Eurasia Press & News
The so-called “Gaza Riviera” plan is less a vision of the future than an obituary written in the language of luxury.
Wrapped in glossy renderings and marketed as a leap into progress, it is in fact the culmination of years of deliberate devastation – a scheme to erase Palestinians in Gaza and rebrand their absence as innovation.
What is pitched as investment and regeneration is, in truth, the laundering of genocide into spectacle, an aesthetic cover story for a political project whose foundation is the rubble of Gaza and the silence of its expelled inhabitants.
Why Israel never developed a postwar plan in Gaza
The widely-condemned ‘Gaza Riviera’ plan – pitched to remake a fully wiped-out enclave into a string of futuristic high-tech beach megacities – arrives dressed in the language of investment and modernity.
But look past the renderings and the investor decks, and a starker truth comes into focus: this is not a diplomatic strategy but an aesthetic for disappearance. It lays bare why, for two years, there has been no coherent Israeli political plan for Gaza beyond mass destruction, mass extermination, and mass starvation; the erasure of Gaza has itself been the plan all along.
The political choreography of recent weeks betrays the priorities of this plan. As US President Donald Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, Tony Blair, and Israeli envoys huddled to imagine Gaza’s future without a single Palestinian in the room, the genocide ground on, stripping away what remains of the Strip’s urban density and social fabric.
The inference is that the erasure is not a hurdle to the plan – it is the precondition.
Netanyahu’s plan from the start
The core contours of the Riviera plan have come to light in recently leaked documents that describe proposals to place Gaza under a US trusteeship for roughly a decade, fully depopulate the enclave of its Palestinian inhabitants, and market the coast as a futuristic tourist-technology hub – “the Riviera of the Middle East”.
None of this, however, is new. The original blueprint for this promised sci-fi hub – built on mass graves and razed cities – was created by Benjamin Netanyahu himself several months before Trump was even elected.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s “Gaza 2035 Vision,” revealed in May 2024, envisaged the long-besieged enclave as a Dubai-like industrial and free trade zone and used the same AI-generated pictures that are now being used in the Riviera plan.
It is no coincidence that both plans have an almost identical opening line. “From a Demolished [Gaza] to a Prosperous Abrahamic Ally,” says the Riviera plan, while Netanyahu’s emphasised “rebuilding from nothing”.
The same two preconditions are implied: that Gaza needs to be fully razed to the ground with nothing left of it, and that it needs to be emptied of its people in order to turn it into a blank canvas to develop from scratch.
This was Netanyahu’s plan from the get-go, when on the first day of war, he ordered Gaza’s civilian population to “leave now” before unprecedented destruction “everywhere”. Netanyahu then doubled down on this when his intelligence ministry produced a detailed plan for the mass expulsion and forcible transfer of Gaza’s population.
The Israelis even got the then US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to tour Arab countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia to promote the idea of the “temporary relocation” of Gaza’s population into Sinai. This quest failed back then, and Israel couldn’t find an audience that would buy into the futuristic Gaza plot.
Netanyahu kept waiting for the opportune moment until Trump walked into office and quickly flew to Washington to talk the American president into presenting the idea of ethnically cleansing and taking over Gaza as Trump’s very own.
Ever since, Netanyahu has kept referring to Israel’s systematic pursuit of mass expulsion in Gaza as “implementing the Trump plan” to outsource the blame for this genocidal policy.
Netanyahu’s cover story – and the audience it’s built for
Experts have repeatedly slammed the Gaza Riviera Plan as “insane,” unrealistic, impractical and riddled with legal and moral hurdles that would render anyone advancing it a partner to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
That is why the Boston Consulting Group rushed to disavow its own senior consultants when they produced a detailed plan operationalising mass population transfer in Gaza, including modelled scenarios and spreadsheets that priced in ethnic cleansing. Anyone aiding this abomination would be exposed to lawsuits and criminal proceedings for decades to come.
But the futuristic Trump fantasy on the Mediterranean may not be meant to be a serious plan to begin with. It is merely a story with an artificial “happy ending” to genocide and ethnic cleansing that Israel tells its complicit partners.
The real utility for Netanyahu in this outlandish idea is narrative management. While Israel’s government prosecutes a campaign that rearranges Gaza’s geography and topography and renders it uninhabitable – flattening neighbourhoods, mass expelling hundreds of thousands into concentration camps, burning homes, and starving children to death – the Riviera slides provide a future-tense alibi.
To Netanyahu’s right, they whisper the old dream of Jewish-only settlements returning to Gaza; to his allies abroad, they offer investable optimism. To Trump’s base, they sell the ultimate MAGA fable: “We will make the desert bloom, and we will make it ours.”
The glitz is the point; the plan circulating the White House is even formally named GREAT (short for Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration, and Transformation). For Trump’s political brand, the promise of turning ruins into resorts is classic theatre.
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