One December morning in central London, more than two dozen people from influential institutions across the Middle East, Europe and the United States gathered in a conference room to pursue an aspiration that that moment bordered on absurdity. They were there to plan the reconstruction and long-term economic development of Gaza.
Gaza was subject to incessant bombardment by Israeli military forces in response to terrorist attacks launched by Hamas in October. Across the country, communities are reduced to ruins and tens of thousands of people have been killed. Families faced hunger, fear and grief.
Yet at the London meeting, members of the international establishment discussed how to transform Gaza from a place defined by isolation and poverty into a Mediterranean commercial hub centered on commerce, tourism and innovation, giving rise to a middle class.
The group included senior officials from U.S. and European economic development agencies, executives from Middle Eastern finance and construction companies, and two partners from the international consulting firm McKinsey & Company. Officially, they were present only as individuals and not as representatives of their institutions.
The plan they came up with is far removed from the terrible reality Gaza faces today. For this to become a reality, it would be necessary to end a war that has devastated the territory, not to mention tens of billions of dollars of investment. It would also require a resolution of the monumental and utterly uncertain political question of who ultimately controls Gaza, and then cooperation from that authority. All this means that the plan is far from being an action plan.
Yet participants argue that simply charting a more prosperous future has value because it can set the stage for projects once conditions are favorable – a notion that has propelled such planning in conflict zones like Kuwait after its invasion by Iraq and Ukraine.
“We are proposing to connect Gaza to the world for the long term,” said Chris Choa, founder and director of Outcomist, a London-based company that designs large-scale urban development projects, and one of the group’s original organizers. known as Emerging Palestine.
Among those implicated are Hashim Shawa, president of the Bank of Palestine, a commercial bank; Samer Khoury, managing director of Consolidated Contractors International, a construction company engaged in large projects in the Middle East; and Mohammed Abukhaizaran, board member of Arab Hospitals Group, a medical provider in the West Bank. Everyone would potentially have an interest in the possible reconstruction work.
“Early on in the war, my team and I began developing a plan to build a facility in Gaza as soon as the war ended,” Mr. Abukhaizaran said in an interview.
The group is clear that the most urgent work is the delivery of food, water, health care and emergency shelter to the people of Gaza, who are now facing a catastrophe. But the main focus of their plan is the reconstruction that will take place over the following decades.
“The war in Gaza must end immediately and incredible and immediate humanitarian efforts will be made,” Mr. Abukhaizaran said. “But we must also think long term to build a better future for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. »
The initiative, one of several under discussion, has attracted interest and advice from major international financing organizations, including the World Bank, said a senior agency official who spoke under the guise of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. The bank sees the plan as a useful contribution to a strategy that could generate jobs in Gaza by integrating the territory into the global economy.
Representatives from U.S. government agencies attended Palestine Emerging workshops and offered advice on the details of the plan, a senior U.S. official said, also speaking on condition that they not be named. U.S. involvement in the initiative was driven by the assumption that greater economic opportunities in Gaza are necessary to undermine popular support for Hamas, the official added.
The plan focuses on a series of major projects, including a deep-water port, a desalination plant to provide drinking water, an e-health service and a transport corridor connecting Gaza to the West Bank. A reconstruction and development fund would oversee future projects.
The most forward-thinking elements, such as the reduction of customs barriers to trade and the introduction of a new currency in place of the Israeli shekel, imply the eventual establishment of Palestinian autonomy, a measure to which the Prime Israeli Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged to resist. He also ruled out the possibility that future governance of Gaza could include a role for the Palestinian Authority, the most obvious potential partner for the reconstruction initiative.
Another obstacle is the enormous cost of any reconstruction. Damage to Gaza’s crucial infrastructure has reached $18.5 billion, according to a recent estimate by the World Bank and the United Nations. Half the population is on the brink of starvation and more than a million people are homeless.
Among the most important variables is who could provide such funding. A previous development plan for the Palestinian territories proposed by the Trump administration in 2019 included substantial investments from Persian Gulf countries like the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. The new initiative still needs to involve Gulf countries, Choa said.
The development imperative in Gaza predates the current war. THE unemployment rate in the territory was more than 45 percent in 2022, according to the World Bank. More than half of the population lived in povertyaccording to the International Monetary Fund.
Although visions of modern transportation systems may now seem tangential to Gaza’s essential needs, the plan is governed by the assumption that even temporary structures like emergency housing and health care facilities must be judiciously placed to avoid wasting future opportunities.
“Temporary tends to become permanent very quickly,” Mr. Choa said. “Someone says, ‘We’re going to put this big refugee camp right here,’ but maybe that’s exactly where you want to put a sewage treatment plant or a mass transit line to the future. “Then you create an obstacle.”
Mr. Choa, 64, has spent much of his career as an international architect wrestling with such details. After the World Trade Center attacks in September. On November 11, 2001, he participated in a commission responsible for designing the future of Lower Manhattan. He then lived and worked in China, where he oversaw the master plans of large urban areas. After moving to London in 2006, he continued his work in Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East.
It first looked at a detailed plan for Gaza in 2015 through work commissioned by Palestinian business interests. He led several missions to Gaza, meeting with the Palestinian Authority and the branch of the Israel Defense Forces that administered the territory. But the pandemic and Israeli security concerns halted those efforts.
Following Hamas’s attacks on Israel in October, he sought to revive the project, teaming up with Baron Frankal, chief executive of the Portland Trust, a London-based organization that is suing economic opportunities for Palestinians.
After the December meeting in London, an expanded group of 58 people met in Washington in early March. A meeting was held recently in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Another meeting is planned in Tel Aviv in early June.
The group informed the Palestinian Authority, which administers part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Frankal said. One of the initiative’s members, Wael Zakout, a former World Bank official, recently joined the cabinet of the new Palestinian government.
The group has not engaged Hamas, which has overseen Gaza since 2007 and is widely condemned as a terrorist organization.
“If Hamas remains a player, people will not invest tens of billions of dollars,” said Stephen Byers, former British cabinet secretary in the government led by Tony Blair, who was present at the London meeting.
The ideas that emerged from the workshops extend into the next quarter century. These include building a state-of-the-art football stadium and elevating the existing football team to a more internationally competitive level, as well as creating a strategy to encourage a Palestinian film industry.
The deep-water port would be established on an artificial island constructed from nearly 30 million tons of debris and rubble that is expected to cover the territory once the conflict ends, and which is expected to take up to a decade to remove.
The plan proposes the establishment of a degree-granting reconstruction technical university in northern Gaza, which would attract students from around the world. They would study strategies for emerging from disaster and spurring development, using post-war Gaza as a living laboratory.
The destruction is so extensive that the usual means of administering aid and overseeing reconstruction will be inadequate, the World Bank official said.
U.S. government agencies face legal restrictions when working directly with the Palestinian Authority. Other institutions are reluctant to deal with the Palestinian Authority because of its reputation for corruption. All of these private companies are essential elements of the plan, although they too will face the risks of investing in a very uncertain climate.
While the most important projects require clarifying the future political administration of Gaza, other initiatives, such as those aimed at encouraging small businesses, could begin as soon as military activities end.
“I want to focus on how we open the bread store, how we operate the factories,” said Jim Pickup, chief executive of the Middle East Investment Initiative, a nonprofit that funds development projects . “Each truck that removes the rubble is in itself a small business that supports a family. »
