Four takeaways from the plan to bring Trump's 'Gaza Riviera' to life

The proposal, circulating around the Trump administration, envisions Gaza under US trusteeship for at least a decade

The lead image from the Great Trust proposal leaked over the weekend (Supplied)

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A post-war Gaza plan circulating in Washington seeks to turn the enclave into a Dubai-like revenue-generating hub using mass surveillance, population displacement, and land appropriation.

The proposal would bring US President Donald Trump's purported "Gaza Riviera" plans to life, complete with world-class resorts and artificial islands, while Palestinians are paid $5,000 per person to leave their land.

A 38-page slide deck of the plan, first reported by the Financial Times, was published in full by The Washington Post on Sunday.

The proposal was reportedly led by Michael Eisenberg, an Israeli-American venture capitalist, and Liran Tancman, an Israeli tech entrepreneur and former military intelligence officer. Their initials, "ME" and "LT", appear to be listed on the deck’s first page alongside a mysterious third set of initials, "TF".

Eisenberg and Tancman were part of an informal group of Israeli officials and businesspeople that first conceived of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) in late 2023, weeks after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel in October 2023, according to The New York Times.

But this proposal takes the GHF as a starting point for a much wider, long-term vision that would see Gaza administered by a US-run "Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust" - or Great Trust for short.

A first draft of the proposal, which employees from the Boston Consulting Group worked on, is understood to have been completed this April and shared with the Trump administration, which held a meeting last week on post-war Gaza reconstruction.

It is unclear whether this proposal was discussed during the meeting, which included Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who have both presented their own grand plans for Palestinians over the years.

There is a lot of material in the dense proposal, but here are a few initial takeaways:

Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is temporary

According to this plan, GHF’s role is only envisioned to last between six to 12 months, but it also suggests its establishment and operations are the key opening move. The GHF's aid scheme in Gaza has been widely discredited by experts, and scores of Palestinians have been killed while trying to secure aid at GHF sites.

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In addition to providing “Hamas-free secure aid” during this time, the proposal also suggests that GHF will offer temporary housing, which it calls “Hamas-free humanitarian transition areas (HTAs)” with $10.8bn in humanitarian support to establish them. But that’s not something that appears to be happening in Gaza right now.

“The HTA system lays the foundation for rebuilding Gazan communities free from Hamas interference, while providing for critical human needs,” the plan says.

“HTAs use a combination of external security and local leaders to provide a safe area for rebuilding and human flourishing free from Hamas.”

Within a year - and once Hamas is dismantled, the plan repeatedly notes - GHF will be folded into the Great Trust. Israel will transfer administrative authority and responsibility in Gaza to the trust, which will be run by the US under a US-Israel agreement.

The trust will then govern Gaza for a multi-year period “until a reformed and deradicalised Palestinian polity is ready to step in its shoes”. At this point, the plan says, Arab and other countries would ideally invest in the trust so it becomes “a multilateral institution”.

Further down the line, when Gaza is “demilitarised and deradicalised”, the US-run trust will transfer authority to the Palestinian polity, which will join the Abraham Accords, the normalisation agreements between Israel and several Arab countries that were made during Trump’s first administration.

It is unclear who and how it would be judged that Gaza had been "demilitarised" or "deradicalised". It is also unclear what powers the trust would hold over Gaza after the Palestinian leadership took over.

Gaza, the plan says, might sign a “Compact of Free Association” with the trust “for long-term financial support in exchange for the trust retaining some plenary powers”.

The lure of rare-earth minerals

The proposal suggests that one of the main strategic benefits for the US would be access for American companies to $1.3 trillion in rare-earth minerals present in western Saudi Arabia and offers a tidy example of how this might work.

US electric vehicle companies, the proposal imagines, could build factories and facilities for skilled but “low-cost” employees in northern Gaza and southern Israel, presumably in the plan’s "Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone". Then Saudi rare minerals, along with other materials from the United Arab Emirates, would be shipped in.

The factories would be powered by both solar energy and gas from the Gaza Marine, a long-disputed field off the coast of Gaza, where Palestinians have been prevented from exploring their declared maritime boundaries, as gas discoveries in the Eastern Mediterranean have boomed in the past 15 years.

The plan does not outline who would own or control the gas.

Regarding the cars, once built by the low-cost workers, they would be delivered to Europe through the Gaza-Arish-Sderot special economic zone envisioned by the plan, with no additional taxes. “EV companies gain profits while giving a better future for Palestinians and Israelis,” the slide says.

How else would the rare-earth minerals be used? Would Saudi Arabia agree to this? Unclear. But securing these kinds of minerals has been a Trump administration aim even from his first administration, and, like the mention of Trump's plans to turn Gaza into a "Riviera of the Middle East" or even the use of the term "great", one can't help but feel this pitch caters to Washington.

Paris as inspiration?

Gaza’s “ongoing insurgency” problems? The proposal says these can be addressed, and stability and quality of life can be delivered with urban design, citing the work of Georges-Eugene Haussmann, the 19th-century French official who reordered Paris into the beautiful capital it is today.

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According to graphics in the proposal, six to eight “smart cities” would be sandwiched between an area labelled the “Trump Touristic Riviera and Islands” (artificial islands similar to the Palm Islands in Dubai), with another area marked for datacentres and advanced manufacturing and surrounded by the Mohammed bin Salman Ring Freeway.

Shaped like slices of pie, the cities are each cut through the middle by large thoroughfares, presumably part of the Mohammed Bin Zayed Freeway network. In between are green areas, including agricultural land, parks and golf courses. It sounds Haussmann-esque.

But then we learn that this is less like the City of Light and more an enclave of surveillance: the design imagines that “all services and economy” in the smart cities will be conducted through ID-based and AI-powered digital systems.

Fewer Palestinians, more money saved

One slide lists “levers to reduce the trust’s investment”. Number one on the list? “Increase the number of Gazans who volunteer to leave Gaza during the reconstruction”.

In other words, the more Palestinians who can be encouraged to leave Gaza, the less the trust will need to invest to get the plan off the ground.

For every Palestinian who leaves, the plan calculates that $23,000 will be saved; for every one percent of the population that relocates, that’s $500m in savings.

To induce people to relocate, the plan proposes to give $5,000 to each person and subsidise their rent in another country for four years, as well as their food for one year.

Stark calculations like this are dotted across the slides, which paint Gaza, without context, as a poverty-stricken, aid-dependent enclave worth “practically $0” so long as Hamas rules, yet one also capable of generating $185bn in revenue within a decade - with the trust at the helm.

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