When Reconstruction Becomes War Governance in Gaza

Graves in Gaza are being disturbed by fresh bombardment at the very moment reconstruction plans are unveiled. A ceasefire came into effect in October 2025, framed by U.S. officials as the stage that would enable Gaza’s “full demilitarization and reconstruction,” but conditions on the ground have remained unstable, with repeated truce violations and continued killings by Israel in the months since. What has emerged instead is a new spatial order. A de facto internal boundary, widely referred to as the “yellow line,” now cuts through the Strip, marking Israeli-designated military zones and buffer areas that shape movement, access, and survival.[i] According to OCHA, the Israeli-designated restricted-access zone expanded from 53 percent of Gaza earlier in 2026 to 64.9 percent by June, as Israeli forces repeatedly shifted the yellow markers westward and transformed a nominal ceasefire line into an advancing frontier of military control.

This alone places Gaza outside conventional reconstruction paradigms. Classical postwar reconstruction is oriented toward restitution. It assumes an end to hostilities and seeks to reestablish housing, infrastructure, and institutions as a pathway back to political normalcy. Gaza lacks even these baseline conditions. Israeli military domination, the architecture of siege, restricted humanitarian access, and the enforcement of the yellow line actively foreclose the conditions under which reconstruction can begin. What is being called “reconstruction” amounts to the managed continuation of destruction: a system designed to sustain life at the threshold of collapse while leaving intact the forces that produce that collapse. In this context, reconstruction functions as an instrument of control. Rebuilding Gaza under these conditions enforces a regime that determines whose presence is tolerated, whose return is obstructed, and whose future remains subordinated to external power.

By any measure, Gaza’s devastation demands urgent rebuilding. Homes, hospitals, schools, farms, and entire neighborhoods lie in ruins. Yet urgency must not become an excuse for illusion or political shortcuts. While global leaders unveil glossy reconstruction visions in elite forums, Israel continues to bomb Gaza, kill Palestinians, restrict humanitarian aid, and expand its territorial control beyond the ceasefire line. As Sultan Barakat warns, such initiatives risk devolving into “a form of sandcastle diplomacy, impressive to the global public, comforting to elites and destined to wash away with the first serious wave of political reality.”[ii]

Gaza has often been cited as a paradigmatic case of disaster capitalism in Naomi Klein’s sense[iii], where crisis enables external actors to restructure economies and governance. Arafeh and Turner locate Gaza’s reconstruction at the convergence of counterinsurgency, disaster capitalism, and Israeli settler colonialism. Read alongside proposals for population transfer, territorial contraction, land appropriation, and externally controlled return, this convergence creates the conditions through which Palestinian displacement could be made permanent.[iv] Unlike postwar settings such as Iraq, Afghanistan, or Haiti, where accumulation followed regime change or natural disaster, dispossession in Gaza is not a contingent outcome of crisis. It is built into the reconstruction process itself. Here, rebuilding functions as a spatial tool that reorganizes population, territory, and political life under ongoing force.

War governance names the use of reconstruction to administer civilian life under continuing military domination. Across contemporary frameworks, rebuilding sustains life while suspending political autonomy, administers care without repair, and organizes space without sovereignty. Violence structures the decisions, timelines, and systems of control through which recovery proceeds. Unlike emergency humanitarianism, which claims temporariness, it produces durable systems: provisional housing without return and recovery plans that move forward in the absence of political resolution. The CMCC proposal for a controlled “planned community” in Rafah makes this logic concrete (explained in detail later). Palestinians would receive shelter, services, and monitored economic access inside a militarized zone, with movement regulated through checkpoints, biometric registration, and an international security apparatus. 

Reconstruction under coercive conditions has long shaped interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Lebanon, and Gaza’s own recovery regimes after 2014. The present moment goes further. Military partition, technocratic administration, securitized aid, investor-led redevelopment, and controlled return are being assembled within a single postwar architecture. What is being tested is a form of rule that sustains Palestinians at the threshold of survival, redesigns Gaza under external security control, and calls the result recovery.

Governing Gaza Through Reconstruction: The Proposals

Taken together, these reconstruction proposals read as competing projects of rule, each laying out a different way to organize Gaza’s people, land, and future under ongoing violence. Their shared move is to detach Gaza from the wider question of Palestine and to convert a national struggle over land, return, sovereignty, and liberation into a bounded administrative problem called “postwar Gaza.”

