When President Trump said last month that he wanted to move all of Gaza’s roughly two million residents out of the strip to Egypt and Jordan and transform the territory into a beachfront “Riviera” for tourism, the pressure was on Arab leaders horrified by the idea to come up with their own grand plan.
At an emergency Arab summit in Cairo on Tuesday, they laid out their vision: Rebuild Gaza without forcing out the Palestinians who live there. Sideline Hamas, the armed group that currently controls Gaza, and appoint a committee of qualified bureaucrats to run the strip for six months before handing power to the internationally recognized Palestinian government in the West Bank. Then reunite the territory with the West Bank as one Palestinian state — a long-held dream of Palestinians and many Arabs across the Middle East.
For all the talk of statehood and nuts-and-bolts discussion of temporary housing units for Palestinians, however, Gaza’s postwar future appears no closer to a resolution.
While Arab countries presented a unified front against the idea of forcibly displacing Palestinians and a detailed $53 billion reconstruction blueprint, their plan leaves central questions still unanswered. And the Arabs have little influence they can use to push Israel or Hamas to break their deadlock on several key issues, especially as the Trump administration is openly siding with Israel.
“With all respect, the plan was very technical, as if it came from an engineering consultancy,” said Ghassan Khatib, a political scientist at Birzeit University in the West Bank. “And we need a political plan.”
But a political solution was never really in the Arabs’ hands. Ultimately, that must come from Israel, Hamas and the United States, analysts said. The three remain at an impasse, raising fears that the fighting will explode again in Gaza.
The Arab countries’ inability to bridge those divisions was on conspicuous display in Tuesday’s statement. Less road map than wish list, the proposal skipped over how power in Gaza would be transferred from a postwar governing committee to the Palestinian Authority and reiterated that Palestinians must be granted their own state, a possibility the hard-right Israeli government has dismissed.
The statement signed by Arab countries on Tuesday night also avoided directly addressing whether or how to disarm Hamas, a crucial issue. While both Israel and the Trump administration say that dismantling the group’s armed wing is nonnegotiable because of the threat it poses to Israel, demilitarizing is a deal breaker for Hamas.
The furthest the document goes is an oblique reference to Gaza’s security being managed by a single armed force and a single legitimate authority. Elsewhere, it calls for the Palestinian Authority to govern Gaza alongside the West Bank in the future, implying that it would be the authority in charge of security, not Hamas.
That is not to say that Arab countries want to see Hamas keep its weapons. Egypt, which hosted the emergency summit and borders Gaza to the south, has serious national security concerns about Hamas. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and some other Arab countries also want to see it gone.
Still, even if they were united on the need to demilitarize Hamas, no one seems to have a plan for how to do so or who would enforce it. The group, which welcomed the statement on Tuesday, has expressed no openness to giving up its weapons.
Another fundamental impasse centers on the issue of Palestinian statehood. The Arab countries’ calls for establishing a Palestinian state are almost certain to run headlong into Israeli objections.
Arab leaders say that turning Mr. Trump’s “Gaza Riviera” notion into reality would mean destroying any prospect of a Palestinian state. Israel has embraced the proposal, with Israel’s foreign ministry saying on X on Tuesday night that Mr. Trump’s idea was “an opportunity for the Gazans to have free choice based on their free will. This should be encouraged!”
A Trump administration spokesman, Brian Hughes, seemed to stand by the American president’s idea when asked about the Arab plan on Tuesday night, saying the Arab plan “does not address the reality that Gaza is currently uninhabitable,” according to Reuters.
Though the United States has not explicitly scrapped its decades-old support for a two-state solution to the conflict, the Trump administration seems to be moving in lock step with Israel on many issues, raising questions about its commitment to Palestinian statehood. Israel, however, is also heavily dependent on the United States, which gives Mr. Trump room to twist Israel’s arm, analysts said.
“The only thing that really matters at this point is, what’s Trump going to propose?” said Paul Salem, an expert at the Washington-based Middle East Institute.
Mr. Trump has his eye on a grand bargain in which Saudi Arabia would agree to normalize relations with Israel in return for a security pact with the United States. Saudi Arabia has conditioned any deal on achieving Palestinian statehood, dimming the agreement’s prospects.
But with the cease-fire in Gaza wobbling and Israel tightening its grip on the West Bank, Mr. Salem said the Palestinians were in such a weakened position that Mr. Trump could perhaps force a deal.
“They might be in a position to have to accept things that they maybe would not have accepted” before, Mr. Salem said.
The Arab blueprint laid out on Tuesday is most detailed when it comes to rebuilding Gaza, a process that the document says could last until 2030 and cost $53 billion. It calls for a conference next month to mobilize international funding and investments for the plan, but it is unclear who will put money down.
Wealthy Gulf Arab states are often called on to pay for reconstruction and development across the Arab world. Egypt’s foreign minister, Badr Abdelatty, has also suggested that Europe could pitch in; and António Costa, the president of the European Council, which brings together European Union leaders, said in a speech at Tuesday’s summit that the bloc “stands ready to provide concrete support.”
Yet Gulf monarchies who would likely have to foot much of the bill, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are wary of spending so much to rebuild Gaza only to see the territory destroyed again if war returns.
Only two Gulf heads of state attended the Cairo summit — the leaders of Bahrain and Qatar — undercutting the strong, unified front Egypt had hoped to present and raising questions about the Gulf countries’ support for the plan.
