Arab countries countered President Trump’s proposal to expel Palestinians from Gaza and transform it into a beachfront destination with their own vision on Tuesday, endorsing a plan to keep the population there, rebuild the territory and turn it into part of a future Palestinian state, without Hamas in government.
The contours of the counterproposal emerged from an emergency summit in Cairo, where Arab countries approved an Egyptian plan to spend $53 billion to rebuild Gaza but not, as Mr. Trump has suggested, moving Palestinians out of the enclave.
Leaders across the Middle East have come under significant pressure to come up with a workable blueprint for reconstructing, securing and governing Gaza at a time when the Israel-Hamas cease-fire is teetering and Israel, buoyed by Mr. Trump’s backing, increasingly appears to hold the upper hand in negotiations.
The Arab plan “sets a path for a new security and political context in Gaza,” Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the Arab League secretary general, said at a news conference. He emphasized the importance of finalizing the Gaza cease-fire agreement.
Yet Israel’s foreign ministry quickly dismissed the Arab proposal on social media, calling its ideas “outdated” and saying it failed to recognize the threat Hamas posed to Israel and the region. Hamas, for its part, said the Arab leaders’ reconstruction plan and support for keeping Palestinians in Gaza were “welcome.”
There was no immediate response from the Trump administration.
Even as Arab leaders presented a unified front against Mr. Trump’s idea, at least one took care to praise the American president for backing the cease-fire — the kind of intervention Arab leaders would happily take more of.
The cease-fire agreement “would not have been possible without the contributions of President Trump and his administration, which we hope will continue,” President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt said in a speech at the summit. He and other speakers rejected forcibly displacing Palestinians, but did not directly criticize Mr. Trump.
The Egyptian framework envisions putting a committee of technocrats and other figures unaffiliated with Hamas in charge of Gaza for an initial period.
Hamas officials have said they would be willing to hand over control of civilian affairs to a governing committee of which the group was not a part, as long as Gaza’s postwar future was determined by Palestinian “national consensus,” according to a Tuesday statement.
The Egyptian plan also calls for the United Nations Security Council to deploy an international peacekeeping force to secure Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, but does not specify which countries might supply troops.
The plan sidesteps one of the thorniest questions of all: whether and how to disarm Hamas, which after 15 months of war remains the most powerful force in Gaza.
Though a number of Arab countries would like to see its armed wing disband, Tuesday’s declaration does not outright call for Hamas to lay down its arms. The language was left somewhat murky, proposing that security and weaponry should be managed by “legitimate Palestinian institutions” based on the principles of a single armed force and a single legitimate authority.
Hamas has rejected demilitarization, with an official Hamas media outlet reporting on Tuesday that “the resistance’s weapons are a red line.” But Israel and the Trump administration have demanded exactly that — a seemingly irreconcilable difference.
Any agreement would also have to get around a more fundamental issue. While Arab leaders will support only a framework that would include at least a nominal path toward Palestinian statehood, Israeli leaders oppose embarking on any path that would lead to Palestinian sovereignty.
Arab countries have scrambled in recent weeks to come up with an alternative to Mr. Trump’s February proposal to force Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt and Jordan. Much of the world has rejected his plan, with some saying it would be tantamount to ethnic cleansing.
Egypt, Jordan and other Arab allies of the United States have pushed back hard on it, saying it would destroy any remaining hope of a Palestinian state and destabilize the region.
Mr. Trump appeared to soften his position recently, saying he was “not forcing” his Gaza idea on anyone. But he also shared an A.I.-generated video depicting a “Trump Gaza,” and with Israel’s hard-line government embracing his proposal, the Arab world remains deeply concerned.
Adding to those worries is the uncertainty surrounding the Gaza cease-fire, which has paused the bloodshed for six weeks and seen Israel and Hamas exchange Palestinian prisoners for Israeli hostages.
In the latest crisis to shake the agreement, Israel began blocking all aid and goods from entering Gaza on Sunday, attempting to strong-arm Hamas into extending the first phase of the truce and swapping more prisoners for hostages without moving toward a permanent end to the war.
Israel also recently drove tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and ruled out allowing them to return, intensifying Arab fears that an emboldened Israel will attempt to annex the territory.
Israel says it is responding to a rising threat of militancy from the West Bank. The Israeli military denies any forced evacuations, but has said it ordered people to leave buildings close to what it called militant hide-outs.
The Cairo summit included representatives of all 22 Arab League members as well as the U.N. secretary general and the European Council president. But the leaders of two of the most powerful Gulf nations — Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — skipped it and sent representatives instead, raising questions about whether there is unified Arab support for Egypt’s plan.
The only Gulf heads of state who did attend were from Bahrain and Qatar.
According to the proposal approved on Tuesday, the transitional governing committee would pave the way for the Palestinian Authority, the internationally recognized body that administers parts of the West Bank, to “return” to Gaza. The authority administered Gaza until Hamas, which had won parliamentary elections in 2006, seized control of the strip by force in 2007.
Arab officials argue that Gaza and the West Bank should be united as one state, and must be linked in any conversations about Gaza. The Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, has so far appeared reluctant to give his blessing to any governing arrangement that does not put him fully in control of Gaza.
On Tuesday, Mr. Abbas said at the summit that his administration was ready to run Gaza again and also suggested he might hold long-delayed Palestinian elections. Mr. Abbas offered amnesty to members of his party whom he had expelled, a possible attempt to show skeptical Arab leaders that he could reunify the fractured Palestinian political landscape.
Mr. Abbas’s leadership has been seen at home as both ineffectual at ending Israeli rule over Palestinians and harshly repressive when it comes to internal dissent. He has little support in Gaza.
The Arab declaration approved on Tuesday was largely based on an Egyptian draft proposal, which suggests that armed Palestinian resistance would only disappear once Palestinians secure statehood and rights. It says the issue could be resolved “if its causes are removed through a clear horizon and a credible political process that ensures the legitimate rights of Palestinians.”
The Arab countries also endorsed a detailed proposal for Gaza’s reconstruction.
Palestinians in Gaza would stay in temporary housing units made of shipping containers on seven sites throughout the territory, with an average of six people living in each, according to a draft of the plan that Arab diplomats shared with The New York Times.
In the first phase, which would last six months and cost $3 billion, rubble and unexploded ordnance would be cleared, 1.2 million people would be moved into prefabricated temporary housing units, and 60,000 partly destroyed housing units would start to be rehabilitated.
In the next phase, which Egypt estimates would cost $20 billion and last until 2027, utilities and permanent housing would be rebuilt, and rubble would be used to expand Gaza’s surface area into the sea. Industrial zones, a fishing port, a seaport and an airport would be built during a final phase costing $30 billion and lasting until 2030, according to the draft.
Under this framework, oil-rich Gulf nations would likely pay for Gaza’s reconstruction, though Egyptian officials have suggested Europe could also contribute funds. On Tuesday, the summit’s attendees agreed to convene a donor conference in Cairo to drum up funding and investments “as soon as possible.”
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