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josh paul
Trump Admin Circulating Plan to Transform Depopulated Gaza Into High-Tech Cash Cow
Under the proposal, the US would take control after "voluntary" relocation of Palestinians from the strip, where proposed projects include an Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone and Gaza Trump Riviera & Islands.
Sep 01, 2025
The White House is "circulating" a plan to transform a substantially depopulated Gaza into US President Donald Trump's vision of a high-tech "Riviera of the Middle East" brimming with private investment and replete with artificial intelligence-powered "smart cities."
That's according a 38-page prospectus for a proposed Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration, and Transformation (GREAT) Trust obtained by The Washington Post and published in a report on Sunday. Parts of the proposal were previously reported by the Financial Times.
"Gaza can transform into a Mediterranean hub for manufacturing, trade, data, and tourism, benefiting from its strategic location, access to markets... resources, and a young workforce all supported by Israeli tech and [Gulf Cooperation Council] investments," the prospectus states.
However, to journalist Hala Jaber, the plan amounts to "genocide packaged as real estate."
Here comes the Gaza Network State.A plan to turn Gaza into a privately-developed “gleaming tourism resort and high-tech manufacturing and technology hub” with “AI-powered smart cities” and “Trump Riviera” resortgift link:wapo.st/4g2eATo
[image or embed]
— Gil Durán (@gilduran.com) August 31, 2025 at 10:18 AM
The GREAT Trust was drafted by some of the same Israelis behind the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), whose aid distribution points in Gaza have been the sites of deliberate massacres and other incidents in which thousands of aid-seeking Palestinians have been killed or wounded.
According to the Post, financial modeling for the GREAT Trust proposal "was done by a team working at the time for the Boston Consulting Group"—which played a key role in creating GHF. BCG told the Post that the firm did not approve work on the trust plan, and that two senior partners who led the financial modeling were subsequently terminated.
The GREAT Trust envisions "a US-led multirlateral custodianship" lasting a decade or longer and leading to "a reformed Palestinian self-governance after Gaza is "demilitarized and de-radicalized."
Josh Paul—a former US State Department official who resigned in October 2023 over the Biden administration's decision to sell more arms to Israel as it waged a war on Gaza increasingly viewed by experts as genocidal—told Democracy Now! last week that Trump's plan for Gaza is "essentially a new form of colonialism, a transition from Israeli colonialism to corporate" colonialism.
The GREAT Trust contains two proposals for Gaza's more than 2 million Palestinians. Under one plan, approximately 75% of Gaza's population would remain in the strip during its transformation. The second proposal involves up to 500,000 Gazans relocating to third countries, 75% of them permanently.
The prospectus does not say how many Palestinians would leave Gaza under the relocation option. Those who choose to permanently relocate to other unspecified countries would each receive $5,000 plus four years of subsidized rent and subsidized food for a year.
The GREAT Trust allocates $6 billion for temporary housing for Palestinians who remain in Gaza and $5 billion for those who relocate.
The proposal projects huge profits for investors—nearly four times the return on investment and annual revenue of $4.5 billion within a decade. The project would be a boon for companies ranging from builders including Saudi bin Laden Group, infrastructure specialists like IKEA, the mercenary firm Academi (formerly Blackwater), US military contractor CACI—which last year was found liable for torturing Iraqis at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison—electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, tech firms such as Amazon, and hoteliers Mandarin Oriental and IHG Hotels and Resorts.
Central to the plan are 10 "megaprojects," including half a dozen "smart cities," a regional logistics hub to be build over the ruins of the southern city of Rafah, a central highway named after Saudi Crown Prime Mohammed bin Salman—Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Gulf states feature prominently in the proposal as investors—large-scale solar and desalinization plants, a US data safe haven, an "Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone," and "Gaza Trump Riviera & Islands" similar to the Palm Islands in Dubai.
In addition to "massive" financial gains for private US investors, the GREAT Trust lists strategic benefits for the United States that would enable it to "strengthen" its "hold in the east Mediterranean and secure US industry access to $1.3 trillion of rare-earth minerals from the Gulf."
Earlier this year, Trump said the US would "take over" Gaza, American real estate developers would "level it out" and build the "Riviera of the Middle East" atop its ruins after Palestinians—"all of them"—leave Palestine's coastal exclave. The president called for the "voluntary" transfer of Gazans to Egypt and Jordan, both of whose leaders vehemently rejected the plan.
