World
India
As the ceasefire in Gaza enters its last phase with Israel receiving the remains of four deceased hostages through the Red Cross, leaders in the Arab world are scrambling to finalise a response to President Donald Trump’s plans for the U.S. to take ownership of Gaza and turn the strip into a MidEast ‘Riviera’.
Key players in the region – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar – will partake the crucial meeting which will likely happen ahead of a larger summit scheduled for March 4 this year, foreign media reports suggest.
So far, there seems to be no consensus among the Gulf nations on the issue with reports of Arab states struggling to present a unified stance coming to the fore.
Cairo is believed to be proposing a 10 to 20 year-long plan for reconstrution of Gaza with Gulf Arab funding, even as assessments by foreign aid agencies and world bank suggest that rebuilding the enclave would take much longer.
Egypt’s state-run newspaper Al Ahram Weekly has reported that Cairo plans to exclude the Hamas from governing Gaza and is aiming for allowing over two million Palestinians residing there to remain in the territory.
Arab nations, however, are seemingly divided on how Gaza should be governed, and consequently Egypt’s plans are yet to gain complete support of the leaders, the report in Al Ahram said, citing Egyptian sources.
According to CNN, Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly suggested earlier this week that Gaza could be restored to its glory as he claimed that Cairo could rebuild the strip in three years to a state that is “better than it was before”.
Madbouly, however, did not provide any details on how his country plans to achieve the ambitious goal.
If a permanent ceasefire in Gaza is agreed upon in the coming months, then it could pave way for the Arab vision to be realised and Egypt’s plans to be completed before Trump’s presidential term comes to an end.
According to estimates by the EU, the UN and the World Bank, a return of essential services (including healthcare and education) alone in Gaza would take three years.
The full reconstruction of the devastated territory, however, would require at least 10 years with the estimated costs of rebuilding expected to exceed $50 billion.
Madbouly has said that Egypt’s plan takes those assessments into consideration.
The Only Plan That I Think Can Work: Netanyahu
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, has stressed that he believes the plan presented by Trump is the only plan that can work to enable a different future for the people of Gaza, Israel and the surrounding areas even as he termed the plan “right on the dot.”
In his address at the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations earlier this week, Netanyahu said Israel’s “greatest friend” is in the White House and he and Trump see eye to eye on the main tasks that they want to achieve and are in the position to change the Middle East.
“We are in a position to change the Middle East and give Israel the kind of horizon, the kind of hope, the kind of security, and the kind of peace that would have been unimaginable, and in fact was unimaginable from the day of the founding of the State of Israel. We’ve had great victories in the past”, Netanyahu had said.
Stressing that the people who want to leave Gaza should be allowed to do so, the Israeli PM mentioned that 150,000 people have left Gaza over the last couple of years, adding that Israel tries to get the people get out of the harm’s way while the Hamas with rifles and gunfire tried to prevent them from leaving.
ALSO READ: Israel On High Alert After Multiple Buses Explode In Suspected Terror Attack
