When Donald Trump’s 20-point “peace plan” was unveiled in late September, many countries in the Middle East and Europe rallied around it. The reason was not so much the plan’s contents, which justifiably raised eyebrows, but rather that it appeared to be the last, best hope to halt Israel’s appalling military onslaught in Gaza.
For more than a month afterward, the U.S. sought a UN Security Council endorsement for key components of the plan, including the proposed International Stabilization Force (ISF) and the “Board of Peace (BoP)”—an executive committee, led by Trump himself, charged with overseeing the administration, reconstruction and recovery of Gaza. While a resolution was ultimately passed, including with support from key Arab and Muslim non-UNSC members, it was not without enduring concern over the lack of clarity or legal grounding in the plan’s political and security components. Largely overlooked, however, was the 20-point plan’s economic redevelopment dimension, which is only loosely mentioned yet equally concerning.
Following the Trail
Very little of Trump’s 20-point plan actually references development or reconstruction. Mention is made to “a panel of experts” composed of people who have “helped birth some of the thriving modern miracle cities of the Middle East”, a clear reference to the UAE, who will create an economic development plan to “rebuild and energize Gaza.” The BoP will handle funding—the UNSC resolution calls for the World Bank to play a role, as well—and a special economic zone will be established.
Beyond that, there are two vague references that suggest the plan behind the plan. The first is the glaring mention of Tony Blair, the former British prime minister and the only individual named in the document besides Trump, as a candidate for the BoP. The second is a line stating that “[m]any thoughtful investment proposals and exciting development ideas have been crafted by well-meaning international groups, and will be considered to synthesize the security and governance frameworks to attract and facilitate these investments that will create jobs, opportunity, and hope for future Gaza [sic].” This extraordinarily casual language also appears verbatim in the annex to UNSC resolution 2803.
Although thoughtful investment proposals and exciting development ideas could include any number of the numerous plans that have been developed over the past two years by various actors and agencies, including by Gaza’s own municipalities, it is far likelier that the intention is to draw from a number of plans developed in the Trump and Blair orbits over the past 15 years, starting when Blair served as Quartet representative to the Middle East, through Trump’s first administration, up to the “Gaza Riviera” idea floated by the U.S. president in February 2025 and later elaborations.
With Trump and Blair positioned at the helm of a Board of Peace endowed with sweeping authority, these redevelopment concepts could readily be imposed. But Gaza is not a blank slate on which to sketch a new Dubai. It is a densely populated territory with millennia-deep historical, social and economic roots, and a population determined to shape its own future. Any serious reconstruction effort must therefore draw on global post-conflict reconstruction experience and be firmly anchored in Palestinian realities—rather than recycled visions conceived elsewhere.
Gaza Inc.©, the making of a disaster
In parallel to Trump upgrading the “Gaza Riviera” into his 20-point plan, his idea of a U.S.-run territory largely emptied of Palestinians was still being advanced by Israeli businessmen and a team at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). On September 2, The Washington Post leaked a 38-page prospectus for the Gaza Reconstruction, Economic Acceleration and Transformation (GREAT) Trust, which was making the rounds at the White House and had been viewed by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI).
The plan made no effort to conceal its aim to serve foreign investors at the expense of Palestinians, estimating roughly $185 billion could be generated “in revenue for industry” over ten years. It proposed 10 mega projects to be built in Gaza—including the infamous Riviera—financed with an “innovative funding model” that includes putting public land into a trust for development, with assets that could be sold to investors through digital tokens traded on a blockchain.
Yet Blair’s role extends well beyond his institution’s involvement in such schemes, and his mention in the 20-point plan is no coincidence. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Blair has been a frequent presence in Israel’s halls of power over the past two years to discuss “day-after” plans, and has been included in meetings with Trump’s team on Gaza’s future. Less than two weeks before the 20-point plan was released, Haaretz leaked TBI’s own blueprint for the post-war governance structure of Gaza, which bears a striking resemblance to Trump’s plan and includes the ISF and a Gaza International Transitional Authority (GITA), headed by a BoP-like international board. Just like in Trump’s plan, too, Palestinian involvement is relegated to a “service delivery arm.”
