by james M Dorsey
US President Donald J. Trump’s shock-and-awe Gaza therapy appears to be working.
Infuriated by Mr. Trump’s assertion that the United States will take ownership of the Strip, resettle its 2.3 million inhabitants in Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere, and turn it into a high-end beachfront real estate development has forced Arab leaders to come up with an alternative plan.
Mr. Trump has acknowledged as much.
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Speaking to Fox News radio hours after the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Egypt, and Jordan discussed an alternative plan at an informal summit in Riyadh, Mr. Trump defended his plan as a recommendation he would not impose.
The leaders in Riyadh expect an Arab summit scheduled for March 4 in Cairo to endorse their plan.
“I’ll tell you the way to do, it is my plan. I think that’s the plan that really works. But I’m not forcing it. I’m just going to sit back and recommend it… Another way of doing it, but I don’t think it would work, would be to do it with people there… The question is, can you wipe (Hamas) out? They are so interspersed among people,” Mr. Trump said.
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Credit: X/@tamerqdh
Taking its cue from Mr. Trump’s original insistence on implementing his plan, Israel this week reportedly dropped Arabic language leaflets over Gaza threatening to “impose forced displacement upon you whether you accept it or not…. The map of the world will not change if all the people of Gaza disappear from existence, and no one will ask about you,” the leaflet read.
Meanwhile, Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy, appeared on stage at a Saudi investment conference in Miami with the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the father of the notion of turning Gaza into a high-end real estate development.
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Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff in Miami. Credit: Al Arabiya
“We talk about convening people together from all parts of the world, master planners and developers and architects, talking about ideas and so forth,” Mr. Witkoff said.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Witkoff was exploring a possible White House gathering of real-estate developers and other business leaders to kick off a Gaza reconstruction effort.
“You have to see the devastation that exists there today in Gaza. There are 30,000 unexploded shells all over there. The conditions are horrendous. I don’t know why anyone would want to live there today. It’s illogical to me,” Mr. Witkoff said.
Mr. Witkoff visited Gaza earlier this month. He was the first senior US official to visit the Strip in 15 years.
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Eager to secure a piece of the pie, Khalaf al-Habtoor, an idiosyncratic Emirati real estate magnet, tabled a 30-page plan to rebuild Gaza in a matter of years rather than decades.
Mr. Al-Habtour apparently aligned his plan with an Egyptian proposal that envisions reconstruction of Gaza in three phases over five years. The Egyptian plan is at the core of what the leaders assembled in Riyadh hope to present at the Arab summit in Cairo.
To persuade Mr. Trump, the Arab plan needs to propose a workable interim governance structure that excludes Hamas and offers a credible, well-funded plan for the rehabilitation and reconstruction of Gaza without the resettling of the territory’s population.
This week, the United Nations, the World Bank, and the European Union jointly estimated that reconstruction of the war-ravaged Strip would cost US$53 billion. The Gulf states reportedly are willing to put up an initial $20 billion.
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The Arab states walk a fine line in proposing a governance structure that would be legitimate in Palestinian and Arab eyes yet acceptable to Israel that has ruled out involving not only Hamas but also the West Bank-based, internationally recognised Palestine Authority.
To achieve that, the Arab plan reportedly envisions an interim governing body made up of Gazan technocrats and notables with an Arab contingent training a Palestinian police force populated by Palestinians with no ties to political or military groups.
In doing so, the Arabs need to square a circle. The Arabs want to link Gaza’s interim administration to a process that leads to the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, a no-go as far as Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is concerned.
To legitimise Arab states’ engagement, the Palestine Authority would have to invite them to participate in Gaza’s post-war rehabilitation, even though they view the Authority as corrupt, dysfunctional, and in need of reform and have treated it as an afterthought in the walk-up to the Riyadh summit.
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The invitation would reaffirm Arab and Palestinian insistence that Gaza is Palestinian and an integral part of a future Palestinian state rather than a territory up for grabs, as Mr. Trump suggested with his real estate development plan for “the world’s people.”
Arab reaffirmation of Palestinian rights in Gaza also serves to push for a sustainable resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that ensures investment in the Strip is not pulverised in an otherwise inevitable renewed round of fighting at some point in the future.
“To reconstruct a Palestinian state, yes. To reconstruct a territory that the Israelis might just destroy again in a matter of years, I don’t think that would be a sensible thing to do,” Saudi ambassador to Britain Khalid bin Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud said in an interview in January.
The question is what the Gulf states will demand in return for their funding of reconstruction.
In a twist of irony, the Gulf states could adopt Mr. Trump’s proposition of getting commercial rights in exchange for the funding of reconstruction.
Last year, the UAE helped Egypt secure an expanded US$8 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan by concluding a $35 billion deal to develop a prime stretch of the North African country’s Mediterranean coast.
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Credit: Foreign Affairs
Arab and Palestinian legitimacy is key to pressuring Hamas to cooperate.
Hamas has said it was willing to cede government in Gaza to a national committee provided it had a say in choosing its members but has rejected the notion of disarmament.
Hamas demonstrated flexibility by agreeing in the Gaza ceasefire’s first phase to US and Egyptian private military contractors replacing Israeli troops in the Netzarim Corridor that separated northern Gaza from the rest of the Strip.
Hamas has used the Gaza ceasefire’s prisoner exchanges to display, after Israel’s 15-month onslaught, its military’s sustained command and control, discipline, and ability to control public spaces and stage high-profile events.
Hundreds of fighters emerged during the exchanges dressed in crisp uniforms and equipped with seemingly well-maintained automatic weapons and pick-up trucks mounted with machine guns.
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Hamas parades coffins of dead Israeli hostages. Credit: CBS
Underlining its insistence on retaining the right to employ violence as long as Israelis and Palestinians have not negotiated an end to their conflict, Hamas this week paraded the black coffins of four Israeli hostages, including two children, killed during the fighting. The remains were the first exchange of dead Israeli hostages under the month-old ceasefire.
Before handing them to the International Red Cross, Hamas placed the coffins on a stage surrounded by armed gunmen clad in black and camouflage uniforms standing in front of a banner blaming Israel for the hostages’ deaths.
The coffins had plaques declaring the date of the victim’s “arrest,” Hamas’ euphemism for the kidnapping of innocent civilians during its October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
The parade sparked Israeli and international outrage fuelled by the Israeli military’s conclusion that one of the four bodies was improperly identified by Hamas as Shiri Bibas, the mother of the two killed children.
Ms. Bibas and her children, nine-month-old Kfir and four-year-old Ariel personified to Israelis the horrors of the October 7 attack, in which some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed and 251 others kidnapped.
Hamas released Yarden Bibas, the children’s father and Ms. Bibas’ husband, in a prisoner exchange earlier this month.
The military said the remains did not match Ms. Bibas’ DNA or that of the remains of any of the other 39 yet-to-be-released hostages who are presumed dead.
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Whether by mistake or deliberate, Hamas’ release of the wrong body has stiffened Mr. Netanyahu’s opposition to any interim arrangement in Gaza that would open the door to Palestinian sovereignty in the Strip or the West Bank and complicated the Arab efforts to come up with a viable alternative to Mr. Trump’s proposal.
In doing so, Hamas has put the ball back in Mr. Trump’s court as Israel and the group prepare to negotiate the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire that would involve Israel’s withdrawal from the Strip and the installation of an interim governing body. The ceasefire’s first phase ends in the first week of March.
“We will act with determination to bring Shiri home along with all our hostages – both living and dead – and ensure Hamas pays the full price for this cruel and evil violation of the agreement,” Mr. Netanyahu said.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.