A $2.4 Billion Plan to Rebuild Gaza. Israel Killed Seven More Palestinians That Day.

NEW YORK — Nikolay Mladenov stood before reporters on Tuesday and described a $2.45 billion plan to rebuild Gaza. As he spoke, Israeli forces were killing people there.

Seven Palestinians died on September 23, the same day the Board of Peace, a body Donald Trump appointed to oversee the Gaza ceasefire and direct reconstruction, released its 66-project blueprint. A vehicle was struck in Khan Younis. Buildings in Gaza City and Deir Al-Balah absorbed Israeli fire. The Israeli military offered no detailed explanation for any of them.

The plan runs for six months and begins in Rafah, moving sector by sector northward through a landscape where Israeli forces have, since October 7, 2023, killed more than 73,900 Palestinians. That figure is maintained by Gaza’s health ministry. It includes roughly 1,399 people who have died since the ceasefire the Trump administration announced as a diplomatic achievement, a ceasefire that Israeli military operations appear not to have honored.

The Board of Peace blueprint covers debris removal, temporary housing, hospitals, electricity grids, water systems, and the deployment of a multinational security force. Mladenov said the plan was designed to be actionable within days of funding authorization. Medium-term reconstruction carries a price tag of $35.2 billion. Full ten-year restoration: $71.4 billion.

One condition underpins the entire architecture. Hamas must disarm. Mladenov said it plainly, without elaboration, as though the difficulty were self-evident. Hamas has rejected the demand, Al Jazeera reported.

That gap between the plan’s assumptions and Gaza’s actual political terrain is the core problem, and it is not a new one. The Board of Peace is not a neutral humanitarian agency. It is a political construct assembled by an administration that has backed Israeli operations throughout the Gaza genocide and positioned itself simultaneously as the architect of whatever comes after. Reconstruction money cannot flow, legally, logistically, or diplomatically, if Hamas retains any governing presence in the territory the plan intends to rebuild. And Hamas, which has administered Gaza since 2007, has given no indication it intends to dissolve on American instruction.

Benjamin Netanyahu arrived at the General Assembly this week arguing the war must continue until Hamas is eliminated. Israeli military commanders have privately acknowledged that objective has no clear military endpoint. The plan Mladenov presented presupposes a post-Hamas Gaza. Netanyahu is still attempting to produce the conditions under which such a Gaza might exist. The distance between those two timelines has a body count attached to it.

Emmanuel Macron, in what aides framed as his final address to the General Assembly before leaving office, called the war a spectacle of shame. He did not endorse the Board of Peace plan directly, but French officials noted that the $2.45 billion figure assumes a political framework for Gaza that no party with the power to affect the outcome has agreed to.

The Gulf states (Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar) are being counted on for a substantial share of the capital. None of them has committed funds. All have made clear, through diplomatic channels and in public statements at the UN margins this week, that they will not finance reconstruction in a territory still subject to Israeli strikes. Their conditions have been consistent for months: a credible political horizon for Palestinian statehood, a halt to military operations, and a governance framework that is neither Israeli occupation nor Hamas administration. None of those conditions exists, The National reported.

The Board of Peace plan is, in this sense, simultaneously detailed and suspended above reality. The 66 projects Mladenov described represent genuine humanitarian need. Debris removal alone faces an estimated 40 million tonnes of rubble, some of it contaminated with unexploded ordnance. Temporary housing is not a bureaucratic category. It describes where 1.9 million people are sleeping.

The seven Palestinians killed on Tuesday were not named in the Board of Peace’s announcement. They rarely are in these settings. The mechanism of killing continues alongside the planning sessions, the UN corridor consultations, the press briefings. Mladenov’s blueprint describes the world as it might exist if the killing stopped. The killing has not stopped.

What the Board of Peace did not answer, and what no questioner at the briefing was able to extract, is the political theory of the case: who governs Gaza on the day reconstruction begins, what entity authorizes the security force’s entry, and what happens when Hamas, operating from whatever position it still holds in the territory, opposes the movement of construction equipment. These are not technical questions with technical solutions. They are the questions on which every post-October 7 reconstruction proposal has collapsed.

The $2.45 billion figure is the most concrete number the Board of Peace has attached to anything since its creation. Whether the plan it describes will outlast the next round of Israeli strikes is not something Mladenov’s briefing addressed.