Neville Teller
The Arab League held a summit in Cairo on March 4 with the sole intention of considering a comprehensive plan for Gaza’s future, master-minded by Egypt. Costed at some $53bn, it focuses in a 112-page document on emergency relief, rebuilding shattered infrastructure and long-term economic development. The conference endorsed the plan, as far as it went. The later stages will require more detailed consideration.
It was on February 4 that US President Donald Trump announced his proposal to turn the Gaza Strip into a US-run “Riviera of the Middle East”, having first evacuated the population to any nearby Arab states willing to accept a total of some 2 million people.
The Arab world, as well as much of the rest of the globe, greeted the idea with a mixture of astonishment and ridicule. Some commentators, claiming to know Trump’s methods, maintained that he had deliberately used shock tactics to goad the Arab world into playing a more active role in considering Gaza’s future and how to achieve it.
If this was indeed the method in Trump’s madness, it produced results. A couple of weeks later, on February 17, news media worldwide reported that Egypt was preparing an alternative to Trump’s proposal in which evacuating the territory and relocating the Gazan population would play no part.
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