"Voluntary emigration" is widely considered a euphemism for ethnic cleansing, given Palestinians' general unwillingness to leave their homeland.
According to a May survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, nearly half of Gazans expressed a willingness to apply for Israeli assistance to relocate to other countries. However, many Gazans say they would never leave the strip, where most inhabitants are descendants of survivors of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Palestinians during the creation of Israel in 1948. Some are actual Nakba survivors.
"I'm staying in a partially destroyed house in Khan Younis now," one Gazan man told the Post. "But we could renovate. I refuse to be made to go to another country, Muslim or not. This is my homeland."
The Post report follows a meeting last Wednesday at the White House, where Trump, senior administration officials, and invited guests including former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, investor and real estate developer Jared Kushner—who is also the president's son-in-law—and Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer discussed Gaza's future.
While Dermer reportedly claimed that Israel does not seek to permanently occupy Gaza, Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes including murder and forced starvation in Gaza—have said they will conquer the entire strip and keep at least large parts of it.
"We conquer, cleanse, and stay until Hamas is destroyed," Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently said. "On the way, we annihilate everything that still remains."
The Israel Knesset also recently hosted a conference called "The Gaza Riviera–from vision to reality" where participants openly discussed the occupation and ethnic cleansing of the strip.
The publication of the GREAT Trust comes as Israeli forces push deeper into Gaza City amid a growing engineered famine that has killed at least hundreds of Palestinians and is starving hundreds of thousands of more. Israel's 696-day assault and siege on Gaza has left at least 233,200 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing, according to the Gaza Health Ministry—whose casualty figures are seen as a likely undercount by experts.
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In 60 Minutes Interview, Ex-State Dept. Officials Spotlight US Complicity in Gaza Assault
"There is a linkage between every single bomb that is dropped in Gaza and the U.S.," said one former official.
Jan 13, 2025
In a Sunday interview with 60 Minutes, former State Department officials spoke with journalist Cecilia Vega and offered a window into how the United States has greased the wheels of carnage in Gaza.
Hala Rharrit, an American diplomat who spent 18 years working on human rights and counterterrorism in the Middle East and elsewhere, left her post last spring—becoming the first State Department diplomat to publicly resign over the Biden administration's policies backing Israel's siege on Gaza, according to Democracy Now!.
Rharrit would send daily reports to senior leadership in Washington containing "gruesome images and her warnings," according to 60 Minutes. "I would show the complicity that was indisputable. Fragments of U.S. bombs next to massacres of... mostly children," Rharrit recounted.
Here's what else Rharrit had to say:
Cecilia Vega: When you tried to speak out, vocalize what you saw.... like you were told to shut up?
Hala Rharrit: Yes. I would show images of children that were starved to death. In one incident, I was basically berated, "Don't put that image in there. We don't wanna see it. We don't wanna see that the children are starving to death."
Cecilia Vega: Who told you that?
Hala Rharrit: A colleague.
The United States has offered largely unchecked support for Israel since Hamas fighters attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, prompting Israel to launch attacks on the Gaza Strip. The U.S. has provided Israel with at least $17.9 billion in military aid to its ally in the Middle East, and in early January the State Department informed Congress of a planned $8 billion arms sale. Local health officials in Gaza say the death toll in the enclave stands at over 46,000. However, a recently published peer-reviewed analysis estimates that Israel's assault on Gaza had actually killed 64,260 people between October 7, 2023 and June 30, 2024—a figure significantly higher than the one reported by the enclave's health ministry.
Meanwhile, multiple human rights organizations have said that Israel's conduct in Gaza constitutes genocide or acts of genocide.
60 Minutes tallies that 13 officials in the White House, Army, and State Department have publicly resigned in protest.
"There is a linkage between every single bomb that is dropped in Gaza and the U.S. because every single bomb that is dropped is dropped from an American-made plane," Josh Paul, a former director in the State Department's Bureau of Political - Military Affairs who resigned shortly after October 7, told 60 Minutes.
"After October 7th, there was no space for debate or discussion. I was part of email chains where there were very clear directions saying, 'Here are the latest requests from Israel. These need to be approved by 3:00 pm,'" said Paul, who was involved in signing off on U.S. security assistance to other countries.
Andrew Miller, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli-Palestinian affairs, resigned last June to spend more time with his family, but has since gone public with concerns about U.S.'s role in the war—the highest ranking official to do so thus far, according to 60 Minutes.
