What is today referred to as the “Gaza Riviera” or “New Gaza” is not merely an urban vision or deferred development plan. It is a comprehensive project that redefines land, people, and urban life through the near-total exclusion of Palestinians and their political reality.

The project has been promoted through sleek presentations and referenced by US President Donald Trump in speeches about what he called a “Peace Council.” He described Gaza as “a wonderful property by the sea.” It has also been marketed by business circles linked to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

What this vision avoids is the fundamental question of Palestinian daily life. Instead, it focuses on one thing only: how Gaza can be turned into a profitable investment project.

Gaza as an investment opportunity

In this plan, Gaza is no longer a living city shaped by history and struggle. It becomes land ripe for redevelopment. The city is stripped of its social networks, economy, and collective memory, and reframed as an investment opportunity. Waterfronts, towers, hotels, and shopping malls replace neighbourhoods and communities. Palestinian suffering, destruction, and siege are reinterpreted as a blank slate for reconstruction, as if genocide were merely a preparatory phase for development.

Palestinians are transformed from political subjects into a population to be managed. They are no longer rights holders or participants, but variables to be controlled. Their movement, residence, and presence are dictated by project requirements, not by self-determination.

The project’s details reveal mechanisms of population sorting. The occupying power decides who may live in enclosed residential compounds and who is excluded. These compounds function as monitored spaces resembling open prisons. Access is controlled through permits, surveillance, and conditional services. Public space is regulated. Autonomy is absent.

Palestinians do not build their own cities. They are forced to adapt to imposed urban forms and lifestyles that erase their identity and history.

The project asks no meaningful questions about life: how people work, socialise, or coexist. Instead, it asks how people are controlled. Where should they live? How are they monitored? How is resistance prevented?

Gaza without Palestinian identity

The plan erases history. Destroyed neighbourhoods, family ties, traditional names, and economic life under siege are removed from the landscape.

The city is designed for investors, not residents. It prioritises seafront views and consumer spaces over lived experience.

“New Gaza” becomes a city without Palestinian character. It lacks community roots, social rhythm, and collective participation. The population is treated as excess—something to manage, not empower. This reflects an old colonial logic, repackaged in the language of investment: a land without a people, or a people rendered invisible to make the land usable.

From citizenship to population management

The project’s most dangerous feature is its logic. Palestinians are not treated as citizens with rights, but as a mass to be sorted and controlled. Terms like “closed residential complexes,” “model villages,” and “population absorption” reveal a governance framework, not urban planning.

The city does not grow from lived experience. It is imposed from above, detached from social and economic realities. Control and exclusion are dressed in humanitarian language: reconstruction, housing, quality of life.

Behind this façade lies surveillance, coercion, and enforced silence. Housing becomes conditional. Services depend on compliance. Gratitude is demanded instead of rights.

This city does not heal wounds. It seals them shut while stripping political agency.

A project for investors, not Palestinians

Every aspect of “New Gaza” is aimed at investors and global elites. Palestinians are not partners in the vision. They are obstacles. The guiding questions are financial and political: Is the area secure? Are residents controllable? Are political risks contained?

Gaza is transformed from a struggle for justice into an emerging market. Palestinian presence, memory, and demands are treated as liabilities.

At its core, the “Gaza Riviera” is not reconstruction. It is a political and economic scheme to reorganise Palestinian life. Turning the city into a product and its people into managed subjects. It reproduces colonial logic in contemporary language: invisibility in exchange for survival.

Palestinian rights are replaced with conditional existence in a space emptied of history, politics, and meaning.

Featured image via the Guardian 

By Alaa Shamali

This post was originally published on Canary.