One morning in February, I opened Instagram to find my feed clogged by reposts of a grotesque AI-generated video of “Trump Gaza.” The clip, created by Israeli entrepreneur Solo Avital and director Ariel Vromen and shared by President Trump’s own social media accounts, begins with scenes of families walking barefoot through rubble and toppled apartment blocks. Then, the scene transforms with a flourish into coastlines dotted with skyscrapers and beach clubs, beautiful women dressed in belly-dancing get-ups, and golden balloons of President Trump carried by Palestinian children.
Beyond the glaring irony of creating digitally generated scenes of the already well-documented destruction of Gaza — which our own government has funded — the clip reduces the lived reality of Palestinians into a surreal spectacle. One which suggests we must turn to Donald Trump to save a population of Arabs from their way of life through economic redevelopment and colonial guardianship.
Since then, President Trump’s Gaza Reconstruction, Economic Acceleration and Transformation (GREAT) plan has shifted global attention away from violated ceasefire terms and rubble to construction and “revitalization” plans. “Trump Gaza” imagines luxury resorts rising from ruins, even as thousands of displaced people remain under tents. There is a fundamental obscenity in this rush to rebuild: Israel has not been held accountable for the devastation that makes rebuilding necessary in the first place.
Legal accountability is the moral prerequisite to reconstruction; before rebuilding begins, international rulings must be enforced. In January 2024, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza and to enable humanitarian access. The UN Human Rights Council has since called for an immediate ceasefire, protection of civilians and accountability for violations of international law. Under any prospect of “rebuilding,” it should be considered essential for the international community to conduct an independent environmental damage assessment, not only for measuring the scope of destruction but also for ensuring justice. It would document the ecological crimes committed against Gaza’s land and people, transforming environmental data into evidence that can hold both states involved in the conflict and developers accountable to proper reparations. Without this reckoning, reconstruction efforts risk sanitizing the violence that necessitated them, turning ecological devastation into a business opportunity.
Israel’s war on Gaza has generated a carbon footprint larger than that of entire nations. The environmental wreckage — poisoned water, scorched farmland, collapsed sewage systems — will scar the region for decades, not even considering the dozens of violations ordered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week. Over 95 percent of Gaza’s farmlands are unusable and over 70,000 people have been killed. Around 30 percent of greenhouse gases generated during the conflict have come from the U.S. sending 50,000 tons of weapons and military supplies to Israel. Instead of reckoning with this ecocide, world leaders and corporations are already circling like vultures around the promise of new development contracts and coastal real estate.
Trump’s proposed plan to rebuild Gaza envisions transforming the enclave into a luxury “Riviera of the Middle East,” instilling “pro-American regional architecture” and offering a payment of $5,000 to each Palestinian who “voluntarily” leaves.
This plan positions foreign actors to become arbiters of urban life and economic development in a reimagined Palestine, granting access to investment opportunities and local energy and mineral resources. Deeply reminiscent of colonial paternalism of the 1800s, this plan neglects to recognize the ethical and environmental complications of attempting to “remake” a city without including its people, and without questioning why we have to rebuild in the first place.
The environmental footprint of the proposed reconstruction is staggering. Massive rebuilding projects promising the construction of skyscrapers, luxury resorts and urban infrastructure further increase emissions by an estimated 31 million tons of carbon dioxide, which Trump’s plan does not acknowledge. This plan will produce enormous amounts of waste while straining water and energy systems already depleted and ravaged by bombings: Desalination plants destroyed by bombings have left much of Gaza’s groundwater undrinkable, and debris from bombings has contaminated soil once used for local agriculture.
Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on Earth, with over two million residents packed into 141 square miles of land, a direct result of decades of displacement, blockade and systematic confinement by the Israeli military. The so-called “Gaza Riviera Plan” ignores these demographic and humanitarian realities, recasting the destruction as an opportunity for profit, ensuring Israeli access “into Gulf supply chains” while effectively “sidelining Palestinian rights and sovereignty.”
In practice, this is a capitalist mode of ethnic cleansing, one that seeks to erase a living population through redevelopment schemes in the aftermath of direct warfare. By flattening neighborhoods, relocating residents and prioritizing investor-led projects, the plan reduces the lives of Gazans to obstacles in a profit-driven fantasy. This scheme will only further entrench social instability and deepen an ongoing humanitarian crisis.
The process of mending the scars of war must address the harm done to the land and its people before it can be used for profiteering. Post-conflict environmental reparations have been applied before, most notably when the UN Compensation Commission required Iraq to pay for environmental damage caused during the Gulf War. The same principle should apply here.
Any genuine effort to rebuild Gaza must reject the extractive neo-colonial model now being advanced by the very powers profiting from its destruction. Yet, recent US-backed proposals such as GREAT envision Gaza not as a territory with people and rights, but as a logistical resource within the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC). The IMEC links the economic interests of many powers together while erasing Palestinian sovereignty. From soil contamination to pulverized concrete laced with heavy metals rendering most farmland unusable, it is clear that Gaza’s ecological devastation is a purposeful product of the political state that destroyed it.
Allowing anti-environmental actors like Donald Trump and Mohammad Bin Salman to direct Gaza’s reconstruction would be a moral absurdity, inviting the very forces complicit in bombardment, blockade and environmental destruction to profit from their own mess. Rebuilding cannot be entrusted to those who have treated Gaza’s people and environment as expendable.
To allow those responsible for Gaza’s annihilation to lead its “revitalization” is a grotesque insult to the people who have survived bombardment, starvation and displacement, as well as to those who have been systematically slaughtered by it. It is a profound conflict of interest to let the warmongers and profiteers of destruction recast themselves as architects of peace. Any reconstruction plan that centers its interests threatens to permanently erase Gaza’s people under the guise of modernization. Rebuilding must be led by the people of Gaza, not those who stand to gain from their continued erasure.
Leili Kamali PO ’29 is a first-year at Pomona. She recommends you read “Perfect Victims” by Mohammed El-Kurd, “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear” by Mosab Abu Toha and “A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict” by Ilan Pappé.
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