I focus on three clusters of proposals: openly coercive governance schemes, managerial humanitarian plans, and counter-planning that refuses the logic of administered non-return. The dominant schemes differ in form, but many share the premise that Sara Roy names directly: “The most influential plans for rebuilding Gaza start from the premise that Palestinians have no right to determine their future.”[v]

A. Reconstruction as Governance and Control

The most overtly political proposals advance through U.S.-aligned, Israeli-linked, and corporate channels, approaching Gaza as a territory to be redesigned rather than a society to be restored. These proposals treat Gaza’s destruction as an opening to impose a new spatial, economic, and administrative order that resolves Gaza as a “problem” through reconfiguration.

The CMCC Plan

The Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) is a U.S.-led civil-military body established in late 2025 under U.S. Central Command, operating in coordination with Israeli military authorities and select allied states. Leaked presentation materials obtained by Drop Site News[vi] outline a proposal for a “planned community” in Rafah designed to house up to 25,000 Palestinians within a fully controlled zone under Israeli military authority. Entry and exit would be mediated through checkpoints, and residents would be registered through biometric systems linked to Palestinian identification numbers and coordinated with Israeli authorities. Economic life would shift to monitored electronic wallets, educational curricula would be externally designed to promote “culture of peace” norms, and policing would operate under an international stabilization force.

Investigations by Forensic Architecture[vii], based on high-resolution satellite imagery, show that Israeli forces have already begun preparing a one-square-kilometer site in eastern Rafah for new residential infrastructure under full military control. Unlike the generalized destruction elsewhere in Gaza, this site exhibits a precise pattern: land razed, rubble cleared, and ground compacted in a manner consistent with construction rather than combat. The site sits at the intersection of two Israeli military corridors, deep inside the zone east of the so-called yellow line and is encircled by military outposts and security installations. Reconstruction here functions as spatial containment under a humanitarian pretext.

Trump-Kushner Plan

The Trump-Kushner plan constructs a new governing architecture through the Board of Peace. Positioned above existing multilateral institutions and chaired by Donald Trump, the Board is insulated from democratic accountability, international law, and Palestinian consent. Power flows through an inner Executive Board and a Gaza Executive Board populated by U.S. officials, Gulf ministers, financiers, real estate magnates, and former Western leaders closely aligned with Israeli security and regional normalization agendas. Palestinians are absent from these bodies.

Day-to-day administration is assigned to a thirteen-member Palestinian technocratic body called the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, or NCAG, tasked with restoring services and “stabilizing daily life.” In practice, the NCAG operates entirely under the authority of the Board of Peace and its subsidiary executive bodies, with no control over borders, security, or the terms of reconstruction. Its mandate is administrative, not political. The arrangement closely mirrors the role of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank: a service-delivery apparatus managing civilian life under external oversight rather than exercising self-determination.

Here, “reconstruction” functions as a legitimating language for a redesign of authority. The plan and its designers handle Gaza as underused space to be reworked through capital-intensive projects, with its political reality pushed aside.

The NCAG has since moved from a proposed administrative structure into an active, though still obstructed, transition process. In July 2026, Hamas announced that it was prepared to relinquish governing authority, and the head of its administration resigned in anticipation of a transfer to the committee. The NCAG, however, has yet to assume power. Israel has prevented its thirteen members from entering Gaza, leaving them based in Cairo and placing the timing and territorial scope of any handover under Israeli control.

The Board of Peace’s original plan for rebuilding all of Gaza has reportedly narrowed into a much smaller pilot project near Rafah. This project would create a temporary camp for a portion of Gaza’s displaced population, run by a Palestinian technocratic administration with vetted police and an International Stabilization Force. The plan remains stalled due to Israeli approvals, uncertain funding, and the unclear legal status of the security force. At the same time, Israel continues to block reconstruction, restrict aid, and expand control east of the ceasefire line. The model is partial by design and divides “recovery” into a limited pilot zone while leaving the rest of the population in a lower tier of humanitarian survival. 

GREAT Trust

The GREAT Trust, short for Gaza Reconstruction, Economic Acceleration, and Transformation, emerged in a leaked 38-page prospectus circulated in U.S. and Israeli policy circles. Developed by Israeli business figures with input from consultants linked to Boston Consulting Group and reviewed by institutions including the Tony Blair Institute, the proposal advances a trusteeship model of reconstruction.

