Middle East and North Africa

Ali Abdel Hamid Shaath, Gaza’s new administrator under the Trump administration’s 20-point peace plan for the region, plans to push the debris spread across Gaza into the Mediterranean Sea. That would create more space for Gazans who were squeezed in a tiny strip of land even before the war.

“If I brought bulldozers and pushed the rubble into the sea,” he has said, “I can win new land for Gaza and at the same time clear the rubble. This won’t take more than three years.”

Ali Abdel Hamid Shaath, Gaza’s new administrator under the Trump administration’s 20-point peace plan for the region, plans to push the debris spread across Gaza into the Mediterranean Sea. That would create more space for Gazans who were squeezed in a tiny strip of land even before the war.

“If I brought bulldozers and pushed the rubble into the sea,” he has said, “I can win new land for Gaza and at the same time clear the rubble. This won’t take more than three years.”

In many ways, Shaath is the perfect man to lead the U.S.-appointed National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG). Born in 1958 in Khan Younis, Gaza, he is a trained civil engineer who studied engineering in Cairo and Belfast and later served as deputy minister of planning and minister of transport and communication in the Palestinian Authority (PA) government. He knows his way around Palestinian bureaucracy and its international donors and earned his stripes as a civic administrator.

He also understands international financing and is advertised on the NCAG website as someone who can “manage complex multi-million-dollar budgets, and build high-level partnerships with governments, development banks, and private investors.” Shaath has already met the envoy of the biggest donor community, the European Union. A former Israeli security official who spoke with Foreign Policy said Shaath was vetted before his name was made official as NCAG chief.

“We are Palestinian minds, not weapons,” Shaath said in January about a team of a dozen NCAG members tasked with running Gaza’s interim governance.

In short, Shaath could usher in infrastructural recovery and economic development for the sake of Palestinians, but he is also acceptable to Israel, and—as an efficient economic operator—is handy for U.S. President Donald Trump’s vision of economic peace in the region. Trump envisions economic well-being........

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