Palestinians create the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) – Gaza’s technocratic turn to genocide management

This document is largely based on a document written by Yara Hawari who is co-director of Al-Shabaka’s, and a policy member in the organization. She previously served as the Palestine policy fellow and senior analyst. Yara completed her PhD in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter. Al Shabaka is the only global network of Palestinian experts to produce critical policy analysis and collectively imagine a new policymaking paradigm for Palestine and Palestinians worldwide.

The announcement of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), a 15-member technocratic body chaired by Ali Shaath, signals a shift toward depoliticized governance in Gaza amid ongoing genocide. Shaath, a Palestinian civil engineer and former deputy minister of planning and international cooperation, is positioned to lead an interim governing structure tasked with managing reconstruction and service provision under external oversight. While presented as a neutral technocratic governing structure, the NCAG is more likely to function as a managerial apparatus that stabilizes conditions. This policy memo argues that technocratic governance in Gaza—particularly under US oversight, given its role as a co-perpetrator in the genocide—should be understood not as a pathway to recovery or sovereignty, but as part of a broader strategy of genocide management.

Donald Trump’s so-called Board for Peace for Gaza is easy to dismiss. It is grotesque in its colonial imagination — a Riviera fantasy rising from mass graves, brokered by billionaires and real-estate interests, insulated from the screams beneath the rubble. It carries the familiar stench of American imperial arrogance: deciding the future of a people while excluding them entirely. One does not need deep analysis to reject it; instinct alone suffices.

READ: Most glaring in Trump’s plan for Gaza is the absence of any discussion of Palestinian sovereignty

What demands far greater intellectual vigilance is what comes after the spectacle. When vulgar colonialism recedes, it is often replaced not by justice or liberation, but by management. This quieter phase of domination is precisely what Yara Hawari exposes in her incisive critique of Gaza’s technocratic turn — a shift that risks transforming genocide from an act of violence into an administrative condition.

At first glance, Gaza’s National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) appears to be a corrective to Trump’s obscenity. It is Palestinian. It is composed of engineers, planners, and professionals. It speaks the language of reconstruction, service delivery, and institutional competence. There are no Kushners, no billion-dollar fees, no overt colonial theatrics. It presents itself as pragmatic, necessary, even humane. And yet this is precisely where the danger lies.

The central problem is not the identity of those appointed, but the structure within which they operate. Technocracy under occupation is never neutral. When governance is stripped of politics in a context defined by siege, occupation, and genocide, it does not become apolitical; it becomes complicit. What is presented as expertise becomes a means of stabilising injustice rather than dismantling it.

The NCAG’s mandate is framed narrowly around administration and reconstruction, while political questions — sovereignty, borders, accountability, demilitarisation, and the end of occupation — are deferred to Trump’s Board for Peace and its international overseers. This is not a division of labour; it is a division of power. Palestinians are invited to manage consequences, not to determine causes. They are allowed to rebuild ruins, but not to challenge the system that produced them.

This model is not new. It mirrors the role long assigned to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank: a body tasked with administering daily life while Israel retains decisive control over land, movement, security, and violence. The result has been a prolonged political limbo in which services are delivered, elections are postponed, dissent is policed, and occupation deepens uninterrupted. Statehood remains perpetually promised and perpetually denied.

Gaza now risks being absorbed into the same logic, under far more catastrophic conditions.

The most revealing aspect of the NCAG is not its technocratic composition, but its explicit refusal of politics. Its chair, Ali Shaath, has emphasised that the committee will play no political role in governing Gaza. In ordinary circumstances this claim would already be dubious. In the midst of an ongoing genocide, it is untenable. To declare governance non-political while bombs fall, borders are sealed, and territories are redrawn is not neutrality; it is acquiescence.

Depoliticisation here functions as strategy. By treating Gaza’s devastation as a technical problem requiring managerial solutions, the structural causes of that devastation are rendered secondary, if not irrelevant. Reconstruction is discussed without addressing siege. Stability is prioritised over justice. Order is pursued while accountability is indefinitely postponed.

