Whichever way you look at it, the devastation of Gaza demands urgent and serious reconstruction. Houses, hospitals, schools, farms, cultural heritage and basic infrastructure are in ruins. Entire neighborhoods have been erased. The humanitarian need is undeniable. But urgency should never become an excuse for illusion, spectacle or political shortcuts.
The contrast between rhetoric and reality could not be starker. As US President Donald Trump and a group of world leaders met in Davos, Switzerland, to sign the charter of the so-called Peace Board and unveil brilliant reconstruction plans, the killings in Gaza continued.
Since the ceasefire came into effect on October 10, no fewer than 480 Palestinians have been killed. Four of them were killed on the same day that 19 ministers and state representatives signed the letter, many of whom were less interested in the Gaza issue and much more interested in being seen alongside Trump.
In that context, the board’s carefully organized optimism feels more like a performance than a transformation. It looks like a sandbox where those who sign up can build sandcastles with Trump that will disappear with the first real wave.
The proposals may seem impressive and hopeful, but structurally they are empty. They sidestep the true drivers of the conflict, marginalize Palestinian action, privilege Israeli military priorities over civilian recovery, and align uncomfortably with long-standing efforts to maintain the occupation, displace Palestinians, and deny the right of return to the uprooted population in 1948 and 1967.
Gaza is not a real estate prospect
Presidential adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner’s brilliant vision treats Gaza not as a traumatized society emerging from catastrophic violence, but as a blank investment canvas for luxury housing, commercial zones, data centers, boardwalks and aspirational gross domestic product (GDP) goals.
It looks less like a turnaround plan and more like a real estate prospectus. The language of development replaces political reality. Elegant presentations replace rights. Markets replace justice.
But Gaza is not a failed startup seeking venture capital. It is home to more than two million Palestinians who have endured sieges, displacement, repeated wars and chronic insecurity for decades. Reconstruction cannot succeed if it separates itself from its lived experiences or if it treats Gaza primarily as an economic asset open to speculative investment, including by extremist Zionists, rather than as a human community struggling to preserve its identity and social fabric.
For many families, even the modest homes in Gaza’s formal refugee camps represented a fragile bridge worth clinging to as a step toward an eventual return to the places they were forced to flee, in what is now known as Israel.
These houses were valued not for their comfort or market value, but for the social networks they supported and their symbolic links to continuity, memory, and political claims. Palestinians are therefore unlikely to be swayed by offers of ostentatious towers, luxurious villas or promises of a “market economy” under siege. Their experience in recent decades has taught them that no level of material improvement can replace deeper aspirations linked to dignity, roots and the right of return.
A future designed without Palestinians
A glaring flaw in Trump’s plan is the systematic exclusion of the Palestinians themselves from shaping the vision of their future. These plans are unveiled in elite conference rooms, not debated with the people whose neighborhoods have been razed.
Without Palestinian ownership, legitimacy collapses. The experience of Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere has repeatedly shown that externally imposed reconstruction (however well qualified) reproduces the same power imbalances that fuel instability in the first place.
Equally worrying is that the plan deliberately avoids addressing the root causes of Gaza’s suffering: the occupation, blockade and military control. You cannot rebuild sustainably and at the same time continue to preserve and finance the machinery that repeatedly destroys what you build.
No amount of concrete, branded or foreign investment can replace political resolve. A territory that remains militarily besieged, economically sealed and politically subjugated will never achieve lasting recovery.
Prosperity cannot flourish inside a cage. The European Union learned this lesson the hard way through multiple cycles of reconstruction it funded in Gaza, which may help explain why none of its members rushed to join the junta, despite being able to pay the permanent membership fee and despite the political incentives of cultivating a warmer relationship with Trump in light of the war in Ukraine and his threats to Greenland.
Aiding military control of Israel through spatial redesign
There is also a serious risk that the proposed physical design of Gaza will entrench Israeli military strategy rather than restoring Palestinian life. The plans foresee buffer zones, segmented districts and the so-called “green spaces and corridors” that would divide the territory internally.
This type of space engineering would facilitate surveillance, control and rapid military access. Urban planning would become security architecture. Civil geography would become a militarized space. What is being sold as modernization would constitute a sophisticated containment system, much like the illegal settlement networks and road systems in the occupied West Bank.
The emphasis on reclaiming land from the sea using debris may echo the problems of rebuilding Beirut after the civil war, where newly reclaimed areas attracted disproportionate investment because they were free of unresolved property claims, ultimately allowing elites to appropriate the city’s coastline and remove it from public use.
The demographic implications of the plan are equally profound. Shifting Gaza’s population center southward – closer to Egypt and further from Israel’s settlements – would quietly alter the political and social center of gravity of Palestinian life.
It may alleviate Israeli security concerns, but it would do so at the expense of Palestinian continuity, identity and territorial coherence. Demographic engineering under the banner of reconstruction raises serious ethical concerns and risks externalizing Gaza’s long-term humanitarian burden onto neighboring states. This may also help explain Egypt’s absence from the signing ceremony and its decision to limit participation to its intelligence leadership.
No political theater can replace freedom
The Peace Board itself also deserves careful examination. Its brand suggests neutrality and collective stewardship, but its political framework remains highly personalized around Trump, with little clarity about how it should operate in practice.
This is not the type of multilateral peacebuilding mechanism envisioned in United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803 of November 2025; It is political theater. Peace mechanisms anchored in personalities rather than institutions and international law rarely survive political change.
At the heart of all this is a familiar but dangerous assumption: that economic growth can substitute for political rights. History teaches the opposite. People do not resist simply because they are poor; They resist because they lack dignity, security, freedom of expression and self-determination. No master plan can avoid these realities. No horizon can compensate for political exclusion.
This does not mean that Gaza should wait for perfect peace to be achieved before rebuilding. Recovery must proceed urgently. But reconstruction must empower Palestinians rather than redesign their limitations. It must dismantle control systems, not incorporate them into concrete and zoning maps. It must confront the political roots of the destruction rather than cosmetically repackaging its consequences.
Until such a foundation is in place, the Peace Board and Kushner’s vision risks becoming exactly what they seem: a form of sandcastle diplomacy: impressive to the global public, comforting to elites, and destined to disappear when the first serious wave of political reality arrives.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
