U.S. to Name Palestinian Committee to Run Gaza

Officials said the body’s leadership could be announced as soon as Wednesday, but U.S. efforts to shape postwar Gaza by disarming Hamas have faced hurdles.

The United States is close to naming a panel of Palestinian technocrats to oversee daily life in the devastated Gaza Strip, where many are desperate to rebuild after two years of war.

A former Palestinian deputy minister for planning, Ali Shaath, has been chosen to lead the committee, according to four officials and six others briefed on the decision. They discussed it on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Several people briefed on the plans say the announcement could come as soon as Wednesday, when Palestinian officials from Hamas and other factions gather in Egypt for talks.

American say the officials hope that establishing the committee will help erode Hamas’s grip on Gaza, which the group seized full control of in 2007.

The cease-fire plan that was backed by President Trump and that went into effect in October called for the committee to be apolitical, engaged largely in providing public services, and that the staff be independent Palestinian experts.

But it is far from clear whether it can succeed.

Officials have so far said little publicly about who will join the committee, how exactly it will administer Gaza and who might finance its operations.

Analysts say that the announcement of its composition might be aimed at injecting some momentum into Mr. Trump’s broader plans for Gaza, which have appeared to hit a roadblock.

While the truce between Israel and Hamas has largely held, the Palestinian militia has not laid down its arms, and U.S. efforts to persuade countries to send peacekeepers to Gaza have found few takers.

Announcing the committee could reflect “a desire to show progress, given that progress on other fronts has been tough,” said Michael Koplow, an analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, a research group based in New York.

“It seems to me that a lot of this is just to show that they’re doing something,” he added.

Mr. Shaath, who is expected to lead the committee, is originally from Gaza and now lives in the West Bank. He was a minister for the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the Israeli-occupied territory, in the 1990s.

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Under the U.S. plan, Mr. Shaath’s technocratic committee will be overseen by a “Board of Peace,” a new forum led by Mr. Trump whose members, expected to be world leaders, also have yet to be announced.

The challenges facing the committee will be enormous.

Two years after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel that ignited full-blown war, much of Gaza lies in ruins. Many of the enclave’s two million people are still living in tents or half-destroyed houses; some hospitals are still shut down; and government buildings have been reduced to rubble.

Hamas says it is willing to turn over the burden of providing public services to the U.S.-backed committee. But the group has not disbanded its battalions of armed fighters, suggesting it wants to keep dominating Gaza despite Israeli and American opposition.

“As long as Hamas continues to maintain security control, there are limitations on what the committee can do,” said Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a research institute.

At the same time, the technocrats will face enormous pressure from Palestinians for results, which may depend on Israel’s easing restrictions on supplies entering the enclave. Both Israeli and U.S. officials have vowed not to allow reconstruction in Hamas-controlled parts of Gaza.

“For the committee to operate and gain any credibility, it has to deliver,” Mr. al-Omari said. “It’s not clear to me that the Israelis will be forthcoming.”

Another major question is how the technocrats will deal with the tens of thousands of civil servants who worked under the Hamas government in Gaza, said two of the officials. Providing public services without them would be difficult, but engaging them could risk Israeli ire, they said.

Analysts say the committee’s weakness is at least partly by design.

Israel ruled out a role for the internationally backed Palestinian Authority. Though the authority’s leaders oppose Hamas, the current Israeli government rejects their aspirations for an independent state.

Nickolay Mladenov, a former United Nations Mideast envoy, is set to take on a senior role, with responsibilities including overseeing the technocratic committee. Last week, Mr. Mladenov traveled to Israel to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and senior Palestinian officials.

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