Once again, Gaza is going green.

Only, this time, it's not Hamas green.

Gaza is going eco-friendly.

With Israel maintaining its longstanding ban on allowing construction materials into the Hamas-controlled Mediterranean strip, everyone from the UN and Red Cross to the Hamas-led government and frustrated families are taking matters into their own hands.

Faced with an unending river of raw sewage flowing into the Mediterranean and the Israeli cement restrictions, the Red Cross decided to scavenge the 25-foot-tall cement slabs from the Gaza-Egypt border fence that had been toppled by Hamas militants in January, 2008.

The Red Cross engineers worked with officials in Rafah to scavenge 2,800 of the concrete slabs to build two new football field-sized sewage treatment pools near the Gaza-Egypt border.

That has created a surreal scene as sewage flows into the new ponds whose borders are made of the concrete walls that once separated Egypt and Gaza.

"We are pioneers," said Marek Komarzynski, a Red Cross engineer who worked on the project.

When Hamas seized military control of Gaza two years ago, the new leaders trotted out a new slogan: Gaza: "Safe, clean and green."

Now, two years later, the new Hamas housing policy is pushing a new plan to train Palestinians to build mud-brick homes and buildings.

The head of the initiative is Hamas engineer and top government leader Ziad al Zaza who pulls out a blueprint and plans for a new Gaza City charity they are preparing to build using mud bricks.

"I hope to break the siege by building this model," says the Hamas leader.

Ziad al Zaza and Komarzynski aren't the only new Gaza eco-warriors.

The United Nations Development Program has sought advice from Rashid Abdel Hamid, a noted Palestinian architect who designed Gaza's first contemporary mud-brick buildings more than a decade ago. He is encouraging the UN to start its own training program to teach Palestinians to build buildings with clay.

(One of Gaza's two Abdel Hamid mud creations is the signature Al Deira Hotel, an elegant, 22-room, seaside hotel that's long been a favorite of visiting journalists and diplomats.)

And some Gaza residents are already taking matters into their own hands.

A growing number of Palestinians are building mud-brick homes.

One of them is a Rafah resident who gave his name only as Abu Rami.

Abu Rami and his sons bought a truckload of dirt that came from the excavated tunnels running under the Gaza-Egypt border, dumped it on their open land and began making mud bricks last week.

"We don't need cement," said Abu Rami.

Rafah's first modern day home eco-builder is Jihad Shaer, a 36-year-old father of five.

As Israeli air strikes hit the nearby smuggling tunnels last week, Shaer offered a tour of his small, two-room mud-brick home as two orange tabby kittens scampered about. The house has built-in platforms for the beds and built-in ledges for books and lanterns.

Shaer used old wooden crates for the windows and bought a bit of concrete from the smugglers to shore things up.

Sitting out front of his home, Shaer jokes about Gaza's plight with a joke about the composition of the word Palestine, which he says is a combination of the Arabic word for poverty (fala) and the Arabic word for mud (tiin).

"We've ended the poverty stage," says Shaer. "Now we've entered the stage of mud."