Critically, the GITA board would supervise a “Gaza Investment Promotion and Economic Development Authority (GIPEDA),” a “commercially-driven authority” responsible for eking out a profit out of every economic activity, “including housing, infrastructure, and industrial development.” In short, it is a Gaza run solely according to investor profit and return on investment, rather than national and communal interests.
What is ultimately consecrated in the 20-point plan and the corresponding UNSC resolution is a trusteeship system with a foreign command structure holding the purse strings. The Trump/Blair Board of Peace would “handle the funding for redevelopment” and release money in stages tied to undefined “terror-free” certification and reform benchmarks that must be agreed to by Israel—effectively rubberstamping Israel’s control of the process.
Alternative (and superior) plans
Despite the myriad drawbacks and colonial overtones of the Trump plan, it is, for now, the only game in town. Yet alternative approaches on the table deserve serious consideration, both because they would better serve Gaza’s residents and because they may be more palatable to external actors whose buy-in is essential to implementation. Three leading proposals offer particularly valuable contributions.
In March 2025, the RAND Corporation published From Camps to Communities: Post-Conflict Shelter in Gaza, which offers the most technically extensive and practically implementable reconstruction framework. By insisting on an area-wide approach, the plan seeks to avoid familiar post-conflict failures, such as temporary housing becoming permanent or entire areas for perpetual “later redevelopment.” Reconstruction is designed from the outset to generate income, giving Palestinians ownership over recovery rather than treating them as passive recipients.
RAND calls for multi-year pooled capital from existing donors and international financial institutions (IFIs), with funds disbursed incrementally as zones are cleared, each receiving a single, complete financing package for debris removal, utilities and housing. The emphasis is on financial discipline and sequencing, not the creation of new funding mechanisms.
Another proposal, Egypt’s Early Recovery and Reconstruction and Development Plan for Gaza, was unveiled the same month and appears to be the first costed blueprint for rebuilding the enclave. Drawing on the February 2025 UN Interim Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment (IRDNA), it envisions a 10-year reconstruction process costing around $53 billion. Its comprehensiveness, Arab League endorsement and quiet European support are notable strengths. The plan envisages a Cairo-hosted pledging conference and a pooled fund combining donor finance, IFIs and private investment, offering a relatively clear channel for accountability.
Most important, however, are initiatives developed by Palestinians themselves, including the Gaza Phoenix Initiative, a “conceptual and practical foundation for launching reconstruction programs in the Gaza Strip” that explicitly invites contributions to the planning. Its core principle—preserve what can be preserved and build around it—is the antithesis of the tabula rasa logic underpinning the Blair and Trump approaches. Phoenix rejects external master-planning, emphasizes sustainability, prioritizes human needs and reflects local identities across Gaza’s diverse contexts.
The plan promotes circular, localized capital flows through public–private partnerships, NGO cooperation and social-impact investment funds in eco-industrial clusters and debris-recycling hubs (CCHs). Rather than treating reconstruction as a one-off engineering project, it frames it as a self-reinforcing socio-economic ecosystem that gradually attracts external support.
Conclusion
Gaza stands to be, alongside Syria, the most consequential global reconstruction endeavor of the decade. Washington’s plan, as drafted, prioritizes external interests and falls short of Palestinian rights and aspirations. If it is to succeed, it must pivot away from these shortcomings and place Palestinians at the center of their own reconstruction.
U.S. policymakers should draw on the Egyptian plan’s financial architecture, phased budgeting and regional endorsement; the RAND plan’s operational discipline; and the Phoenix initiative’s indigenous expertise and logic of rebuilding. Local authorship and implementation are not optional virtues but central to legitimacy, both domestically and internationally.
The area-based approaches common to these proposals reflect hard lessons from the 2014 UN-brokered Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism, whose micro-approval system created a “labyrinth of bureaucracy” and effectively handed Israel veto power over rebuilding.
Absent early course correction, Washington risks engineering its own failure—one that no promises of gigafactories or investor returns can offset.
