Day 519 - Haviv Rettig Gur on Egypt’s 'silly' plan for postwar Gaza
The Times of Israel Daily Briefing
The Times of Israel
4.4 • 864 Ratings
🗓️ 8 March 2025
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to The Times of Israel's Daily Briefing, your 20-minute audio update on what's happening in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world.
Senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur joins host Amanda Borschel-Dan for today's Daily Briefing, which is a bonus episode of our weekly What Matters Now podcast series.
At a Cairo summit of Arab leaders on Tuesday, a consensus of states adopted an Egyptian reconstruction plan for Gaza that would cost $53 billion and avoid displacing Palestinians from the enclave -- in contrast to US President Donald Trump’s “Middle East Riviera” vision.
The over 100-page “Early Recovery, Reconstruction, Development of Gaza” plan envisions a Gaza Administration Committee, made up of independent technocrats, to manage an initial six-month transitional phase. It also urges elections in all Palestinian areas within a year, if conditions support such a move.
The rub? The plan doesn’t explicitly tackle the issue of Hamas and how the terror group will be disarmed -- if at all. It also pushes for a Palestinian state before addressing any of the armed Palestinian factions.
Rettig Gur dissects elements of the plan and weighs in on its seriousness.
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IMAGE: In this photo provided by Egypt's presidency media office, Arab leaders pose during the emergency Arab summit at Egypt's New Administrative Capital, just outside Cairo, March 4, 2025. (Egyptian Presidency Media Office via AP)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to What Matters Now, the Times of Israel's weekly podcast delving into one issue that is |
| 0:07.9 | affecting Israel and the Jewish world right now. I'm your host, deputy editor Amanda Warshald Dan, |
| 0:13.7 | here with our senior analyst, Javiv Riktegur. Hi, Jav. Hey, Amanda. Good to see you. Glad you're back |
| 0:20.3 | in the country. Good to be here. Glad you're back in the country. |
| 0:21.0 | Good to be here. |
| 0:21.8 | I'm gone next week, but I'm just checking in that everything's still around. |
| 0:26.9 | So we are recording on Wednesday, which is just after President Donald Trump addressed Congress in an hour and 40-minute speech. So, Kaviv, I have to admit, I didn't watch it. |
| 0:42.0 | Did you? |
| 0:42.7 | I refuse to answer that question on the grounds of. Look, it was very long, and we're all reading briefings about it, but I will eventually have to go back and watch it because there are nuances, there's choices of language, |
| 0:54.9 | but at the moment, in the immediate aftermath of it, I have not yet caught up. It's been a busy |
| 1:00.1 | day. There's this amazing thing now with technology that you can listen to things at double |
| 1:05.1 | speech, so I recommend that for this particular speech. And, you know, we are busy people. |
| 1:10.7 | But I have to say that one thing that jumped out at me was Trump's for this particular speech. And, you know, we are busy people. |
| 1:15.2 | But I have to say that one thing that jumped out at me was Trump's really confident statement that he was bringing the hostages home. |
| 1:18.8 | And we heard today, just this evening, that the Trump administration has been holding |
| 1:24.4 | secret, direct talks with Hamas, |
| 1:28.3 | aimed at securing the release of American hostages |
| 1:31.3 | and bringing about a permanent end to the war in Gaza. |
| 1:35.3 | So these, again, secret talks being held by Trump's hostage envoy, Adam Boehler, |
| 1:42.3 | are unprecedented because the U.S. has never before engaged directly |
| 1:48.8 | with Hamas, which incidentally, Washington designated as a terror group in 1997. So when I read about |
| 1:59.4 | this, I asked our U.S. Bureau Chief, on a scale of 1 to 10, how big is it that the U.S. is holding direct talks with Hamas? And before I tell you what his number was, what would be your number, Chavid, between 1 and 10? How big do you think this is? |
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