As world leaders convened in Davos on 22 January 2026, the inauguration of the so-called 'Board of Peace' turned the international gaze once more toward reconstruction in the Gaza Strip. Despite this focus, a profound contradiction has been overlooked: the same powers designing technical blueprints for governance, demilitarisation, and aid are failing to stop the ongoing genocide. With the launch of Phase Two of the current ceasefire plan, debates that once remained abstract are hardening into concrete plans, making reconstruction no longer hypothetical. Yet a ceasefire alone does not enable the conditions required for the recovery process to start. Without durable guarantees, freedom of return, and credible enforcement, Gaza risks repeating a familiar cycle: pause-rebuild-destroy. The central question remains: how can rebuilding start whilst the genocide continues?
To address this dilemma and enable Palestinian-led reconstruction, the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies (CHS) is convening a critical intervention, 'Toward Palestinian Frameworks for Reconstruction in the Gaza Strip,' in Doha from 24 to 26 January 2026. The event brings together more than thirty-five Palestinian experts—including scholars, architects, engineers, and civil society actors—to examine potential pathways for Gaza's reconstruction. The workshop centres Palestinian voices, unpacking the humanitarian reality and the severe limits of recovery in the wake of the ceasefire.
Discussions focus on reconstruction policy, with particular attention to the roles of Palestinian and Arab stakeholders. This event seeks to interrogate urgent questions—from the mechanisms required to ensure civilian protection to the political challenges of governance and transformative recovery. The emphasis is not on managing the status quo, but on identifying the conditions that must change for reconstruction to be possible. This takes place as international proposals for the 'Day After' risk reinforcing access and decision-making arrangements that undermine civilian safety, constrain return and concentrate reconstruction authority outside Palestinian control.
Coming at a critical moment, the CHS workshop aims to re-centre the debate around two fundamental principles that have been systematically marginalised.
First, civilian protection—backed by enforceable U.S. guarantees—is a precondition for reconstruction. Without credible assurances that large-scale violence will not resume, reconstruction planning is uncertain and return is unlikely. Phase Two slows the killing, but without such commitments, it remains fully reversible.
On the opening day of the workshop, a Palestinian reconstruction expert noted, 'Reconstruction is designed to begin once the war has ended. In the Gaza Strip, it is being planned whilst the war remains active. That inversion matters: reconstruction depends on predictability—of safety, return, and continuity—and war eliminates all three.' This explains why reconstruction under fire carries a high risk of failure—not because plans are absent, but because the conditions that enable recovery to take root are structurally missing. U.S. guarantees matter because they provide leverage: they remain the primary mechanism capable of constraining the political and military genocidal practices that have repeatedly disrupted past rebuilding efforts. Reconstruction can only proceed when Palestinians are safe and able to return, govern, and participate without fear. These conditions are required to plant the seeds of genuine recovery; without them, reconstruction becomes a process of violence, extraction, and securitisation.
Second, Palestinian agency is essential to effective governance and recovery. Reconstruction approaches that rely on external design and top-down implementation frequently fail to produce durable results. When community actors are excluded from decision-making, reconstruction lacks ownership, accountability, and sustainability.
At the workshop, a Palestinian political expert observed, 'under the Trump plan, reconstruction risks being reshaped around external investment and resource exploitation, effectively substituting Palestinian political agency with market-driven priorities imposed from outside.' This replaces governance with extraction, concentrating decision-making power outside Gaza and reproducing the political fragility that reconstruction is meant to resolve. Reconstruction is more likely to hold when Palestinian voices are included in ways that shape its planning and implementation. Prioritising Palestinian economic activity and community-defined needs frames the reconstruction approach as developmental rather than extractive. Thus, without Palestinian agency, reconstruction remains an administrative process exercised by outsiders.
Reconstruction cannot be treated as a passive, technical exercise. Where genocide, ethnic cleansing, and displacement persist, rebuilding risks producing structures without protection or sustainable recovery. Reconstruction is not the management of rubble; it is the reclamation of the future. The 'Board of Peace,' as part of the wider externally led governing architecture for Gaza's reconstruction, now faces a stark choice: to protect Palestinian life and support the sovereign right to rebuild, or to be complicit in a process that reinforces the conditions for yet another cycle of destruction and violence.
These principles anchor the CHS workshop and shape the discussions unfolding across its sessions. The objective is not to restate imperatives, but to translate them into concrete frameworks that specify conditions, sequencing, and mechanisms for reconstruction. Blueprints do not fail for lack of detail; they fail when they ignore the conditions under which rebuilding can endure. Without enforceable civilian protection, safe return, and political participation secured in advance, reconstruction remains structurally premature—technically elaborate, politically fragile, and vulnerable to reversal.