Ali Abdel Hamid Shaath, Gaza’s new administrator under the Trump administration’s 20-point peace plan for the region, plans to push the debris spread across Gaza into the Mediterranean Sea. That would create more space for Gazans who were squeezed in a tiny strip of land even before the war.

“If I brought bulldozers and pushed the rubble into the sea,” he has said, “I can win new land for Gaza and at the same time clear the rubble. This won’t take more than three years.”

In many ways, Shaath is the perfect man to lead the U.S.-appointed National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG). Born in 1958 in Khan Younis, Gaza, he is a trained civil engineer who studied engineering in Cairo and Belfast and later served as deputy minister of planning and minister of transport and communication in the Palestinian Authority (PA) government. He knows his way around Palestinian bureaucracy and its international donors and earned his stripes as a civic administrator.

He also understands international financing and is advertised on the NCAG website as someone who can “manage complex multi-million-dollar budgets, and build high-level partnerships with governments, development banks, and private investors.” Shaath has already met the envoy of the biggest donor community, the European Union. A former Israeli security official who spoke with Foreign Policy said Shaath was vetted before his name was made official as NCAG chief.

“We are Palestinian minds, not weapons,” Shaath said in January about a team of a dozen NCAG members tasked with running Gaza’s interim governance.

In short, Shaath could usher in infrastructural recovery and economic development for the sake of Palestinians, but he is also acceptable to Israel, and—as an efficient economic operator—is handy for U.S. President Donald Trump’s vision of economic peace in the region. Trump envisions economic well-being as a path toward reconciliation between Israel and Palestinians—even though his “Gaza Riviera” plan was widely derided as insensitive.

Palestinians are desperate for Gaza’s reconstruction; even Hamas has said that it is ready to hand over control of Gaza to the technocrat. But there is a sense among Palestinians that behind Shaath and the NCAG lies a grand strategy to unleash economic prosperity only to make national struggle less relevant and deepen intra-Palestinian divisions.

“Shaath will now perform tasks that the Palestinian Authority was previously performing in Gaza, like managing Rafah crossings and providing books for students, etc.,” said Muhammad Shehada, a fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations. “This could risk breaking the existing coordination between Gaza and the West Bank.”

Shaath will have to tread cautiously, lest he be labeled a puppet and lose credibility with Palestinians. If the NCAG becomes a permanent feature of Gaza’s governance, it could deepen the geographical fragmentation of the West Bank and Gaza and hurt the Palestinian national movement. “There is no timetable for when the NCAG’s work in Gaza will end,” said Eran Lerman, a retired intelligence colonel and Israel’s former deputy national security advisor who now serves as the vice president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security.

The NCAG’s main task, according to the text of the 20-point peace plan, is to provide “day-to-day” public services “until such time as the Palestinian Authority has completed its reform program” and is ready to take over.

That plan sounds simple enough but is riddled with obstacles. Shaath faces myriad challenges—not just those posed by Israel but also a more fundamental reckoning within the Palestinian movement.

His first challenge is to get to work. More than seven months after his appointment as the chief commissioner of the NCAG, Shaath has been languishing in a hotel in Cairo along with his team members. The reconstruction of Gaza hasn’t even begun.

Hamas has agreed to store away its weapons, but Israel doesn’t see that as disarmament and has refused to commit to upholding the existing deal in the run-up to Israeli parliamentary elections in October. Israel suspects that Hamas will never abandon its grip over the enclave and fully disarm and doesn’t want to give up the leverage that it has gained by reoccupying Gaza. Palestinians doubt Israel ever had any intention of withdrawing.

Some fear that Israel intends to exploit Shaath and the NCAG as a governance model that could eventually be replicated in the West Bank—where economic prosperity, not national liberation, is at the center.

“Under Trump’s 20-point peace plan, the NCAG is to hand over Gaza to PA” once it has carried out necessary but unspecified reforms, Shehada said. “But the suspicion is that may not happen. That the NCAG instead might take over West Bank administration,” Shehada added.

Lerman said that Israel has reservations about the PA’s expansion into Gaza. “It’s not clear whether the PA will play a role in Gaza after all,” he said, adding that the NCAG could potentially provide a model for the West Bank in time to come. But there is no plan to replace the PA just yet.

“The NCAG could become an indicator of what better governance could look like in a post-Abbas proposition,” Lerman said in reference to PA’s 90-year-old President Mahmoud Abbas, who has led the authority for two decades. “It is not about necessarily overthrowing the PA and bringing in the NCAG, but certainly creating norms that would change the way business is done in Ramallah as well,” he added.

For all of Israel’s faults, Palestinians also acknowledge that their own political leadership needs to reform and salvage the floundering movement. There is cautious hope that the PA will finally hold elections in November and ideally even presidential polls next year and that political groups will leave rivalries behind to make it happen.

If Palestinian politics is going to escape the Gaza-West Bank split, some Palestinians believe that there is only one viable route: elections. “There are three ways forward for the Palestinian movement,” Shehada said. “Armed resistance will only offer Israel an excuse to kill more Palestinians. A nonviolent movement cannot work; anyone who approaches the yellow line will just be shot,” he said, referencing the de facto Gaza border manned by Israeli military. “The only way forward is elections.”

Abbas has called on political groups and candidates to renounce violence and recognize Israel as a precondition to participate in elections—a deliberate trick to leave out Hamas, which won the elections in 2006. At the time, violent clashes between the group and Fatah, which dominated the PA, split the movement into Hamas-run Gaza and the PA-ruled West Bank.

Hamas hasn’t renounced violence but may yet find a workaround to contest elections. Shehada said a number of political groups were already reaching out to Hamas to form an electoral alliance and that the group may field candidates as independents. Hamas has said that it will participate in elections under the broadest possible national coalition; however, the group has never recognized Israel and only suggested a hudna or a cease-fire and not a permanent resolution.

Palestinian analysts say that Hamas has taken a beating but hasn’t been eliminated and retains a fighting chance. The group elected Khalil al-Hayya as its new chief last month.

“None of the many plans drawn up for Gaza governance has addressed how to contain the remnants of Hamas’s informal system, which survived the destruction of the group’s official governing bodies and can sustain control endlessly,” wrote Ibrahim Dalalsha of the Ramallah-based Horizon Center.

Over the years, several Palestinian activists have argued in favor of reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas. Hussein al-Sheikh, Abbas’s vice president and presumed successor, recently congratulated Hayya on his selection, but there is no sign of a broader alignment.

If elections take place, the Palestinian Authority—or more broadly, an entity chosen by Palestinians—may strengthen its claim over governance of Gaza over the NCAG, which is under the control of Trump’s Board of Peace.

That would keep the Palestinian territories from further fragmentation. But Hamas will have to renounce violence to be accepted as a political actor by the international world, while Fatah and others will have to accept if Hamas and allied groups perform better in elections.

At this stage, it isn’t certain if elections will even be held. Back in 2021, Abbas called off the elections at the last minute owing to Israel’s refusal to let Palestinians in East Jerusalem cast their ballots. If elections do not take place, Shaath’s tenure will be extended for longer than the reconstruction of Gaza requires.

Gazans are desperate for basic amenities, and Palestinians at large welcome economic development, but not at the cost of self-determination. Shaath has little control over the broader electoral machinations or Israel’s intended or suspected plans, but he faces a peculiar challenge: how to improve the lives of Palestinians without compromising their national cause.