Last month, US President Donald Trump unveiled a surprise plan for his government to take over the Gaza Strip, relocate its residents outside their homeland and transform it into a “Riviera of the Middle East”. The proposal appeared to be a repudiation of America’s decades-long policy of support for a two-state solution and Palestinian self-determination.
Following widespread rejection of the proposal, including from Washington’s allies in the region, Mr Trump softened his stance and invited Arab leaders to formulate a “better” alternative to revive a territory battered by 15 months of war with Israel.
Exactly one month later, Egypt and its Arab partners have done exactly that.
The Arab plan, unveiled in Cairo on Tuesday, provides a detailed framework, including timeframes and a budget, for the reconstruction and governance of the Gaza Strip, which has lost nearly 50,000 lives and almost 70 per cent of its buildings to the war. With temporary housing factored into the rebuilding project, which could take three to five years, this plan would not require removing any of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents from their homeland. This stands in contrast to Mr Trump’s proposal, which assumed reconstruction would take more than a decade.
The Arab proposal envisions Hamas handing over control of Gaza, which the militant group has controlled since 2007, to a committee of apolitical technocrats for a period of six months, before the territory is eventually taken over by the Palestinian Authority. The proposal also includes a plan, to be mandated by the UN Security Council, for the posting of Arab and UN forces to monitor Gaza’s land crossings with Egypt and Israel. Egypt and Jordan would also provide training to Gaza’s police force.
The proposal has the backing of almost the entire international community, including the UN as well as Arab and EU states and many African countries. Crucially, it has been endorsed by the Palestinian Authority as well as Hamas. But two of the most important stakeholders outside the Arab world – Israel and the US – have rejected it. They are deeply misguided in doing so.
One of the Israeli government’s stated aims when it launched its most devastating war in Gaza, in October 2023, was to eliminate Hamas after the group killed more than 1,200 people in Israel and abducted 251 others. Today, that goal remains elusive; Hamas’s capabilities are severely degraded, but it remains Gaza’s sole governing power. But statements made by the group’s political leadership articulating its willingness to give up that position should prove to Israel and its allies in Washington that the Cairo plan is the most viable one on the table.
Decades of occupation and conflict between Palestine and Israel have eroded trust. But the message delivered in unanimity by the attendees of the Cairo summit was clear. It was one of peace, within the prism of the two-state solution.
That message ought to resonate with Mr Trump, who has made the task of restoring peace in an increasingly conflict-ridden world one of his top priorities in office. He must know that the plan unveiled in Cairo provides the only realistic pathway for Palestinians and Israelis to live – and eventually, perhaps even thrive – alongside one another after almost 80 years of conflict.
Rejecting this deal without offering a better one, with equal or greater protections for Palestinian and Israeli lives, would be to take a step in the opposite direction. And it risks sending a message that stokes the Arab world’s worst fears – that those who say they want to see Hamas eliminated from Gaza perhaps are working to eliminate all Palestinians from their homeland.
