After President Trump shocked the Arab world last month by suggesting the entire population of Gaza be expelled from the territory, his aides reframed the idea as an invitation to the leaders of the Middle East: Come up with a better plan, or do it our way.
“All these countries say how much they care about the Palestinians,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week. “If the Arab countries have a better plan, then that’s great,” Mr. Rubio added.
Now, the governments of several Arab states are attempting to do exactly that. Representatives of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are quietly coordinating to form an alternative vision for Gaza in which Arab countries would help fund and oversee the reconstruction of Gaza, while keeping its residents in place and preserving the possibility of a Palestinian state, according to diplomats and officials briefed on the endeavor.
Envoys from all five countries are set to flesh out the details on Friday in Saudi Arabia, and then again at a bigger summit on March 4 in Cairo. At those meetings, Egypt will probably propose forming a committee of Palestinian technocrats and community leaders, all unaffiliated with Hamas, who could run Gaza after the war, according to two Arab diplomats, a senior Western official and Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland. Mr. Van Hollen said he spoke over the last week with the Egyptian, Saudi and Jordanian foreign ministers about the evolving proposal.
“A lot of the focus will be to demonstrate to Trump and others that, ‘Yes, there is a viable plan to rebuild, we will invest the resources there,’” Mr. Van Hollen said.
“Their view is that Trump’s a real estate guy, he talked about redeveloping Gaza, they want to put together a viable plan that shows Trump that you can rebuild Gaza and provide a future for two million Palestinians” without forcing them to leave the territory, Mr. Van Hollen added.
While the ideas might be presented as a fresh alternative, they are hardly new. For months, Egypt has promoted the idea of a technocratic committee and has hosted Palestinian leaders in Cairo to discuss the idea. For decades, Arab leaders have called for the establishment of a Palestinian state that includes Gaza. Even the Israeli government has privately signaled for more than a year that it is open to Arab leaders playing an oversight role in postwar Gaza.
The challenge is that the obstacles to these ideas are as old as the ideas themselves.
Israeli leaders oppose postwar plans that would pave the way to Palestinian sovereignty. But Arab leaders will only support a framework that at least nominally forges a path toward Palestinian statehood.
They also want the blessing of the Palestinian Authority, the internationally recognized body that administered Gaza until Hamas wrested control of the territory nearly two decades ago. But the authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, has appeared wary of a postwar governance structure that does not unequivocally give him full control of the territory — a position that puts him at odds with a technocratic committee. Hamas officials have said they would be willing to cede control over civil affairs to such a body. But they have refused to disband their military wing, an unacceptable position for both Israel and Mr. Trump, who seek Hamas’s complete disarmament.
“The biggest challenge that the Arab leaders face is to present a realistic plan that can be imposed on the Palestinian factions as well as also being acceptable to both the U.S. and Israel,” said Ibrahim Dalalsha, director of the Horizon Center, a political research group in Ramallah, West Bank. “It’s going to be a very complicated process.”
Among the uncertainties is whom the Arab leaders would entrust to secure Gaza and prevent Hamas from attacking Israel. Israeli officials also want the Israeli military to have operational freedom in Gaza for the long term, but that arrangement would be hard for the Arab leadership to publicly support.
Some hope that Egypt and the Persian Gulf countries would provide their own troops. Last month, Egypt allowed a private Egyptian security firm to help staff a checkpoint inside Gaza — an arrangement that some diplomats and analysts viewed as a prototype for a broader operation. But it is unclear whether Arab leaders would be prepared to send a larger force to secure a wider territory. And it is unlikely that Hamas would accept that intervention.
“Whoever wants to take Israel’s place will be treated just like Israel,” Osama Hamdan, a senior Hamas official, said during a conference in Qatar last weekend.
The firmest element of the Egyptian plan centers on rebuilding Gaza while keeping Palestinians inside the enclave instead of forcing them out to Egypt and Jordan, as Mr. Trump has suggested.
President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt outlined the proposal in broad strokes in meetings on Sunday with Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, and Crown Prince Hussein of Jordan. Mr. el-Sisi discussed with the Jordanian prince “the necessity of immediately starting the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, without displacing the Palestinians from their land,” according to a statement from Egypt’s presidency.
But the details of the plan remain unclear.
Samir Farag, a retired Egyptian military general, said in an interview that Egypt would call on an array of companies, both domestic and international, to reconstruct Gaza over the next three to five years. A first phase of increasing humanitarian aid to Gaza and clearing rubble would be followed by building hospitals, schools and other infrastructure, said Mr. Farag, who is close to Egyptian officials.
The question of who will pay for it remains unanswered.
Egypt will call on other Arab countries to contribute reconstruction funds at an upcoming conference, Mr. Farag said.
But even the timing of such summits has been the subject of confusion. Egypt originally invited Arab leaders to an “emergency” summit on Feb. 27.
Then it was delayed by a week.
Rania Khaled contributed reporting from Cairo, and Ismaeel Naar from Riyadh.
