Trump thought Gulf monarchs would rebuild Gaza. Then he told them his plan

The American writer Kurt Vonnegut was a prisoner in Dresden during the Second World War, and after the devastating Allied bombing of that city, was forced to go “mining” for corpses. In his novel Slaughterhouse Five, he described the terrible stench as being like “mustard gas and roses”.

A similar “ghoulish mission” – as Vonnegut put it – faces those charged with rebuilding Gaza … first, they must excavate the decomposing bodies entombed beneath the rubble. There are between 10,000 and 14,000 of them, according to published estimates, though no one knows the true number.

That grim task may be the easy part. After that, comes the job of clearing away the rubble. I covered an earlier Gaza war, in 2008-2009. I say “covered” but – just like today – Israel stopped foreign journalists from entering Gaza. After a ceasefire, we were finally allowed in, pushing our camera gear on a luggage trolley through an eerily deserted Erez crossing. We soon saw a row of houses destroyed by bombs. The flat roofs were mostly intact, everything below having collapsed … they really had been flattened like pancakes. A woman in a hijab stood wailing over the remains of her home. I went back to Gaza many times but those houses were never rebuilt.

Rubble from Gaza’s earlier wars still hadn’t been cleared away by the time this one started. They hadn’t managed to remove some of the buildings demolished during the 2014 war, and that lasted just 51 days. There is now two years’ worth of twisted metal and broken concrete after the most recent bombing.

The UN Environment Programme said there was 17 times more rubble than from all those previous conflicts, or 50.8 million tonnes, as of last December. UN-Habitat estimates that it would take 105 lorries 20 years to take it all away. But there isn’t anything like that number of trucks and there’s almost no heavy equipment.

The numbers tell a story of devastation. The UN says that at least 69% of all buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. This includes 94% of hospitals, with almost half of them closed; 89% of schools and all 12 universities; 92% of the electricity grid; 70% of water and sewage plants; 79% of mosques, as well as 92% of major roads. The most important figures perhaps are that 92% of homes in Gaza are in ruins, and 1.9 million people are homeless. As the UN Special Rapporteur Balakrishnan Rajagopal said last year, this “systematic” destruction of housing is a cause of “profound trauma”.

As winter approaches, many people are living in the open. On Friday, the UN spokeman, Stéphane Dujarric, said that 4,000 pallets of tents, blankets and kitchen sets remained stuck in Jordan, Egypt and Israel, waiting for permission to enter Gaza. He said the Israeli authorities had rejected 23 requests from nine different humanitarian aid providers to bring in these “critical” supplies. This happens routinely: the Israeli position is that aid organisations are failing to make sure Hamas does not get its hands on the supplies.

That points to a major problem in the way of reconstruction. Israel bans more than 1,000 items as “dual use”. They include cement, steel bars, pipes, and welding equipment, all of which the Israeli authorities say could be used for military purposes.

Before the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, Israel allowed Qatar to send concrete into Gaza as aid. This was tactical: Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted a strong Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority, to stop the emergence of a Palestinian state. But the concrete was used in the network of tunnels built by Hamas. Netanyahu will not allow that to happen again.

All this is theoretical: there’s no money to rebuild Gaza. 

The World Bank and the UN put reconstruction costs at $70bn. President Trump had high hopes that rich Gulf monarchies would give a large part of this. He even had plans for a Gaza riviera, complete with a large gold statue of “your favourite president”. But so far, the response has been minimal.

As things stand, the Gulf states and others have donated around $1.14bn of the $4bn requested for urgent aid. That’s barely a quarter of what’s required just for basic humanitarian needs, let alone to start rebuilding. There’s precedent for this. At the 2014 Cairo donor conference, countries pledged $5.4bn, but as little as 2 per cent of the funds were actually sent. 

This time, there’s more than the usual reluctance to cough up. The international response has been paralysed by the question of who will govern Gaza. Israel rejects any role for Hamas but also opposes involvement by the Palestinian Authority. Netanyahu said he wanted neither “Hamastan” nor “Fatahstan”.

There’s supposed to be an international stabilisation force to provide security. But Hamas won’t disarm, and no one wants to send troops to fight Gaza’s armed groups on Israel’s behalf. The United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and Indonesia were all named as possible contributors to this force. All are now noticeably reluctant. (Turkey and Pakistan could still be willing, but Israel might not allow it.)

The Gaza agreement negotiated by President Trump calls for a “Board of Peace” to oversee reconstruction. Tony Blair was nominated as co-chair, though Trump being Trump, he insisted he’d be chief, with Blair as deputy. As much as anyone else, Blair may have been the real author of the Trump plan. He knows the intricacies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, having been a special envoy for the Quartet (representing the UN, US, EU and Russia). But he is a divisive figure, to many Arabs a war criminal for the invasion of Iraq.

The former Palestinian Authority negotiator Nabil Shaath said Blair had achieved little as Quartet envoy “because of his gross efforts to please the Israelis”. A member of the Hamas political bureau, Husam Badran, called him “the devil’s brother”.

The ceasefire was undoubtedly a major achievement by President Trump, though Hamas says some 270 civilians have been killed since it came into force. But progress has stagnated since the truce was agreed – there’s precious little money, no foreign peacekeepers, and no sign of Sir Tony and the Board of Peace.

The Israeli commentator Ehud Yaari wrote that Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza was going nowhere. It “currently belongs to the realm of Disneyland and has no grip on reality”.

For Gazans living under canvas, raw sewage flowing between the tents, the grandiose plans for reconstruction must seem like a cruel fantasy.