The Infrastructure Realities Of Trump’s Riviera Dream

TOPSHOT – Palestinian Hamas fighters escort Israeli hostages (L-R, holding certificates) Ohad Ben Ami, Eli Sharabi and Or Levy on a stage before handing them over to a Red Cross team in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, on February 8, 2025, as part of the fifth hostage-prisoner exchange of a fragile ceasefire. The release of hostages may have motivated a large part of previous political discourse, but their release is not sufficient alone to move forward with reconstruction.

AFP via Getty Images

The vision for a rebuilt Gaza that Jared Kushner unveiled at the World Economic Forum in Davos this January is nothing if not audacious. A “New Gaza,” defined by skyscrapers and high-tech data centers, aims to replace a century of terrorism and wars — and grievance politics with the promise and logic of the free market.

As one who lived in the Middle East many years, I recognize the strategic imperative: shifting Gaza from a black hole of aid dependency to a self-sustaining economic engine is the only way out for the world that has seen so much blood and aid money disappear into its sands. The people of Gaza, many of whom are now living in tents or overcrowded apartments after two years of war triggered by the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, deserve better.

Sadly, ambitious PowerPoint slides don’t pump sewage or keep the lights on.

Energy Infrastructure In Gaza

Before the first ribbon is cut on the first Gaza Hilton, we have to face this grim reality: the enclave’s core utilities are nonexistent. After years of brutal conflict, the U.N. claims, satellite imagery confirms that over 80% of Gaza’s structures are damaged or destroyed – and that’s without taking into account that many of the standing structures may conceal the miles of tunnels that Hamas built as their base for urban warfare in the Strip, as well as buildings still standing that Hamas likely boobytrapped.

You cannot build a “Singapore on the Med” without Singapore-quality infrastructure.

Without a reliable power grid and clean water, those gleaming towers will become white elephants, and the promised tourism will never materialize. The financial costs are staggering. The UN, World Bank, and EU peg total reconstruction costs at approximately $50-70 billion, with the early phases — clearance of over 60 million tons of debris and demining —requiring billions immediately.

President Trump’s ambitious Board of Peace — chaired by the President himself and featuring heavy hitters like Kushner, Marco Rubio, and Tony Blair — is a bold attempt to sideline the U.N. and bypass traditional, sluggish multilateralism. However, Qatar, Russia, Pakistan, Turkey, and Israel in one room are hardly a prescription for consensus and success.

The hefty “$1 billion buy-in” for board seats signals the high cost of an entry ticket, but geopolitical friction will be a feature, not a bug, of the process, even with the players paying in.

Energy infrastructure provides a critical leverage point, but it is no silver bullet. The Gaza Marine offshore field holds roughly 30 billion cubic meters of natural gas — enough to power local needs but yielding only a modest $4 billion in revenue over 15 years. his falls far short of the $70 billion reconstruction tab.

To truly power a modern metropolis, Gaza will need a massive, stable electricity baseload that currently doesn’t exist, and with Hamas still in place Israel cannot be expected to provide electricity for free as it did before October 7. This means enough security needed to eliminate political risks for building natural gas-powered generation capacity and potentially building a massive solar array in Sinai with Egyptian cooperation. Exploring new “hard power” infrastructure, such as branching a gas pipeline from Israel, or an oil pipelines from Saudi Arabia via the Eilat-Ashkelon route for local residential and industry uses may come later.

Furthermore, the “New Gaza” vision assumes a level of security for which we can only pray. Hamas’s ideological DNA is hardwired to reject any peace and to obsess about destroying Israel. Qatar and Turkey are both supportive of the terrorist, Muslim Brotherhood-inspired organization.

Unless we see full disarmament, as envisaged in the Trump Plan’s Phase II, and a total exit of the Hamas leadership from Gaza, private investors — particularly in the sensitive energy and technology sectors — likely won’t touch Gaza with a ten-foot pole. The White House’s U.S.-centric design for the Board of Peace risks a stalemate if traditional international players feel sidelined or if adversaries use their influence to act as spoilers.

The entrenched U.N. refugee status framework perpetuated by UNRWA also presents a formidable hurdle. For decades, the “right of return” has been the third rail of Palestinian politics. A permanent, $70 billion reconstruction deal for Gaza should imply abandoning historic claims to the whole of Israel (and the “dhimmization”, deportation or elimination of its Jews and Christians) that no Palestinian leader has yet dared to sign off on. Without resolving this in favor of a willingness to look forward and move on, even a plan to build the most beautiful of new cities risks being rejected by Hamas, the Palestinian “street”, and possibly the Palestinian Autonomy. And, if that happens, the next war in Gaza is not a matter of if, but when, putting the investments this reconstruction project will entail in harm’s way.

Finally, we must consider the longevity of this American-led initiative. The Board of Peace is a quintessentially “Trumpian” vehicle — transactional, high-stakes, and personality-driven. Can it survive a change in the U.S. administration? Will it maintain focus on unglamorous basics like sewage and power grids once the headline-grabbing skyscraper announcements fade?

Realism requires a strict sequence: security, water, food, electricity, healthcare, and transport come first. The only way to realize the Davos vision is through the engineering realities of disarming Hamas, demining, destroying tunnels, and replacing them with pipelines, power stations, and electric grids. Only when the unglamorous foundations are secured through pragmatic policy, ample funding, international expertise, and a genuine Palestinian commitment to peace can the “New Gaza” move from an aspirational PowerPoint presentation to a tangible path toward stability and prosperity. Anything less is just a dream built on sand.