RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Arab countries have finally come up with a plan for the Gaza Strip that aims to address the humanitarian crisis, restore essential services and rebuild. The $53 billion plan, announced in early March after an extraordinary meeting of the Arab League in the Egyptian capital of Cairo, did not come out of a genuine desire to help the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, but as a counterproposal to US President Donald Trump’s vision of relocating the residents of Gaza and turning it into the Rivera of the Middle East.

If the Arab leaders really wanted to assist the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, they would have held a meeting immediately after the Hamas-Israel war, which erupted on October 7, 2023, when the Iran-backed Islamist group and thousands of ordinary Palestinians invaded Israel, slaughtering 1,200 Israelis and wounding thousands. Another 251 Israelis were kidnapped into the Gaza Strip, where 59 – alive and dead – are still being held as hostages.

It took the leaders of Arab states 18 months to hold a summit to discuss a plan for the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. The only reason they met was because of Trump’s plan, according to which Egypt, Jordan and other Arab countries would absorb Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. The Arab leaders have rejected the idea of receiving Palestinians in their countries on the clear pretext that such a move would be seen as helping in their permanent displacement.

The truth, however, is that most of the Arab countries have always refused to receive Palestinians. Most Arabs view the Palestinians as ungrateful. The turning point in Arab-Palestinian relations occurred in 1990, when Palestinians supported Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait – a country that had provided residency and employment to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. When Kuwait was liberated a year later by the US-led coalition, the Kuwaitis and other Gulf states responded by deporting most of them.

Since then, the Palestinians have been almost entirely dependent on financial aid from the US and the European Union. All they have seen from their Arab brothers, apart from Qatar, are empty promises of financial aid and rhetorical support.

Qatar has funded every Islamist extremist group from the Muslim Brotherhood to the Taliban to Al Qaeda, both with donations and through its broadcasting empire Al Jazeera. Qatar was the only Arab country that provided direct financial aid to the Hamas-rulers of the Gaza Strip over the past two decades. The Qataris did not do so out of love for the Palestinians, but to ensure that Hamas remains in power, in order to eliminate Israel and replace it with an Islamic state. October 7, 2023 was the result. Now Qatar is negotiating to preserve its client, Hamas.

The latest Arab plan does not even include a commitment from the Arab regimes to contribute to the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. Instead, it states that the sources of funding would come from the United Nations, international financial institutions, and donor countries, as well as foreign direct investments and private sector contributions.

The Arab plan, notably, also does not call on Hamas to lay down its weapons. Do the Arab leaders really believe that Western donors would rush to invest tens of billions of dollars in the Gaza Strip while terrorists belonging to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other groups continue to roam the streets? Allowing Hamas to maintain its military capabilities means that it is only a matter of time before the terrorist group launches more massacres against Israelis, as its own leaders have vowed.

MEMRI reported on November 1, 2023:

“Ghazi Hamad of the Hamas political bureau said in an October 24, 2023 show on LBC TV (Lebanon) that Hamas is prepared to repeat the October 7 ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ Operation [October 7 attack,] time and again until Israel is annihilated.”

Hamad stated:

“Israel is a country that has no place on our land. We must remove that country… The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth… “

Hussein Abdul Hussein, a research fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote on March 4, 2024:

“The Arab plan for Gaza is dead on arrival. It does not demand the disarmament of Hamas, the biggest hurdle to any post-war plan, and puts disarmament of Palestinian terrorist groups after the sought-after creation of a Palestinian state — which is contrary to how the two-state solution was conceived decades ago.”

The Arab plan also invites the Palestinian Authority (PA) to return to the Gaza Strip to govern it instead of Hamas. The Arab leaders seem to have forgotten that between 1994 and 2007, the PA had already governed the Gaza Strip, before they were violently overthrown by Hamas. When they were in control of Gaza, PA security forces did nothing to crack down on Hamas or prevent it from manufacturing and smuggling weapons. The assumption that the PA would be able to rein in the terrorists without the prior disarmament of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other armed groups, is false.

Hamas, in the meantime, has repeatedly emphasized that it has no intention of laying down its weapons. Recently, Hamas leader Sami Abu Zuhri warned that disarming is out of the question for his group and other Palestinian terrorist factions. “Any talk about the resistance’s weapons is nonsense,” he said. “The resistance’s weapons are a red line for Hamas and all resistance factions.”

For Hamas, holding onto its weapons is far more important than rebuilding the Gaza Strip.

For the Arab countries, the new plan just another attempt to avoid responsibility towards their Palestinian brothers and shift the blame onto Israel.

The Arab leaders did not even bother to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre of Israelis or hold the terrorist group fully responsible for initiating a war that has brought death and destruction on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

The Arab leaders, as pointed out by Dalia Ziada, an Egyptian political analyst, chose to vilify Israel rather than develop a practical roadmap for Gaza’s future:

“The Arab League’s emergency summit on Gaza on March 4, 2025, was never about the future of Gaza, but about the Arabs’ Gaza dilemma and the interplay between Arabs, the United States, and Europe. The emergency summit, organized by Egypt in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s Gaza-Riviera statements, was a carefully staged political maneuver designed to whitewash the hands of Arab leaders from their responsibility to shelter Gazans and gaslight the international community into believing that a viable solution is possible for the chronic Gaza crisis, which is the most aching core of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, without addressing the crux of the problem – Hamas….

“The reality is that the Arab emergency summit was also about demonizing Israel and throwing the Gaza hot potato into its court. A closer look at the summit’s final statement reveals its true purpose: attacking Israel rather than addressing Gaza’s future. For example, Article 18 of the summit’s Cairo Declaration proposes forming a legal committee to classify Israel’s military actions, and the U.S. calls for ‘displacement of Gazans’ as acts of genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention.

“Playing the ‘genocide’ card once again was a cynical attempt by Arabs to weaponize international law against Israel and, this time, against the United States too. They purposefully ignored the fact that Hamas deliberately embedded its military infrastructure within civilian areas and purposefully used the people of Gaza as human shields….

This focus on vilifying Israel rather than developing a practical roadmap for Gaza’s future is precisely why the Arab League summit failed. Rather than offering real solutions, Arab leaders reverted to their old strategy of using Gaza as a diplomatic tool against Israel and the West. This approach does nothing to help the Palestinian people and only ensures that the conflict continues indefinitely….

“Until Hamas is removed, every so-called ‘peace plan’ will be nothing more than another chapter in an endless cycle of destruction.”

Khaled Abu Toameh is an award-winning journalist based in Jerusalem.