The Arab Plan to Save Gaza Has One Major Flaw

The highly anticipated Egypt-drafted plan endorsed by Arab powers as a counterproposal to President Donald Trump’s calls for the expulsion of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip outlines a new pathway to peace, reconstruction and eventual Palestinian statehood that excludes Hamas from power.

But there’s one major flaw, according to Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank and a Gaza native who reviewed the 106-page document firsthand. It never actually mentions Hamas.

“You have the word ‘administrative,’ you have the word ‘reconstruct.’ It uses words like ‘genocide.’ It uses words like ‘ethnic cleansing.’ It uses all these sharp words for Israel and that’s typical of diplomacy, if you will,” Alkhatib told Newsweek. “But if you look at the actual language, the actual verbiage for Hamas, there’s nothing.”

He argued that the plan, which otherwise constituted a “nice vision for rebuilding Gaza,” did debut two points that could prove useful in advancing negotiations toward a lasting peace in Gaza after 16 months of conflict.

These include the formation of an administrative committee of independent Palestinians to temporarily lead the territory until ostensibly handing power to a reformed Palestinian National Authority (PA). It also discusses the deployment of an international peacekeeping force not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank, where the PA currently leads in limited fashion, increasingly isolated from Hamas-led Gaza.

Yet empowering independent Palestinians to take the reins from Hamas in Gaza may prove difficult, Alkhatib said, “if Arabs from afar aren’t even willing to talk about Hamas.”

Newsweek has reached out to Hamas and the Israeli Consulate General in New York for comment.

Hamas has been in control of Gaza since seizing the territory amid a violent split with the PA’s top Fatah faction in 2007. A year earlier, in the wake of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas came out with the highest share of votes in the last Palestinian elections to ever be held, but Fatah refused to participate in the short-lived unity government and soaring tensions devolved into clashes in which Hamas also emerged victorious.

Since then, Hamas has previously signaled that it would be willing to cede power in Gaza, but only in the event that a new unified government was chosen by Palestinians. Hamas and Fatah agreed to similar terms in 2017, but negotiations again soon unraveled.

One senior Hamas leader recently told Newsweek that there were two paths through which the group would hand over power.

“We are ready to leave the administration of Gaza to any national unity government that represents all Palestinians, not necessarily politically, and with specific tasks, which are reconstruction, the unification of institutions and the preparation for elections to reform the Palestinian political system,” the senior Hamas leader said.

“Or we can go with the Egyptian option, which is to form a special body for the Gaza Strip of technocratic professionals who represent all the sons of the Palestinian people, not necessarily the factions, to manage the affairs of the Gaza Strip,” the senior Hamas official added. “Therefore, remaining in power is not a goal for Hamas, but Hamas will not leave the Gaza Strip to chaos and tampering.”

The latter plan appears to more closely mirror the current proposal put forth by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi and also endorsed Tuesday by the king of Jordan, the emir of Qatar, the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, the vice president of the United Arab Emirates and other representatives of Arab League states at an emergency summit in Cairo.

The urgent gathering and the timely rollout of the plan was largely a reaction to Trump’s drastic shift on U.S. policy toward the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The U.S. leader who has taken credit for the ceasefire deal first outlined by his predecessor in May 2023 and later adopted just days before his inauguration has proposed not only transferring Gaza’s 2 million residents to “beautiful communities” elsewhere, but also the U.S. assuming direct control of the devastated territory. The end goal would be to transform Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East,” a vision advertised in a tongue-in-cheek AI-generated video released by Trump last week.

Trump’s approach has generated substantial controversy and condemnation throughout the Arab world, but it has also garnered some support in Israel, particularly among far-right factions crucial to Netanyahu’s ruling coalition. Furthermore, Trump has said he told the Israeli premier, “You do whatever you want,” as it relates to whether or not to maintain the ceasefire or resume the war.

Negotiations toward phase two of the ceasefire agreement have yet to commence and Netanyahu has warned he was prepared to restart operations in Gaza if Hamas did not continue to release hostages. Of the roughly 251 people taken captive during Hamas’ October 2023 attack, nearly 50 are believed to remain in the group’s hands, the majority of which are believed to be dead.

While Netanyahu has yet to officially react to the new Arab proposal, Alkhatib felt the omission of Hamas could prove a nonstarter for Israel, which has also voiced opposition toward allowing the PA to rule in Gaza.

“[Netanyahu and his government] want to have the sole security purview over Gaza, so they’re already highly suspicious of the Egyptians, the Arabs, of anything other than the Israelis,” Alkhatib said. “So, to come up with a plan that doesn’t address Hamas, I think, just further feeds their paranoia that ‘We can’t trust anyone, we can only and exclusively engage with ourselves and the Americans to basically give us a blank check to do whatever we want,’ and that the Arabs and the Palestinian Authority will never be in a position to be of security assistance.”

On the other hand, Alkhatib felt there may more of a chance to win over Trump, who despite being likely “to defer to the Israelis,” also may also “look to this as an opportunity to engage the Saudis” at a time when the White House was looking to build upon its Abraham Accords legacy. His negotiating team, including Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, could also use the plan as a vehicle for maintaining the kind of calm Trump has promised for the region.

“That might be the play here,” Alkhatib said, “to say, ‘This plan right here gives us enough cover to say this is how we’re going to reconstruct Gaza, this is how we’re going to end the war and this is how we’re going to get more hostages brought back until we make it to phase three,’ which might actually end up being where the war resolves.”

The stakes for the plan are particularly high, however, not only for the sake of ending the longest and deadliest clash of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to date, but also for determining whether or not the two-state solution remains a viable path forward after decades of frustrated diplomacy.

“I absolutely think that this plan, tactically speaking, may be the last attempt to stabilize what remains of the Palestinian people on their land, what remains of the Palestinians territories, what remains of the Palestinian Authority, such that we could even keep talk of the two-state solution alive,” Alkhatib said.

Should it fail, he said, “I think it really is the end of any real connectivity between Gaza and the West Bank, I think it’s the end of any real dominion that the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority will have over the Gaza Strip and the beginning of a long, drawn-out battle of attrition and counterinsurgency campaign by the IDF against Hamas that will inevitably start either now or, if some of this is in a token manner adopted, after the end of phase two.”