From the outset, the proposal frames Gaza as a strategic liability, an “Iranian outpost” whose continued Palestinian political autonomy is cast as a threat to the Abrahamic or IMEC regional architecture. Reconstruction is justified as neutralization, aligning Gaza with a “New Abrahamic Architecture” oriented toward investor security, regional integration, and geopolitical containment rather than Palestinian self-governance.

The GREAT Trust is an investment prospectus with governing authority attached. Beneath its language of “transformation,” Gaza is treated as a postwar asset to be recapitalized, redesigned, and administered under a U.S.-led custodianship until Palestinians are deemed sufficiently “reformed,” “deradicalized,” and safe for incorporation into a new regional order. Its first move is already a political verdict: Gaza itself is the risk.

What distinguishes the proposal is its brazenness. Profiteering is built into the design. Success is measured through returns on investment, asset valuation, GDP multiples, and revenue streams across construction, security, ports, tourism, and data centers. Gaza’s devastation is reframed as an opportunity to convert “$0 today” into hundreds of billions in future value.

Displacement is integral to this logic. “Voluntary relocation” is treated as a cost-saving mechanism, with the proposal explicitly calculating savings “per Palestinian relocated” and suggesting that increased displacement reduces the Trust’s investment burden.

Its urban program translates this financial model into spatial form. References to Haussmann point to a spatial order built on separation, circulation, and control, with wide corridors, buffer zones, and road networks that break up space and manage movement.

The GREAT Trust remains dormant as a standalone plan, yet its core logic already circulates through the Board of Peace: trusteeship, investor-led redevelopment, securitized governance, and regional integration.

The CMCC materials and the Board of Peace pilot overlap in location, vetted residence, Palestinian policing, and international security, though their precise institutional relationship has not been publicly clarified. GREAT has not advanced independently, but its principles of trusteeship, investor-led redevelopment, and regional integration reappear within the Board of Peace framework.

Across these proposals, Gaza is rendered administratively collapsed, economically inert, and politically illegible. Reconstruction becomes the vehicle for geopolitical reordering and economic extraction, while sovereignty, return, and accountability are displaced by the language of efficiency, security, and market viability. Political claims rooted in history, dispossession, and rights are rendered unintelligible within this framework. What remains governable are flows: of people, capital, data, aid, and risk. What disappears in these plans is any sense that Gaza’s destruction demands political reckoning.

B. Stabilization Without Repair: Managerial Humanitarianism

RAND, UNDP, and the Arab Proposal are framed through the language of humanitarian recovery. Their authority rests in claims to neutrality, expertise, and managerial competence. By converting loss into quantifiable indicators, such as housing units destroyed, kilometers of road damaged, and service capacity lost, these frameworks make devastation legible to donors. 

RAND: From Camps to Communities

The RAND Corporation’s report From Camps to Communities: Post-Conflict Shelter in Gaza presents itself as a pragmatic response to unprecedented destruction. Grounded in comparative post-conflict cases and framed through urban planning expertise, it accepts prolonged displacement as a given and organizes reconstruction around the problem of managing civilian life during what it acknowledges will be decades of rebuilding. Its core intervention is spatial management: how to house, move, cluster, and gradually reassemble Gaza’s population under conditions of extended precarity.

RAND’s central claim is that large-scale interim shelter is unavoidable and that the task, therefore, is to design displacement “better.” The report warns, correctly, of the historical failures of refugee camps, drawing on Gaza’s own past and on cases from Jordan, Kenya, Iraq, and Syria to show how temporary solutions harden into permanent infrastructures of deprivation. In response, RAND advances a technocratic alternative: incremental urbanism. This approach blends tents, caravans, partial buildings, and community hubs into flexible spatial arrangements meant to preserve social ties, enable service delivery, and gradually transition displaced populations back into urban life.

To its credit, RAND departs from more fantastical reconstruction visions by foregrounding constraints. It is attentive to the everyday realities of living in Gaza and to what people can realistically rely on in the short to medium term. Yet its analytic horizon remains tightly circumscribed. Destruction is treated as a planning constraint rather than a political event demanding accountability. Displacement is reduced to a logistics problem, severed from the violence that produced it. RAND stresses “realistic timelines,” “pragmatic tradeoffs,” and “feasible governance arrangements,” but brackets the siege, military control, material restrictions, and absence of Palestinian sovereignty that make Gaza’s destruction ongoing.

