Israeli political sources say the military aims to have withdrawn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.

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.

Separately, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics said on Monday
that 4,100 homes were totally destroyed and 17,000 others damaged
during the conflict.

About 1,500 factories and workshops, 20 mosques, 31
security installations and 10 water or sewage pipes were also damaged,
it added.

The bureau estimated that the overall physical damage
so far amounted to about $1.9bn (£1.4bn), including about $200m (£140m)
of damage to infrastructure.

The Israeli Social Welfare Minister, Isaac Herzog, told
the BBC the problem was how to rebuild Gaza without facilitating
further attacks on Israel by militants.

There was a risk during reconstruction that buildings would be turned into missile launch sites, he said.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon earlier met Israel’s prime minister in
Jerusalem before entering northern Gaza via the Erez Crossing, to
inspect the damage and see what assistance could be given.

He will visit three UN facilities which were heavily damaged during the
conflict, including a school where at least 40 people taking shelter
were killed when what the Israeli military says was a “stray mortar”
fired by its troops landed outside.

UN spokesman Ahmed Fawzi said Mr Ban was keen to
express solidarity with the people of Gaza and for the UN staff, who he
said had continued heroically to provide assistance under such
difficult circumstances despite some of them being killed.

He will later visit the southern Israeli town of Sderot to see the damage caused by rocket attacks from Gaza.

The BBC’s Aleem Maqbool in Gaza City says Palestinians are meanwhile
continuing to search through the rubble of their homes to try to find
the bodies of those killed in the conflict.

Many are angry and feel that the world did not do enough when it mattered to stop the violence, our correspondent says.

Israel called a ceasefire on Saturday, saying it had met its war aims.
Hamas later declared its own truce, with one of its leaders claiming a
“great victory” over Israel.

Palestinian medical sources say at least 1,300 Palestinians were
killed, nearly a third of them children, and 5,500 injured during the
conflict. Thirteen Israelis, including three civilians, were killed.

The director of operations for UN aid agency in Gaza,
Unrwa, told the BBC that the weapons used by the Israeli military had
caused “horrific” injuries to children.

“These are not scratches or bullet wounds, these are kids who are hit by shrapnel in most instances,” John Ging said.

Palestinian militant groups in Gaza meanwhile said 112 of their
fighters and 180 Hamas paramilitary policemen were killed, according to
the Reuters news agency.

Arab foreign ministers meeting on the sidelines of an
economic summit in Kuwait City have meanwhile failed to agree on a
unified statement on Gaza because “some are entrenched in their
positions”, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari has said.