Press Releases

Trump’s “GREAT” Plan: Weaponizing Aid and Reconstruction as Instruments of Genocide and Forcible Transfer in the Gaza Strip

Bethlehem, 12 September 2025

The Israeli regime has escalated its bombardment of Gaza City, issuing “full evacuation” of the over one million Palestinians there. The aim is clear: to push the city’s population southward to facilitate their forcible transfer out of Gaza altogether. In February 2025, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Donald Trump both declared that they planned to take over the Gaza Strip and forcibly displace Palestinians to neighbouring states. Donald Trump’s so-called “Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation (GREAT) Plan” (August 2025), provides a blueprint for Gaza’s ethnic cleansing, under the guise of “post-war governance” and “reconstruction”, with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), serving as the central instrument. Trump’s “GREAT” plan in Gaza mirrors Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s “Decisive Plan” for the West Bank. Both of which seek to confiscate Palestinian land, forcibly displace Palestinians and entrench Israeli colonization and apartheid. Through weaponizing both aid and reconstruction, the Israeli regime, US Administration and the GHF accelerate the mass forcible transfer of Palestinians outside of the Gaza Strip, a process enabled by the complicity and inaction of states to impose comprehensive sanctions.

Trump’s “GREAT” Plan articulates his aim to turn the Gaza Strip into the “The Riviera of the Middle East,” through the weaponization of both aid and reconstruction. The “GREAT” Plan is a blueprint for ethnic cleansing and genocide disguised as “reconstruction,” implemented by the GHF - an US-imposed Israeli-backed privatized and militarized agency poised to replace UNRWA and the UN-led aid system in Gaza. It is responsible for engineering famine, forcibly displacing those seeking aid, and has massacred over 2,256 Palestinians as of 9 September 2025. The GHF is explicitly delegated within the “GREAT Plan” to enforce the so-called “Humanitarian Transit Areas”, and retain its role in the militarization of aid while Gaza is “reconstructed.”

The plan makes clear there is no intention for Palestinians to remain in Gaza. Its so-called “internal levers of investment” are designed to accelerate “voluntary departures”, disguising forced transfer as economic development. This is part of a coordinated US-Israeli scheme, confirmed by Netanyahu, when he repeatedly mentioned the “resettlement” of Palestinians in Gaza to other states, as if it were a choice.

At its core, the “GREAT” Plan rests on three mechanisms of forcible transfer:

The external colonial management of reconstruction, with Gaza’s “recovery”, land management, and aid flows administered by external actors excluding Palestinians from any decision-making;
The “voluntary” relocation of Palestinians abroad, packaged as financial inducements of 5000 USD, enforced under genocide;
The economic securitization of land, whereby Palestinian property is stolen, commodified, and converted into externally managed assets, eroding collective ownership and Palestinian sovereignty.

Both Smotrich’s 2017 “Decisive Plan” for the West Bank and Trump’s “GREAT” Plan for Gaza operate under a coherent settler-colonial logic of elimination: maximum land for the Israeli regime with the minimum number of Palestinians – with full US support.

The active complicity of Western colonial powers is marked by cutting and suspending funding to UNRWA, denying their political support, and obstructing accountability mechanisms. They have not only failed to stop and prevent genocide through inaction and the refusal to impose comprehensive sanctions, but have directly legitimized and enabled the GHF to emerge as central to Palestinian forced displacement in the Gaza Strip. The recent European Commission measures, including the partial suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement and increased aid to Gaza, falls far below fulfilling the obligations to stop and prevent genocide. In addition, by failing to fully support UNRWA and the UN-led mechanism, colonial states entrench the weaponization of aid and enable the GHF to continue serving as the central apparatus of genocide and forcible transfer. Without comprehensive sanctions to halt the Israeli regime’s genocide and to reinstate UNRWA, the ethnic cleansing of Gaza (and the West Bank) will persist, sustained through states’ complicity in these crimes.