UNDP’s Early Recovery Programme Proposal

The United Nations Development Programme’s Early Recovery Programme reflects the quintessential humanitarian-development template. It treats reconstruction as a logistical imperative: a matter of restoring functionality, delivering essential services, and managing risk. It frames Gaza’s future around stabilization, with repair limited to patching damage and restoring basic services, and timelines shaped by external priorities rather than local direction. Space appears as a technical surface, neutral, governable, and amenable to phased recovery, with little attention to the deeper violence inscribed within it.

It invokes the rhetoric of “Palestinian-led recovery” while assigning Palestinian institutions a constrained executor role within externally defined priorities. This move makes hierarchy palatable while obscuring political asymmetry. Co-authorship by institutions such as the Università Iuav di Venezia reinforces that logic, giving the appearance of technical expertise while diluting local authorship. The economic vision follows the same pattern: short-term employment through cash-for-work schemes and externally funded infrastructure projects, with no serious strategy for long-term local industry revival or material self-sufficiency. What emerges is a donor-led model that reproduces structural dependence while speaking in the language of recovery.

The Arab Proposal

The Arab Proposal invokes the scale of statecraft.[viii] Framed through intergovernmental cooperation, it projects reconstruction as a top-down act of regional benevolence, rebuilding Gaza through monumental infrastructure, ports, and capital-intensive public works. The proposal places Arab governments, particularly Egypt, at the center of coordination. It calls for a consortium of Arab states to lead reconstruction, supported by an international trust fund and executed through centralized planning bodies.

Presented as solidarity, it is equally a soft-power project: a way for regional states to assert influence, stabilize borders, and shape Gaza’s future without ceding real authority to Palestinians themselves. Participation functions as a legitimizing gesture, not a transfer of authority. Read through dependency theory, the proposal reproduces familiar hierarchies. Capital, expertise, and decision-making flow from the region’s core, particularly Gulf states, while Gaza is cast as a recipient economy rebuilt through externally managed investment rather than Palestinian economic sovereignty. The proposal retains regional diplomatic endorsement but has not developed into an integrated implementation mechanism. 

C. Counter-Planning Under Constraint

The Gaza Phoenix Plan

The Gaza Phoenix Plan works in a different register. It is not designed around donor endorsement, security approval, or phased implementation under current conditions. It operates as a form of refusal. Its political significance lies less in its technical completeness than in its insistence that reconstruction cannot be disentangled from return, memory, and Palestinian authorship.

Rather than treating Gaza as a tabula rasa to be reorganized, Gaza Phoenix begins from the premise of rebuilding in place. It rejects mass relocation, camps, and phased depopulation as acceptable starting points for recovery. Housing, neighborhoods, and public space are imagined as continuations of pre-destruction social life, not as substitutes for it. Memory is embedded into spatial logic itself, affirming that reconstruction must carry forward what has been targeted for erasure.

Central to this approach is the analytic of survivability. Gaza Phoenix centers the capacity to endure with dignity under conditions deliberately designed to exhaust life. Survivability here is a claim to social reproduction, collective presence, and spatial continuity despite siege. Planning becomes a means of sustaining political life, not merely biological survival.

The limits of this approach are real and should not be romanticized. Gaza Phoenix lacks guaranteed access to materials, formal governance authority, and protection under international law. Its refusal of donor-driven sequencing raises questions of scale, coordination, and vulnerability to interruption or criminalization. Under conditions of siege, counter-planning operates without the institutional shields that protect technocratic frameworks.

To evaluate Gaza Phoenix primarily through feasibility is to misread its function. Feasibility is a political filter that privileges plans aligned with existing power structures. Proposals that accept siege, fragmentation, and external control appear realistic, while those grounded in return and Palestinian authority are dismissed as utopian. As Nour Joudah argues, “Rebuilding does not begin with construction but with reclamation. The first step is to return. The first step is for people to be able to inhabit a space together again."[ix]

The Quiet Normalization of Non-Return

Across the reconstruction proposals examined in this article, the right of return is rarely denied outright. Instead, it is administered. This administrative deferral gives contemporary reconstruction frameworks much of their political power. Non-return is normalized through procedures, timelines, and spatial arrangements that render return perpetually impractical or conditional.

