploded ordnance, calling Gaza a "horrific, unmapped minefield".