Language matters, and the language emerging from this technocratic framework is telling. The invocation of “one law, one authority, one weapon” echoes almost verbatim the formulations used by Jared Kushner in his plans for Gaza’s demilitarisation. This convergence is not accidental. It reflects a shared colonial priority: internal control over external responsibility. Palestinians are to be unified, disciplined, and disarmed, while the forces that carried out mass killing remain beyond scrutiny.

Security, in this vision, is reduced to Palestinians policing Palestinians. Protection from Israeli violence is absent from the equation. Demilitarisation is demanded without decolonisation; obedience without sovereignty. What emerges is not peace, but pacification.

Trump’s Board for Peace is obscene but transparent. Its ambitions are crude and its contempt for Palestinian agency barely concealed. The technocratic alternative is far more insidious precisely because it wears a Palestinian face. It risks normalising a future in which Gaza is endlessly rebuilt but never freed, administered but never sovereign, stabilised but never healed.

Genocide does not end simply because bombs pause. It continues when the conditions that made it possible are preserved under new administrative arrangements. A ceasefire without political rupture becomes merely an intermission. Reconstruction without accountability becomes another phase of violence — slower, bureaucratic, and easier for the international community to tolerate.

Hawari’s intervention is therefore not a rejection of relief or rebuilding. Gaza desperately needs both. It is a rejection of the lie that relief can substitute for liberation, or that expertise can replace political agency. It insists that governance cannot be severed from justice, and that reconstruction divorced from sovereignty is not recovery but containment.

Real alternatives already exist, developed by Palestinian experts and civil society actors who understand that rebuilding Gaza cannot be separated from dismantling siege, occupation, and colonial control. Frameworks such as the Gaza Phoenix Plan matter not because they are perfect, but because they restore politics to a space where politics has been violently erased.

The choice before the international community is not between Trump’s vulgar imperialism and benevolent technocracy. That is a false binary. The real choice is between managing genocide politely and confronting the structures that sustain it.

Gaza does not need trustees, technocrats, or stabilisers. It needs an immediate and permanent ceasefire, enforceable guarantees against renewed assault, accountability for crimes committed, the dismantling of siege and occupation, and the restoration of Palestinian collective decision-making.

Anything less is not peace. It is administration in the service of erasure.

This document calls to be widely disseminated as a way of illustrating that Palestinians have the political substance and technocratic capacity to transform Gaza into a liveable space for all its citizens without colonial intervention. Trump had no plan except that of land-grab and profit from the misery which he and his Zionist partners connived to do. His plan, as many others he conceived in the last year, is doomed to fail.

Proposed solutions for Gaza and Palestine involve a multi-phased approach focusing on immediate humanitarian relief, rubble removal, and reconstruction, alongside a, two-state solution supported by Arab nations, which includes a non-affiliated administrative committee to govern, ultimately transitioning to the Palestinian Authority. Implementation requires, however, significant international financing, securing borders, and restoring essential services.

Western engagement in Palestine is increasingly viewed through the lens of supporting long-term, structural change, such as the recognition of a Palestinian state, rather than just providing, which some critics argue sustains a status quo of dependency or aids in concealing, rather than resolving, the underlying political and colonial issues.

Traditional Western aid has often acted as a substitute for political action, allowing for the continuation of the Israeli occupation while failing to address the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people. The “repatriation” argument is often linked to the call for a “right of return” for Palestinian refugees, a fundamental aspect of the broader Palestinian struggle for self-determination.

Many perspectives now emphasize that support for Palestine should focus on decolonization, the removal of colonial structures, and establishing a single, democratic state with equal citizenship. The deliberation underlines a weighty swing from seeing the situation as a humanitarian crisis to recognizing it as a matter of political and territorial rights in which the entire global community vigorously drives for a just and permanent, sustainable solution.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.