# Israel and America Agree on Ali Shaath as Gaza's New Leader. Palestinians Are Wary. > The engineer tapped to run Gaza's postwar administration wants to push war rubble into the sea within three years, but Palestinians fear the technocratic National Committee he leads is built to make economic recovery a substitute for self-determination. - Source: Foreign Time - Canonical URL: https://foreigntime.com/article/ali-shaath-gaza-ncag-israel-trump-technocrat-leader - Author: Foreign Time Newsroom - Section: Diplomacy - Published: 2026-08-21T17:31:36.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-21T17:31:36.000Z - Tags: Diplomacy, Gaza, Israel, Palestinian Authority, Middle East --- Ali Abdel Hamid Shaath, the Gaza administrator installed under the Trump administration's 20-point peace plan, has a characteristically blunt idea for the enclave's mountains of war rubble: push it into the Mediterranean Sea. "If I brought bulldozers and pushed the rubble into the sea, I can win new land for Gaza and at the same time clear the rubble. This won't take more than three years," he has said, according to a Foreign Policy report. Shaath, a Khan Younis-born civil engineer who studied in Cairo and Belfast and previously served as the Palestinian Authority's deputy minister of planning and minister of transport, now leads the U.S.-appointed National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, or NCAG. Shaath's résumé makes him, on paper, an unusually acceptable figure to both sides: he is advertised on the NCAG's own website as capable of managing "complex multi-million-dollar budgets" and building partnerships with governments, development banks, and private investors, and a former Israeli security official told Foreign Policy he was vetted before his appointment was made official. He has already met with the European Union's envoy, the largest donor community involved in Gaza's reconstruction. "We are Palestinian minds, not weapons," Shaath said in January of the roughly dozen NCAG members tasked with running Gaza's interim governance, a framing that fits President Donald Trump's stated vision of using economic development, rather than a political settlement, as the path to reconciliation. That framing is exactly what worries many Palestinians, the report notes, even as Hamas has said it is ready to hand Gaza's administration to the technocrat. Muhammad Shehada, a fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, warned that Shaath will now take over functions the Palestinian Authority used to run in Gaza, from the Rafah crossing to school textbooks, which "could risk breaking the existing coordination between Gaza and the West Bank." Eran Lerman, a retired Israeli intelligence colonel and former deputy national security advisor, told Foreign Policy there is "no timetable" for when the NCAG's work will end, and floated it as a possible governance model that could eventually extend to the West Bank, though he said there is no current plan to replace the Palestinian Authority. More than seven months after his appointment, Shaath's first challenge is simply getting to work: he and his team have been based in a Cairo hotel while Gaza's reconstruction has yet to begin. Hamas has agreed to store away its weapons, but Israel does not consider that disarmament and has declined to commit to the existing deal ahead of its own parliamentary elections in October, with each side accusing the other of never intending to follow through. Palestinian analysts quoted in the piece, including Ibrahim Dalalsha of the Ramallah-based Horizon Center, note that no Gaza governance plan so far has addressed how to dismantle Hamas's informal control structures, which survived the destruction of its official governing bodies. Shehada argues elections are the only viable way out of the Gaza-West Bank split: "Armed resistance will only offer Israel an excuse to kill more Palestinians. A nonviolent movement cannot work; anyone who approaches the yellow line will just be shot. The only way forward is elections." Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has called for candidates to renounce violence and recognize Israel before running, a condition widely read as an attempt to exclude Hamas, though Foreign Policy reports several political groups are already reaching out to Hamas about an electoral alliance and that the group may field candidates as independents. Abbas canceled elections at the last minute in 2021 over Israel's refusal to allow voting in East Jerusalem, and it remains uncertain whether this round will happen at all. Until it does, Shaath's tenure, and the question of whether Gaza's recovery comes at the cost of Palestinian self-determination, looks likely to run longer than reconstruction alone requires. --- Originally published by Foreign Time. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://foreigntime.com/article/ali-shaath-gaza-ncag-israel-trump-technocrat-leader.