Billionaires, Zionists and a UN official: Tony Blair’s proposed team for Gaza : Shared by Anis Salem

By Oscar Rickett — Middle East Eye
Click here for the article

Summary
A leaked draft of Tony Blair’s proposed Gaza International Transitional Authority (GITA) reveals a plan in which an international board of billionaires and business elites would oversee Gaza’s governance during a “transitional period.” The board—endorsed by Israel, Egypt, and reportedly the White House—would have “supreme political and legal authority” over Gaza. None of the named candidates are Palestinian.

They include billionaire financiers Aryeh Lightstone, Naguib Sawiris, Marc Rowan, and former UN envoy Sigrid Kaag. Critics see the plan as part of a broader effort to privatize Gaza’s reconstruction and marginalize Palestinian self-determination.

Lightstone, a rabbi and businessman tied to the Trump administration and Abraham Accords network, helped found the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)—a US- and Israeli-backed system accused by Médecins Sans Frontières of “institutionalised starvation and dehumanisation.” He has reportedly dismissed discussion of a two-state solution as “inappropriate.”

Sawiris, an Egyptian billionaire with long-standing ties to Blair, has built his fortune in telecoms and mining and cultivated Emirati backing for a Dubai-style “free-capital zone” in Gaza. While critical of Egypt’s military rule, he is a self-described free-market purist with a record of supporting pro-capitalist political movements.

Rowan, a Jewish American worth over $10 billion, runs Apollo Global Management—an $840 billion private-equity giant heavily financed by Gulf investors. A vocal supporter of Israel, he has called the Gaza war a “just war” and pushed for US universities to suppress pro-Palestinian activism, helping oust the president of the University of Pennsylvania.

Kaag, the only non-billionaire and the only woman on the list, is a former Dutch minister and UN humanitarian coordinator for Gaza. She has condemned Israel’s “weaponisation of aid,” calling Gaza’s destruction “a stain on our collective conscience” and warning against its transformation into a “Riviera” for displacement-based redevelopment.

The Blair plan, with its elite board and minimal Palestinian representation, underscores a shift toward Western- and Gulf-backed economic control of Gaza under the guise of “reconstruction,” deepening concerns over the UN’s sidelining and the moral legitimacy of the postwar order.

Quotes

• “Gita will be run by an international board that has supreme political and legal authority for Gaza during the transitional period.”

• MSF described the GHF system as “institutionalised starvation and dehumanisation” and “orchestrated killing.”

• Sigrid Kaag: “Life has been made unlivable to the extent you suddenly hear proposals such as, ‘we can turn Gaza into the Riviera’… What is happening in Gaza will haunt all of us.”

• Naguib Sawiris: “Israel does not wish good for Egypt, nor does the US. No one wants good for Egypt except the Egyptians themselves.”

• Marc Rowan: “What I see is a just war… The idea that we have lost the narrative is just insane.”