Despite the impression of diplomatic progress, Israeli restrictions, military threats, and bureaucratic obstacles deliberately render Gaza’s truce unworkable
The establishment of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) had been a long-awaited step for Palestinians hoping to begin rebuilding the war-ravaged enclave.
A month later, however, Israel has yet to allow the technocratic committee to enter Gaza, while the US has still not made clear to the NCAG what its exact mandate will be.
US special envoy Steve Witkoff’s announcement of the start of Phase Two of Donald Trump’s Gaza plan in mid-January has been met with Israeli condemnation, procrastination, restrictions, an escalation in bombing, and vows to resume unrestricted military operations and collapse the ceasefire.
This immediately hostile and panicked reaction, despite Trump adding the ICC-indicted Benjamin Netanyahu to the ‘Board of Peace’ and accommodating all Israeli demands, makes clear Israel’s intent to sabotage Phase Two of what’s become a unilateral ceasefire after Israel repeatedly violated Phase One into virtual obsolescence.
A committee without power, offices or staff
The Gaza technocratic committee, composed of 15 Palestinian experts, retired officials, civil society leaders and businessmen, is supposed to take over governance from Hamas and start the reconstruction of Gaza.
However, two people close to the head of the NCAG, Dr Ali Shaath, told The New Arab that committee members haven’t even been told where they would live or work once they enter Gaza, nor have they been designated any residences, offices or staff.
NCAG commissioners also don’t know if they will be given any access to eastern Gaza, the 60% of the enclave that the Israeli army fully controls. One NCAG commissioner told The New Arab, “We have more questions than answers at this stage.”
The committee held a meeting with the Palestinian Red Crescent society, during which NCAG commissioners were asked whether they would be able to pay salaries for the families of health workers killed by Israel, according to a source close to Shaath.
“They had no answer,” the source said, adding that the NCAG’s most substantial meeting on the transition of government has only been with municipalities in Gaza that provide basic services rather than with ministries. Tony Blair, now a member of Trump’s Board of Peace, reportedly told Shaath that the NCAG will have no role in politics or disarmament.
Shaath is “excited to get meetings and calls from ambassadors of different countries, like the EU or Japan. It makes him feel like a prime minister, but he has been given no real power until now,” the source told TNA. The NCAG hasn’t been explicitly told whether they can run the government in Gaza with the existing civil servants of the Palestinian Authority (PA) or Hamas’s government.
The UAE and Mohammed Dahlan
Each of the 15 NCAG commissioners will receive a salary up to $18,000 per month, according to two sources familiar with the arrangements, who said the UAE is the one making those payments.
Multiple sources, including Arab and Western diplomats and internal documents viewed by The New Arab, show that several NCAG commissioners are in fact affiliated with the UAE’s presidential advisor and controversial Palestinian politician, Mohammed Dahlan.
The UAE has also reportedly been supporting Israel’s proxy gangs in Gaza, such as the IS-linked Abu Shabab militia, and is planning to bankroll Israel’s ‘New Rafah’ scheme that aims to build a camp in the south of Gaza under strict Israeli military control and biometric surveillance.
The Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, recently reported that “the UAE sees Gaza as key to influencing all of Trump’s policies in the region” and hence is heavily invested in any new arrangements in Gaza.
However, a senior Arab diplomat told The New Arab that the UAE is keen on ensuring the full removal of Hamas and prefers “Sudan-like chaos” in Gaza to any scenario in which the Islamist group survives Israel’s war.
Israel is pre-planning the NCAG’s collapse
As soon as the NCAG was established, Israel’s Brigadier General Erez Wiener, a close associate of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, rushed to make clear that Israeli restrictions would continue despite the Phase Two announcement.
“Nothing can happen in the area that Israel doesn’t want because we own the house. We sit on the entrances and exits,” he told 103FM radio. “Even if they decide to bring in materials for the benefit of rebuilding Gaza, as long as Israel doesn’t approve it, then it can’t happen. We have supervision and control.”
This was not mere rhetoric. Israeli right-wing media have been repeatedly highlighting Netanyahu’s intent to collapse the ceasefire. For instance, Israel’s Channel 14 said that the Israeli army chief of staff has approved plans for a large-scale attack on Gaza, including invading areas the Israeli army hadn’t entered before.
Similarly, Maariv revealed that Israel is currently “preparing for the collapse of the Trump Plan” and has already made plans for resuming its assault in Gaza “without restrictions” to occupy the entire territory.
Israel has spared no effort in obstructing, undermining, and attacking the NCAG. Last week, Netanyahu personally attacked the NCAG for something as trivial as using a logo that resembles that of the Palestinian Authority. “Israel will not accept the use of the Palestinian Authority’s symbol, and the PA will not be a partner in the administration of Gaza,” he said.
