U.S. plan proposes to replace Palestinians in Gaza with projects including Gaza Trump Riviera & Islands and Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zones.
What Happens to Palestinians? (Midday India, Sept. 3, YouTube Screenshot)
By Brett Wilkins
Common Dreams
The White House is “circulating” a plan to transform a substantially depopulated Gaza into U.S. 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. 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.
Trump’s Riviera Plan Replaces Palestinians in Gaza. (Wikileaks, Twitter Screenshot, July 2025)
However, to journalist Hala Jaber, the plan amounts to “genocide packaged as real estate.”
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 multilateral custodianship” lasting a decade or longer and leading to “a reformed Palestinian self-governance after Gaza is “demilitarized and de-radicalized.”
“However, to journalist Hala Jaber, the plan amounts to ‘genocide packaged as real estate’.”
Josh Paul — a former U.S. 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 percent 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 percent 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.
Still from AI-generated video promoting Trump’s takeover plans for Gaza, which the U.S. president posted on his social media account on Feb. 26, 2025. (Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
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), U.S. 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 built over the ruins of the southern city of Rafah, a central highway named after Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Gulf states feature prominently in the proposal as investors — large-scale solar and desalinization plants, a U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. industry access to $1.3 trillion of rare-earth minerals from the Gulf.”
Earlier this year, Trump said the U.S. 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.
An aerial photo of displaced Palestinians waiting in northern Nuseirat to return to their homes in Gaza, Jan. 6, 2025. (Ashraf Amra/United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 4.0)
“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.
Brett Wilkins is a staff writer at Common Dreams.
This article is from Common Dreams.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
This is every real estate developer’s dream scenario. You don’t have to pay high prices to holdout homeowners or waste time and money on eviction cases and bribes to city officials and planning boards – just kill ‘em all and take over. You don’t even have to pay the costs of demolition, just of site clearance.
No one can say the empire is not going down without showing its true, profoundly evil face to the world.
My recent enlightenment regarding the probable genesis of the “Gaza Riviera” plan, courtesies of the second article of Unlimited Hangout’s three-part “First Friends” series:
“[I]t seems that some of Trump’s most controversial foreign policy ideas may have first originated with his long-time friend. In 2016, [Paolo] Zampolli had told journalist Mattia Ferraresi of his idea of converting Gaza ‘into a ‘Mediterrean Riviera’ with high-rises and shopping malls.’ ‘Let’s make it like Dubai, but with no golden faucets,’ Zampolli was quoted as saying. More recently, in February, Trump (and before him his son-in-law Jared Kushner) promoted the very controversial policy of forcibly relocating the 2.3 million Palestinians in the war-torn Gaza strip to other states, demolishing buildings in the strip that haven’t already been destroyed by the Israeli military and building a US-backed ‘Riviera’ in their place. When Ferraresi contacted Zampolli after Trump’s ‘Riviera’ plan, he said ‘You see, maybe I am no completely dumb after all’ and was ‘obviously delighted about the Mar-a-Gaza project,’ per Ferraresi.”
Source:
Mark Goodwin and Whitney Webb, “First Friends: How the First Couple’s Consigliere Went From Modeling Mogul to Special Envoy,” Unlimited Hangout, Aug. 26, 2025
“Israel was [Ronn] Torossian’s gateway to PR. Born in 1974 and raised Jewish by a single mother in the Bronx, as a boy Torossian came under the tutelage of Avi Weiss, a prominent ‘open Orthodox’ rabbi and prolific organizer of protests related to Jewish causes. As an adolescent, he became involved with Betar, a Zionist youth movement with ties to Israel’s Likud party, and traveled the world to protest with Weiss. […] In a 2008 article, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, a veteran of the Israeli Defense Force who is now the magazine’s editor-in-chief, recounted a conversation with Torossian about Palestinian terrorism in which the flack opined, ‘I think we should kill a hundred Arabs or a thousand Arabs for every one Jew they kill.’ Goldberg described Torossian’s proposal as a ‘Nazi idea.’
[…]
What about the man who first introduced the president to the first lady? That would be Paolo Zampolli, an Italian playboy and modeling agent turned ambassador to the United Nations from the tiny Caribbean island of Dominica [and current US Special Representative for Global Partnerships], who played matchmaker to Donald to Melania in 1998. He’s pals with Torossian, too — Zampolli describes him as a ‘unique character’ and a ‘mastermind.'”
Source:
Ben Schrekinger, “Meet the Pro-Trump PR Guy at the Center of the Mueller Probe — and Everything Else,” Politico, Apr. 30, 2018
The only thing that will stop this is a prolonged national strike. We have to withhold our cooperation and labor. Make a list of demands and don’t relent until they are all met. Counter force is the only language these homicidal freaks understand.
Complete bar on any kind of commerce: trade (especially in arms), communication, aid: Israel should be anathema.
Thanks Brett, and it is sickening
A complete and total abomination. Utterly sinister.
They are utterly utterly deranged, aren’t they?
Gaza would have been prevented if someone did a spellcheck
before Trump sent Kushner on a “Piece in the Middle East” quest.
Trump needs to be grilled on his failure to discuss a Gaza riviera and development zone with the Palestinians.
The Jewish supremacists are going for broke, they’re shamelessly striving to reach every single one of their repulsive and heinous goals regardless of world opinion. It’s this that needs to be commented on.
Why are they so brazen?
Why are the Jewish supremacists such audacious and bold bastards, thinking they can get away with everything with impunity in front of the entire world? I’ll tell you why: They’re counting on their massive influence in the entire Western cultural apparatus to whitewash all of this Jewish supremacist inflicted starvation and genocide! Their massive control of our mass media, grade school and high school curriculums, university presses, historical scholarship in general, it’s this soft power that they’re counting on to ultimately win the day.
Yes, theirs is the money power that the US failed to keep out of elections and mass media, and thereby all branches of government as well as universities, which superceded military power as the primary means of tyranny. Few in our ignorant commercial culture can even bear to hear of it, and almost none have the courage to do anything about it. We need constitutional amendments to isolate government and mass media from money power, but of course Congress is completely dependent upon bribes through political parties. So perhaps China will bribe them the other way, and restore democracy here.
Great comment.
That soft power is diminishing – not quick enough to stop the current slaughter, but the trend in visible. Israel will not survive as a Zionist state. The question is how much death and destruction will occur in the meantime. These are monstrous times
I hope you’re correct that it’s diminishing. I tend to see that somewhat occurring too, but time will tell.
These are indeed monstrous times despite what Pinker says (“The Better Angels of Our Nature”).