On 27 October 1973, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat established a new ministry for reconstruction headed by pan-Arab construction tycoon, Osman Ahmed Osman. The October War, in which Egypt fought to regain the Sinai Peninsula from Israel, had ended only 48 hours earlier, after a second UN-mandated ceasefire came into effect. But with most of the Israeli army still in Sinai, and a brigade laying siege to the city of Suez east of the canal 100 kilometres from the capital, why was there such a rush for reconstruction?
Riad El-Wathiq is a housing rights activist and member of the Housing Justice Network.
The late Milad Hanna, a prominent housing and Coptic rights activist, exposed this move in his book, Al-Iskan w-al-Siyasa (Housing and Politics). He explained how a crucial part of Israel’s ceasefire demands was the rapid rebuilding and repopulation of the Suez Canal cities evacuated after the Six Day War as a measure to discourage Egypt restarting armed hostilities — a militarized urbanism, by proxy. Reconstruction started in earnest in 1974, as Israeli troops withdrew from around Suez — after destroying 80 percent of its homes — and began their slow retreat from the Sinai. In addition to rebuilding the bombed-out parts of all three Suez Canal cities of Suez, Ismailia, and Port Said, Osman planned to “demolish and destroy all the old parts of the cities and build anew”.
He did so within a few years, with Egyptian plans and hands, funded mostly by Arab Gulf money. The new neighbourhoods, however, were composed of rectilinear housing estates built on a grid-iron pattern of wide streets, in stark contrast to the old city’s organic fabric of narrow, intertwining streets — streets that helped the fida’iyyin, civilian guerrillas, thwart Suez’s occupation during the war. Osman was even quizzed over the possibility of repopulating the cities with paramilitary units to engage in any future Israeli attacks, a claim he rejected by saying, “Our nation likes peace, we need peace and we are looking for peace.” However, the modern urban planning spoke for itself, and as with Baron Haussmann’s demobilization of the Paris Commune by replacing the historic city with grand avenues, were Israel to invade Egypt again, all the canal cities rebuilt by Osman would stand little chance of holding back an attack.
Fast-forward half a century, and we find yet another reconstruction plan after an Israeli domicide, underpinned by its militarized demands, planned and implemented by Egyptians, and funded by Arab Gulf countries. Early last February, Palestinians woke up to a dehumanizing plan from US President Donald Trump to take Gaza, displace all 2 million residents to Egypt and Jordan, and turn their land into a real estate development of luxury homes and resorts overlooking the Mediterranean coast. The neoliberal right-wing sovereign argued that Gaza was “just a demolition site”, where Palestinians only wanted to live because they had nowhere else to go — an echo of predatory real estate developer speak as they size up a neighbourhood to gentrify, claiming how the working-class people living there are stifling economic growth, jobs, and of course, profits from being realized.
Yet while Trump the slumlord engaged in class warfare and worked to evict tenants, his promotion to president renders his visions as ones of ethnic cleansing of an indigenous people. Condemnation and rejection of this plan from Arab leaders followed — not necessarily because Palestinians would be forcibly displaced from their land, but because they would be displaced to Egypt and Jordan, who are not happy to have them. Within a week, Egypt announced it sought peace in Palestine, and would cooperate with the US, promising to present a Gaza reconstruction plan as an alternative to hosting Palestinians on its soil. The statement stressed how any vision addressing the Palestinian issue should not threaten the gains of peace, alluding to the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty.
For genuine and lasting recovery, Arab nations — and, indeed, the international community — must be equally radical, and diametrically opposed to Trump’s and Israel’s plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
Businessmen with close ties to the government quickly circled around the proposal in hopes of gaining lucrative contracts. Essam Al-Argani, son of a tribal militia man, and the de facto controller of the Sinai-Gaza Rafah crossing, Ibrahim Al-Argani,emphasized that they would be leading the participation of Egyptian contractors in Gaza’s reconstruction. At the same time, Hisham Talaat Mostafa, founder and major shareholder of Egypt’s largest real estate developer, Talaat Mostafa Group, presented his own plan to rebuild Gaza. In addition to technical details of how the reconstruction would happen, Mostafa was the first to present reconstruction as a way to pacify Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. On a major Arab talk show, Mostafa said “when you establish a civilized community, you are solving the problem, also in Israel’s favour… when that person has a home and a decent job… he would be reluctant to give them up to do other things”. Mostafa and the talk show host, Amr Adib, also criticized Trump’s plan, not just because it was a violation of Palestinians’ right to their land, but because they saw Gaza as a high-risk area. After all, “who would you get to go buy property there?!” Instead, they invited Trump to invest in Egypt’s Mediterranean Riviera — as if that were the main reason the US president had threatened the Palestinians with expulsion.
Officially, however, Egyptian reconstruction plans were being prepared by a Gaza Reconstruction Committee. The committee was convened by the Egyptian Engineers’ Syndicate and chaired by General Ahmad Zaki Abdin, former head of the military-owned company that built Sisi’s New Administrative Capital. Other than the prominent military engineer, committee members included well-known urban planners and university professors schooled in New Urbanist projects such as the New Capital, where tabula rasa plans are made over empty (or emptied) locations, starting anew without history or culture. A few weeks later, the Egyptian planners’ fingerprints were all over the reconstruction plan presented at an emergency Arab League summit in Cairo in early March. In their report, titled “Early Recovery, Reconstruction and Development of Gaza”, a multi-phase rebuilding plan was detailed, setting out both temporary shelter as well as permanent homes.
The plan’s schematics unsurprisingly showed a completely new urban fabric of grid-iron streets with a string of large apartment blocks hugging the entire 40-kilometre coast, leaving a wide gap of agricultural fields before Gaza’s walled borders with Israel. Lebanese architect Samir Sakiny saw the Egyptian plan as a continuation of the genocide, arguing that it completes the erasure of Gaza’s organic string of towns and villages spread along the historic Salaheldin road, erasing its residents’ history and, with it, their identity. The investigative studio Forensic Architecture succinctly revealed how each east-west military incursion corridor is mirrored in the new city’s street network, while the relocation of all homes to the coast effectively creates a “buffer zone” wholly on the Palestinian side in order to prevent any future attacks.
Despite all this, the US and Israel immediately rejected the plan, as they would only accept reconstruction if the Arabs controlled Gaza in place of Hamas. The Israeli opposition even went as far as proposing that Egypt do just that in exchange for relief from its massive foreign debt, echoing the country’s involvement in the US-led liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in 1991.
Egypt’s involvement in Gaza’s reconstruction reflects a dual strategy: preventing the forced displacement of Palestinians onto its soil, while securing financially beneficial contracts for its state-affiliated enterprises. This approach mirrors historical patterns, such as Osman Ahmed Osman’s Suez reconstruction, where Egyptian labour and Gulf financing aligned with Israel’s militarized urban agenda.
For genuine and lasting recovery, Arab nations — and, indeed, the international community — must be equally radical, and diametrically opposed to Trump’s and Israel’s plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza by prioritizing a permanent ceasefire and ensuring that reconstruction is Palestinian-led. Instead, at their darkest hour, Palestinians have never felt more abandoned by the world.