Trump’s dream of transforming Gaza into a seaside resort community will come to nothing if Hamas resists pacification.
Trump’s dream of transforming Gaza into a seaside resort community will come to nothing if Hamas resists pacification.
A little over three months after a formal cease-fire put a halt to Israeli combat operations in the Gaza Strip, the Trump administration announced that Donald Trump’s peace plan for the region will progress to “phase two.”
In announcing the milestone, the Trump White House debuted what it’s calling “the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG).” That outfit will be helmed by Dr. Ali Shaath, a native Gazan, an engineer, and a former deputy with the Palestinian Authority whom the White House describes as “a widely respected technocratic leader.”
For his part, Shaath is enthusiastic about his new charge. “We are not talking about ‘reconstruction’ but construction anew,” he recently told the hosts of a West Bank–based radio station last week. Shaath is brimming with plans for “water rehabilitation” and “purification,” and he floated a proposal to push the rubble strewn about the Strip into the Mediterranean Sea as part of a land reclamation project. Of course, realizing Shaath’s objectives will depend on the cooperation of a lot of otherwise uncooperative elements inside Gaza. “The commission is not an army,” he confessed. Rather, “It is 15 Palestinian experts in reconstruction, assisted by staff — brains more than weapons.”
True enough. Shaath’s NCAG is an adjunct to what Trump’s plan envisions as the real postwar power center in the Gaza Strip: the so-called “Board of Peace.” That body “will play an essential role in fulfilling all 20 points of the President’s plan, providing strategic oversight, mobilizing international resources, and ensuring accountability as Gaza transitions from conflict to peace and development,” the White House’s statement read.
The press release included a list of high-profile board members, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Argentine President Javier Milei, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, as well as Trump’s all-purpose conflict negotiator Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. But Trump’s dream of transforming Gaza into an international seaside resort community will come to nothing if the Strip’s terrorist elements resist pacification. Toward that end, Trump has appointed U.S. Major General Jasper Jeffers to lead the International Stabilization Force (ISF), which will “establish security, preserve peace, and establish a durable terror-free environment.”
Jeffers, a longtime veteran and commander of Airborne, Infantry, Ranger, and Special Forces operations, also played “a key role in the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire,” the Jerusalem Post reported. That experience will serve him well as Jeffers monitors and preserves the cease-fire. But it is entirely unclear what the ISF will consist of, what its objectives and metrics for success are, or even what nations will play a role in executing its mission. Indeed, the conditions in Gaza that the ISF was proposed to oversee do not yet exist.
In Trump’s original multi-point peace plan, part six compelled Hamas to “commit to a peaceful coexistence and to decommission their weapons” in exchange for “amnesty.” Only several bullet points later do we arrive at the establishment of the Board of Peace and, subordinate to it, “a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee” to manage the day-to-day. Getting Hamas to disarm was always going to be the hardest part of this process. Trump seems to have just skipped it.
In fact, given Witkoff’s insistence that the U.S. expects Hamas to finally surrender all Israeli hostage remains, warning that its “failure to do so will bring serious consequences,” the president seems also to have blown right past part five: the surrender of all hostages, which was once a prerequisite for moving ahead with redevelopment.
Although it is certainly weaker than it was on October 6, 2023, Israeli intelligence assesses that Hamas remains armed and operational. No one cursorily familiar with the videos that circulated online in the wake of the October 2025 cease-fire featuring Hamas remnants wantonly executing Palestinians who resisted its authority would doubt that the terrorist sect can complicate the process the Trump White House envisions.
What’s more, the nations that Trump initially named as potential contributors to the ISF’s mission in Gaza — Azerbaijan, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates, for example — stipulated that their forces would not engage in combat with Hamas and will not deploy until disarmament had been achieved. In the intervening months, the UAE and Azerbaijan “appeared to back away from committing to the force,” the Jerusalem Post’s reporting added.
Some are holding out hope that unreliable parties like Qatar and Turkey could still persuade Hamas to play ball. They were instrumental in securing a cease-fire in the first place, after all; the withdrawal of their covert support for Hamas’s terrorist activities played a decisive role in convincing the organization that the jig was finally up. Perhaps in an effort to unlock their active participation in the peace process, Trump has recently been giving in to every request from Ankara and Doha. But Israel is properly leery of their participation in this project. If Jerusalem objects, it’s not clear if the ISF will be able to stand up a force at all.
For his part, Trump himself seems to be treating this whole exercise as though it was a game.
The Kremlin confirmed on Sunday that it had received an invitation from the American president to serve alongside his administration’s principals on the Board of Peace. “The plan has been criticized by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said the details hadn’t been coordinated with his country,” Bloomberg reported.
Trump struck a flippant note when he was asked why Putin was invited to join the body even as U.S. allies like French President Emmanuel Macron declined to participate. “Did he say that?” Trump replied. “Well, nobody wants him because he’s going to be out of office very soon,” the president continued. “I’ll put a 200 percent tariff on his wines and champagnes, and he’ll join.”
An armed Hamas. A distressed Israel. A fragmentary peace process that exists, for the most part, on paper. None of these conditions are especially conducive to the kind of durable “phase two” the White House proposed last autumn. If Trump doesn’t want one of the “eight wars PLUS” he says he has concluded to reignite, he and his subordinates would be wise to more cautiously steward the Gaza peace process.