Time itself functions as a weapon in this normalization. Reconstruction timelines stretch return into an indefinite future: six months of early recovery, followed by multi-year reconstruction phases contingent on funding, security conditions, or political benchmarks. As return is deferred from the present to a hypothetical endpoint, its urgency dissipates. The longer displacement persists, the more it is absorbed into planning assumptions. Return is postponed until it loses political force.

By turning displacement into a planning problem, these frameworks and international organizations like the UN also suspend the moral and political questions that displacement raises. Justice is no longer urgent. Reconciliation is treated as something that can wait. As post-conflict scholars remind us, reconciliation and justice are foundational to postwar reconstruction, but only when they involve public acknowledgment of harm, truth-telling, and symbolic repair.[x]

Trauma-informed planning recognizes that people are rebuilding in the aftermath of harm, and that this shapes how they live, move, remember, and engage with space. In this context, it must reject liberal narratives of closure. It cannot impose reconciliatory tropes onto communities that have not seen accountability, redress, or cessation of harm. What is needed is a politicized form of healing, one that holds space for collective grief, centers community memory, and publicly names the structures of domination that make mourning, survival, and rebuilding simultaneously necessary and dangerous. Planning must remain sensitive to this temporality, refusing imposed deadlines of healing or closure and creating spaces that dignify mourning, recognize the impossibility of full recovery under siege, and assert the right to narrate and inhabit grief collectively and publicly. 

Rafah reopened in February 2026 after nearly two years, but only for limited pedestrian movement and only after Israeli and Egyptian security approval. Several forms of return are being restricted simultaneously: the re-entry of Palestinians who left Gaza during the war, the return of internally displaced people to homes and neighborhoods now behind military lines, and Gaza’s place within the wider Palestinian claim to return. These claims differ legally and historically, but contemporary reconstruction frameworks subject each of them to administrative delay, security screening, or spatial prohibition.

Reuters reported that approximately fifty Palestinians were expected to enter Gaza each day and a similar number to leave, even as an estimated 100,000 Palestinians who had fled during the war sought to return. Diplomats expected Israel to permit more departures than entries.[xi]The Washington Post reported that only about a dozen people crossed in each direction on the first day of Rafah’s reopening. Israeli authorities also informed UN officials that return would be limited to Palestinians who had left during the war and received prior Israeli security clearance.[xii] These eligibility rules, security screenings, restricted crossings, military corridors, and daily quotas place re-entry beyond the reach of most Palestinians seeking to return.

This selective regime operates alongside a renewed economy of paid exit. In April 2026, Al Manassa reported that non-medical travelers had resumed leaving Gaza through Hala Consulting and Tourism. One traveler said that he had paid $5,000 per adult and $2,500 per child through an agent in Cairo.[xiii] Movement under closure becomes a commodity: those able to pay may secure a route out, while return remains subject to Israeli approval and an opaque screening process. The Board of Peace’s current Rafah pilot extends the same logic. The proposed camp would accommodate only a small fraction of Gaza’s displaced population, with preference given to former residents of Rafah, inside a buffer zone governed through a technocratic administration, vetted Palestinian police, and an international security force.[xiv] The resulting regime permits exit selectively, filters re-entry, and leaves most displaced Palestinians outside the spaces being rebuilt.

Conclusion

Reconstruction in Gaza is being organized within an ongoing structure of siege, displacement, and territorial control. Across these proposals, rebuilding manages populations, sorts territory, and narrows the terms of political life. External boards, trusteeships, securitized zones, humanitarian sequencing, and donor-led recovery differ in form, yet each places Palestinian return, autonomy, and authorship under administrative control. When military power determines access to land, materials, aid, and movement, reconstruction helps decide which forms of destruction become permanent.

Counterinsurgency and disaster capitalism converge within this process. Security architecture and humanitarian management govern Palestinian life, while devastation opens Gaza to external investment, extraction, and territorial redesign. The result is a model in which aid sustains life at the bare minimum, return is thinned out through procedure, and temporary arrangements harden into lasting control.

What is being tested in Gaza will not remain there. Reconstruction under these conditions cannot be mistaken for peace. It is one of the terrains on which the struggle over Palestine is now being fought.