Even from the first day of the committee’s creation, Israel unleashed its criminal proxy gangs in Gaza to attack the committee and has vowed to boycott and undermine it. The Israeli army has been using those gangs to carry out assassinations in western Gaza while maintaining plausible deniability, which bodes ill for the safety of the NCAG’s members.
Israel is even using the Abu Shabab gang to harass Palestinians returning to Gaza through the Rafah crossing, where they stop and interrogate returnees and escort them to a checkpoint 500 meters away from the crossing, where masked armed men carry out further interrogations and loot passengers’ personal belongings.
The gang’s leader, Ghassan Al-Duhaini, announced that they had set up a checkpoint near the crossing where his militia would blackmail returning passengers into moving to the gang’s area, or ‘New Rafah’.
Furthermore, the Abu Shabab gang has previously stopped international delegations, such as the Red Cross or the UN, from entering. This means Israel can easily use the Abu Shabab gang to block, kidnap or even assassinate NCAG members as they cross in or out of Gaza.
Israel is also currently blocking the NCAG from using any civil servants in Gaza from either Hamas’s or the PA’s governments, which means the committee’s 15 members would be on their own without any employees on the ground to run the enclave.
Israel’s Shin Bet security agency kept vetoing most names proposed for the NCAG and manipulated the list of names of the members of the committee to put it on a collision course with Hamas and other factions in Gaza.
For instance, Israel replaced Mohammed Tawfeeq Heles as the commissioner of security with Sami Nasman, a retired PA intelligence officer who led direct confrontations with Hamas in Gaza and is considered part of Dahlan’s circle.
The security commissioner is supposed to take over the police and other security agencies and oversee the decommissioning of Hamas’s offensive weapons. But Nasman’s long history casts doubt on his ability to build trust with local actors to achieve this task.
He had, for example, been sentenced to 15 years in prison in absentia by a Gazan court for alleged espionage and recruiting cells tasked with burning vehicles and attacking public infrastructure to create unrest and destabilise Hamas’s government. A veteran Palestinian journalist told The New Arab that Nasman is also allegedly responsible for the killing of two Islamic Jihad members, Ayman al-Razayna and Ammar al-Aaraj, in 1998.
Nasman’s appointment has infuriated both Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and may push their members to refuse to cooperate with a man they consider to be “compromised” or even a “collaborator”. This is precisely the outcome Israel wants to achieve: create intra-Palestinian tensions, make Hamas take more hardline positions, then use this as a pretext for resuming the assault on Gaza.
The NCAG is a distraction from Gaza’s continued occupation
Fully absent from the US announcement of the start of Phase Two is any mention of further Israeli military withdrawals from Gaza, despite it being a core item in the Trump plan. Israel and the US further conditioned any reconstruction in Gaza on the full disarmament of Hamas, a clear act of collective punishment.
This means that more than 60% of Gaza would be de facto inaccessible to the new government, while the remaining 40% would remain a wasteland for the foreseeable future. The NCAG would likely bear the brunt of public anger, despite being powerless to change the situation.
This is why a source close to Shaath said that the NCAG’s creation is a “distraction” for Israel’s continued occupation of Gaza. Creating a new Palestinian entity with immense promises serves as a spectacle of progress, without Israel changing course on the ground from its continued destruction of all remaining homes and vital infrastructure in eastern Gaza.
To cover up this dystopian reality, Israel is proceeding with the ‘New Rafah’ plan that would serve as a Potemkin village, giving the façade of reconstruction and distracting from the unlivable conditions Israel imposes on Gaza.
According to slides prepared by the US administration and viewed by The New Arab, the gated camp ‘New Rafah’ would only house 25,000 people, a symbolic fraction of Gaza’s 2.4 million inhabitants.
The rendering of the area resembles a prison yard, with overcrowded shipping containers used as homes instead of any permanent structures. Gazans who lived in similar shipping containers after the 2014 war say those containers turn into baking ovens in the summer as the metal absorbs the heat.
Schools in that camp would not teach the Palestinian curriculum, but instead would use the “emergency studies” modelled after the “UAE’s culture of peace principles”.
Anyone moving into ‘New Rafah’ would be subject to security screening and biometric surveillance. They would lose the ability to cross into western Gaza, and instead would be given the option of leaving Gaza altogether through the Rafah crossing.
Israel’s intentions in Gaza are unmistakable. After having spent over $100 billion, losing nearly 900 soldiers, weakening the national economy, and squandering its regional standing, all to pulverise Gaza into dust, Netanyahu won’t simply throw all of this away, sit back, and allow the rebuilding of the very enclave he did everything to render uninhabitable.