Political leaders from around the world have convened in Egypt for a ceremony to sign a ceasefire deal in Gaza, led by United States President Donald Trump and mediating partners such as Egypt, Qatar, and Turkiye.
Speaking in the Egyptian seaside resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on Monday, Trump envisioned a glimmering future for Gaza as a hub of development and investment, even as the Gaza Strip lies in ruins following Israel’s devastating, two-year assault.
“A new and beautiful day is rising and now the rebuilding begins,” said the US president, who praised regional leaders who helped broker a deal between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas.
“Rebuilding is maybe going to be the easiest part,” he added, stating that “we know how to build better than anybody in the world.”
The ceasefire deal has been greeted with a combination of relief and anxiety about the future in Gaza, where Israeli attacks killed at least 67,869 people, with thousands more likely buried beneath the rubble.
“There’s no place here for people to stay,” Al Jazeera correspondent Hani Mahmoud reported from Gaza.
He added that people returning to what remains of their homes have struggled to access basic necessities, including water.
“We drove by entire neighbourhoods that have been levelled to the ground,” Mahmoud said. “There is nothing left. There is nothing recognisable about many of the neighbourhoods that we knew.”
Despite the toll of Israel’s military campaign, which left most of the Strip unlivable and has been described as a genocide by a growing number of scholars and rights groups, the US president has framed discussions of Gaza’s future around Israeli security demands.
“Gaza’s reconstruction also requires that it be demilitarised,” Trump said in his remarks.
Leaders from the region such as Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi praised Trump at the summit, but warned that only the creation of a Palestinian state could offer a durable end to the conflict.
“Egypt reasserts along with its brotherly Arab and Muslim nations that peace remains our strategic choice, and that the experiences have shown over the past decades that this choice can only be established upon justice and equality in rights,” he said.
But progress towards that goal remains distant.
Israel has insisted that it will not allow the creation of a Palestinian state, and the US, which continued to assist Israel with massive arms transfers and diplomatic support during the conflict despite growing anger at the destruction of Gaza, has offered only vague comments about its vision of the Strip’s future.
The possible involvement of strongly pro-Israel figures, including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, in the post-war governance of Gaza has also raised concerns.
“We’re seeing these global leaders gathering together, ensuring that they’re all aligned, that they want to end this conflict,” Zeidon Alkinani, a lecturer at Georgetown University in Qatar, told Al Jazeera.
“But how sustainable is the long-term future after this peace treaty? Are we ending all the issues that ended up accumulating to leading to the events of October 7 and everything that happened [after]? I think that’s the question we need to look at.”
Trump’s Gaza plan calls for a group of Palestinian policy experts to rule Gaza, but the local authorities would be supervised by a so-called “Board of Peace” headed by Trump and Blair.
“We need to look at the legitimacy of a political committee that would be governing a future Gaza,” Alkinani said. “Who would be making the decisions? Who would be nominating these people?”
