Arab Leaders To Meet For Postwar Gaza Future

Arab leaders are set to meet in Saudi Arabia on Friday for the first time to propose a response to US President Donald Trump’s plan for the US to take ownership of Gaza, expel its Palestinian population and turn it into a Middle Eastern “coastline.”

The meeting includes Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf Arab nations – will take place ahead of a larger Arab summit on March 4, Saudi Arabia said. A meeting of Islamic countries is expected to follow, according to the Egyptian foreign ministry.

Originally announced by Egypt in early February as an “emergency summit,” the gathering will take place five weeks after Trump first floated his plan, showing the struggle among Arab states to craft a unified stance.

A report published in Egypt’s state-run Al Ahram Weekly said Cairo was proposing a 10-to-20-year plan to rebuild Gaza with Gulf Arab funding, while excluding Hamas from governing the enclave and allowing its 2.1 million Palestinian residents to remain.

Al Ahram, citing Egyptian sources, said the plan has yet to secure the full support of Arab nations, who disagree on how Gaza should be governed. CNN has asked the Egyptian government for comment.

Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly on Wednesday claimed that his country could fully rebuild Gaza in three years to a state that is “better than it was before,” without saying how he plans to achieve that. If a permanent ceasefire is reached in Gaza in the coming months, that would mean the vision could be completed before the end of Trump’s presidential term.

The World Bank, the European Union and the United Nations said in a joint statement Tuesday that, according to their estimates, a return of essential services alone, including health, education, as well as the clearing of rubble, would take three years.

The full rebuilding of the devastated enclave would need 10 years and cost more than $50 billion, with housing alone estimated to cost $15 billion. The Egyptian prime minister said that his country’s plan takes those assessments into consideration.

Meanwhile, the Egyptian government and real estate developers in the country have been eyeing a role in the rebuilding process, which could come with contracts worth billions of dollars.

“We have experience, and we have applied it (before) in Egypt,” Madbouly said in a news conference in Egypt’s new administrative capital. “The capability to rebuild the (Gaza) Strip and executing it in way that will make it better than it was before the destruction – truly three years is an acceptable timeline to do this.”

Trump said on Wednesday that he had not yet seen the Egyptian plan.

Despite urgency from Arab countries to present Trump with a convincing counterproposal, rebuilding Gaza is a “long and complex” journey, the World Bank, EU and UN said.

CNN/Ejiofor Ezeifeoma