In the midst of one of the bloodiest assaults on Gaza in modern history, a controversial plan has quietly emerged, one that recasts Gaza not as a homeland under siege, but as prime real estate for global investors. Titled “The GREAT Trust: Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation,” the 38-page proposal envisions the total demolition of the Gaza Strip and its rebirth as a futuristic “smart” Special Economic Zone, a kind of Singapore-by-the-Mediterranean. The plan, backed by powerful U.S. and Israeli interests, appears to have been reviewed at a White House meeting involving Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, Marco Rubio, and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.
At its core, the GREAT proposal offers a vision of Gaza as a privatized investment hub, governed for a decade by a supranational trust. Its financial blueprint projects up to $100 billion in public funds to “trigger” $65 billion in private investments, promising a tenfold increase in Gaza’s pre-war GDP from $2.7 billion to $30 billion annually by year ten. The plan anticipates the creation of one million jobs, construction of six to eight AI-driven smart cities, and a projected $385 billion return on investment over the same period. Gaza’s residents, however, are reduced to statistics in this corporate calculus: those who “voluntarily” emigrate would receive a $5,000 cash incentive and a four-year rent subsidy, while others would be housed in “special complexes” under private supervision.
The GREAT Trust’s investor pitch reads like a dystopian prospectus. Among the corporations cited or allegedly linked to the proposal are Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Tesla, BlackRock, Vanguard, and even the notorious private military firm Academi (formerly Blackwater). According to a July 2025 UN report, both BlackRock and Vanguard are primary investors in multiple companies supplying Israel’s military-industrial apparatus. The involvement of these mega-funds suggests that the destruction of Gaza may be paving the way for its privatized reconstruction under what activists have called “disaster capitalism”, the art of monetizing catastrophe.
The economic logic is clear: Gaza’s coastal waters sit atop 1.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, conservatively valued at over $500 billion. Since the 1990s, control over these reserves has been a silent driver of Israel’s policies toward Gaza. A “new Gaza,” stripped of resistance and reconstituted as a Special Economic Zone, would allow unrestricted exploitation of these offshore assets, integrated into the emerging India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), a Western-backed alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The IMEC map unveiled at the 2023 G20 Summit shows one terminal point in Haifa, Israel, and another, tellingly, in Gaza.
Beyond profit, the GREAT plan also outlines a new model of digital governance. Each Gazan resident would be issued a “Digital ID” linked to Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs), enabling complete surveillance of identity, transactions, and movement. In corporate language, this is sold as “efficiency.” In human terms, it is an Orwellian experiment in population control, using Gaza as a laboratory for a fully tokenized, AI-managed society.
Critics argue that this model mirrors the broader strategy of “creative destruction,” coined by economist Joseph Schumpeter, where economic renewal is built on the ruins of the old. But in Gaza’s case, the destruction is not metaphorical. Over 60,000 civilians have been killed, 80% of infrastructure leveled, and nearly two million people displaced since Israel’s latest campaign began. To market this devastation as an investment opportunity, say human rights observers, is to normalize genocide under the banner of economic progress.
Politically, the plan dovetails with the Abraham Accords, which normalized Israeli relations with Gulf monarchies like the UAE and Bahrain. Gaza’s envisioned transformation into a “prosperous Abrahamic ally” would further align Israel with these regimes, creating an economic corridor that binds the Arabian Peninsula to the Mediterranean, bypassing both Iran and Turkey. Saudi Arabia’s futuristic NEOM city, a $500 billion “smart” metropolis rising from the desert, is explicitly referenced in the GREAT plan as Gaza’s sister project.
Yet, despite the glossy language of “reconstruction,” the moral implications are stark. What is unfolding is not post-war recovery but a corporate land grab underwritten by human tragedy. If the global public accepts the privatization of Gaza as a fait accompli, it could set a dangerous precedent for the commodification of conflict zones worldwide, where devastation becomes a prerequisite for profit.
Gaza’s erasure, then, is not just physical but conceptual. Its people are being written out of their homeland’s future, replaced by an algorithmic, investor-friendly cityscape managed by distant financiers. In this sense, Netanyahu’s war is more than a military operation, it is the demolition phase of a global economic project. As historian Rafeef Ziadah aptly wrote: “Gaza is described less as a society than as a distressed asset to be flipped.”
Whether the GREAT Trust will succeed depends on geopolitics as much as capital. The IMEC alliance faces pushback from Turkey and mounting anger within Arab populations over their governments’ complicity. But one thing is clear: what is being built, or destroyed, in Gaza is not just a warzone’s future, but a prototype for a new world order where private capital replaces public sovereignty, and human suffering becomes the down payment for profit.
An Oblong Media Unlimited team investigative analysis
OBLONG MEDIA UNLIMITED 
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