Until this week Ali Abdel Hamid Sha’ath was an obscure Palestinian businessman and former official. Now he may hold one of the most difficult jobs in the world: head of Gaza’s new transitional government.
The Trump administration this week formally announced Sha’ath as the chair of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), a 15-person body tasked with managing day-to-day governance for 2mn people in the war-shattered Palestinian enclave.
US officials view the body, which is made up of Palestinian technocrats like Sha’ath, as a government for Gaza that will work under the Donald Trump-chaired “Board of Peace” which is set to be filled by as-yet unnamed world leaders.
The executive board which will advise the Board of Peace was also unveiled on Friday, and includes major international players such as US envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, former British prime minister Tony Blair, Marc Rowan, head of private equity firm Apollo Global Management, and Nickolay Mladenov, a former Bulgarian defence minister and UN envoy.
Mladenov will serve as the high representative of the executive board, overseeing the work of the Palestinian technocratic committee.
“It’s rare to have an opportunity of standing up a new government from scratch,” one US official told reporters on Wednesday. “This really has the potential to be the beginning of a new era.”
But Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday that the make-up of the executive board had not been co-ordinated with Israel and is “contrary to its policy”, without elaborating. The Israeli premier said the matter would be raised with the Trump administration.
That Sha’ath, a civil engineer and former deputy minister in the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, was plucked to spearhead this new era in Gaza was, from the outside, unlikely. Yet several people with knowledge of the tortuous negotiations between the US, Israel, Hamas, the PA, Egypt and various other regional actors say Sha’ath fulfils all the requirements.
Born in the southern Gazan city of Khan Younis, Sha’ath, 68, received a degree from Cairo’s Ain Shams University before moving to the UK and obtaining a doctorate from Queen’s University in Belfast.
He later lectured at Strathclyde and Abertay universities, before being called back to the Palestinian Territories in 1994 by then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat after the signing of the Oslo peace accords with Israel.
Sha’ath worked for the PA in various development roles, including the construction of Gaza’s port and airport — since destroyed in later Israeli-Palestinian wars — and various industrial zones. He ultimately rose to become deputy minister of planning and international co-operation.
Despite Israeli vows that the PA would not have a role in postwar Gaza, Sha’ath hails from a prominent clan with close ties to the secular nationalist Fatah party which controls the PA and took part in past rounds of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
“He’s a good man, competent and not corrupt, and known to Ramallah [the PA’s de facto capital] and Gaza,” said one person with knowledge of his appointment. “He was approved by Israel and the US with no issues.”
According to Diana Buttu, a lawyer and former adviser to the Palestinian presidency who has known Sha’ath for two decades, the man given the daunting task of rebuilding Gaza is a skilled engineer, rather than a political operator.
Yet he “understands the various levers that can be pulled and not pulled. He’s bright in that sense . . . he knows how to get across the message of what needs to be done”, she said.
The PA and Hamas, along with all the other Palestinian factions, welcomed the NCAG’s appointment, theoretically clearing a political path for it to begin its work. But the reality of Gaza after two years of devastating war makes the task seem near-impossible.
At a minimum, estimates suggest that tens of billions of dollars and several years will be needed to reconstruct the enclave. Some 85 per cent of homes have been destroyed or damaged, hundreds of thousands of people are displaced, and food insecurity stalks the population.
The thorny issues of Hamas’s disarmament and Israel’s withdrawal from the strip remain to be negotiated, as required in the US-brokered ceasefire deal struck in October. Israeli troops still hold half of Gaza, with Hamas retaining the other half, and near-daily clashes continue amid mutual claims of ceasefire violations by either side.
According to a person with knowledge of the matter, $1bn has been raised to pay for the NCAG to employ staff in Gaza. The new Palestinian committee, including Sha’ath, intend to move there from Cairo, where they are currently based, although no timeframe has so far been floated.
How the group’s security will be guaranteed once inside the strip also remains unclear, the person added, as no foreign governments have yet committed to send peacekeeping troops.
“All my colleagues in the committee and I are technocrats. We are committed to the mission of building a Palestinian national economy and facilities,” Sha’ath told Egyptian television.
“Our people have endured two and a half years [of war] and we must stand with them. We are looking forward only to seeing the smiles of our children in the coming days,” he added.
According to Samer Sinijlawi, a prominent Palestinian activist from East Jerusalem, “everyone is looking for something positive, and a message of hope”.
Despite the myriad challenges, Sinijlawi said, Sha’ath’s committee will soon begin to deploy its newfound diplomatic status, backed up by a UN security council resolution and increased financial support, in the service of the Gazan people.
“And most importantly, Donald Trump is the head of all this,” he added.