In reference to 2,000-pound bombs that the U.S. has supplied to Israel, Miller said that "the Israelis were using those bombs in some instances to target one or two individuals in densely packed areas. And in enough instances, we saw that was in question, how Israel was using it. And those weapons were suspended."
The U.S. suspended a shipment of 2,000 pound bombs to Israel in spring 2024, though in general weapons have continued to flow.
Reacting to Miller’s comments that Israel bombed densely packed areas, one observer wrote Sunday: “60 Minutes is finally exposing the supply chain of genocide.”
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'Morally Bankrupt' Biden Blasted for $8 Billion More in Arms to Israel Amid Gaza Genocide
"The Biden administration is ending its tenure as it has acted throughout it," said A New Policy co-founder Josh Paul, "with a complete disregard for Palestinian humanity, American laws, and American interests."
Jan 06, 2025
Human rights advocates in the United States and around the world on Monday condemned outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden for continuing to fuel Israel's genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip with a pending $8 billion weapons package.
Since
Axois revealed late Friday that his administration had notified Congress of the deal, Biden has faced a fresh flood of outrage, with critics calling the president "morally bankrupt" and his decision to keep arming Israel "willful madness."
"Too many kids still alive in Gaza for Joe Biden's liking," Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian American political analyst,
said on social media. "This is an administration of cowards and criminals and will go down as a historic worst."
Two men who resigned from the Biden administration over U.S. support for Israel's assault on Gaza—which has
killed at least 45,854 Palestinians and led to a genocide case at the International Court of Justice—shared sharp critiques on Monday.
"The Biden administration is ending its tenure as it has acted throughout it," said ex-U.S. State Department official Josh Paul, "with a complete disregard for Palestinian humanity, American laws, and American interests."
"The precedent set by the Biden administration will surely haunt our nation for many years to come."
Paul and former Education Department official Tariq Habash launched the lobbying group A New Policy in October. Habash also took aim at Biden's new effort to arm Israel with missiles for fighter jets and attack helicopters, 155 mm artillery shells, small-diameter bombs, 50-pound warheads, bomb fuzes, and kits used to convert "dumb bombs" into precision-guided munitions.
"Americans continue to struggle here at home, so the notion that the Biden administration would push another $8 billion in weapons to Israel on the backs of American [taxpayers] demonstrates how unmoored this administration has become from its values and its commitments to the American people," said Habash. "The precedent set by the Biden administration will surely haunt our nation for many years to come."
Win Without War executive director Sara Haghdoosti also denounced the effort, saying in a Monday statement that "these weapon sales won't bring hostages home and don't get us closer to a viable long-term solution that ensures Israelis and Palestinians can live with dignity without the threat of violence."
"Many of the types of weapons reported to be part of this $8 billion package have been used—or are likely to be used—to kill and wound Palestinian civilians in Gaza, in a war that drags on because the president and his advisers refused to exercise real leverage to end it," she noted. "This new tranche of weapons will surely be used to the same horrific ends."
Haghdoosti highlighted that "President Biden and his senior advisers continue skirting U.S. laws that should prohibit the sale of deadly weapons while Israeli officials restrict humanitarian aid and seek to make Gaza uninhabitable."
Despite attempts by progressives in Congress such as U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to block some arms to Israel, Democratic and Republican lawmakers have repeatedly voted to send more—including with the $895 billion National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2025 that they sent to Biden's desk last month.
News of the $8 billion package comes just two weeks away from the inauguration of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump.
Paul said that "there is no need to rush these sales to completion, but it is clear President Biden and his appointees at the State Department do not have confidence in the Trump administration to follow through on their decision to rush arms to Israel with no questions asked, which is why they are pushing through these sales now."
While the current administration is clearly aiming to push the package through ahead of the looming transition of power in the United States, Trump is widely expected to serve as an ally to Israel, as he did in his first term. Haghdoosti sounded the alarm about the Republican's return to the White House with a GOP-controlled Congress.
"These latest sales mark a bleak handoff to the incoming Trump administration, whose senior nominees openly ally with far-right Israeli government ministers who plan to settle Gaza and annex the West Bank, all but guaranteeing another generation of displacement and deprivation that will undermine security for Palestinians and Israelis alike," she said.
Trump and far-right leaders in Israel—including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir—"will use these sales to advance that violent project," Haghdoosti added. "It is an utter shame that President Biden has chosen to abet it during his final days in office."
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