The Corporate Identity of UNSC Resolution 2803: Trump’s Gaza Plan as a Business Strategy on New Cities Construction

Building on the excellent post by Michelle Burgis-Kasthala on UNSC Resolution 2803 and President Donald Trump’s Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict, annexed to this “deeply problematic Resolution”, we would like to explore here the background and context of the physical reconstruction proposals for Gaza contained in this Plan. Burgis-Kasthala rightly mentions that these plans are subject to a financing scheme with a very limited role for the World Bank and donor states, instead “extolling the Gulf dictatorships as economic role models and benefactors”. Beyond that already problematic financing mechanism, Gaza’s reconstruction as envisaged in this Plan is directly related to Trump’s taste for “new cities-building”, that is from-the-scratch and mostly private urban developments, widely detached from their broader national and international environments. What is most striking for us as international lawyers is that, in an unprecedented move, the UN Security Council has fully endorsed a business plan seizing an opportunity from immense devastation and intolerable human suffering – a novelty as to its blatancy but sadly recalling “the long-standing relationship between imperialism, predatory capitalism, and international law”, as noted by Janne Nijman previously on this blog.

(Re)construction, Development and New-Cities-Building 

New-cities-building is a model of urban development that has many different roots in intellectual history. Most recently, such ideas have taken the form of proposed “charter cities”, an idea originally developed around 2010 by former World Bank chief economist and Nobel laureate, Paul Romer, who envisioned the idea of new cities built from scratch inside the territory of less-developed countries as a means to boost their economic growth and overall welfare. Charter cities are heavily influenced by the older and more established notion of special economic zones (SEZs), and hence vulnerable to some of the same criticisms on SEZs as being primarily concerned with facilitating private investment, mostly FDI, through tax exemptions and deregulation. In Romer’s own words, charter cities are sorts of SEZ on a larger scale, “with room for residents as well as firms”. Larger-scale refers here to the greater enclosure of private space within a state’s territory. This becomes clear when Romer relates his model as “start ups” to “opt-in”, going well-beyond traditional SEZs which do not enjoy the degree of self-government prerogatives, or special private jurisdiction, that the “charter”, that is a sort of constitution of the new city, is meant to offer to these new urban enclaves. 

As historian Quinn Slobodian eloquently puts it, “those who became most excited about Romer’s plan (…) were not existing states like Canada but entrepreneurial libertarians who thought it might be nice to have a mini-state of their own (…)  a self-conscious choice to make corporate governance the foundation of human community”. Accordingly, the charter city dream has been heavily promoted by the Charter Cities Institute (CCI), a non-for-profit private organization based in California, driven by techno-libertarian visions and anarcho-capitalist ideas. It has very strong ties with the Seasteading Institute, which promotes the creation of floating cities on the Ocean, “OUTSIDE of all Exclusive Economic Zones”. In both cases, the major tenet is to create spaces capable of escaping public jurisdiction as much as possible, or in Surabhi Ranganathan’s words, spaces which can overcome “the tedium of established forms of law and government”. Today, one of the main projects of CCI is the promotion and creation of so-called “freedom cities” in the US.  

Donald Trump’s Flavour for New Cities and the Beginnings of his Gaza Plan 

When campaigning for a second term as US president, Donald Trump repeatedly evoked the idea of building “freedom cities” across the US. According to Trump, people could move to these new cities if they found themselves alienated by the prevailing ideological, political and social mores of US big metropolises at the moment – all of which are supposedly leaning more towards the liberal-progressive side of the political spectrum (for a critical appraisal, see Woodworth). 

Once in office for his second term, President Trump ventilated the ludicrous and de-humanizing plan to turn the Gaza strip into a “Riviera on the Mediterranean”, involving the removal of the Gazan population to places where they could lead a better life – and not stand in the way of developing the Gaza strip into something which can only be described as a real-estate fantasy project, grotesquely detailed in the completely overblown AI-generated video on “Trump Gaza”. Trump announced his vision of what has been ridiculed as a Gaz-a-Lago, during a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in the White House, on February 4 2025. According to that proposal, Gazans would be free to leave or stay, but if they chose to leave, they would not be allowed to return. In a cruel and demeaning way, the blatantly illegal Trump Gaza plan could be understood as a slanted merger of two conceptions of charter cities in one: creating a new urban sphere in the Palestinian territory of the Gaza strip which aspires to attract rich migrants from across the world, as some form of real-estate project, and the simultaneous relocation of the Gazan population which would inevitably also require the construction of new sites of living – it is everyone’s guess whether these new conurbations would resemble more the supposedly shiny new urban agglomeration in the Gaza strip or the refugee camps in which millions of Palestinians have lived for decades. 

Resolution 2803 and the Real Estate Plan 

At the beginning, Trump’s plans on Gaza seemed delusional and derailed to many, arguably not worth of taking seriously. Sadly, however, these ideas entered his Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict, of September 2025, which was endorsed by the UN Security Council in Resolution 2803 on 17 November 2025, and reproduced in toto in its Annex 1.  While Burgis-Kasthala has already reproduced Point 10 of the Plan, which deals with the financing of Gaza’s reconstruction,  let us reflect further on this, and reproduce it now together with Point 11: 

“10. A Trump economic development plan to rebuild and energize Gaza will be created by convening a panel of experts who have helped birth some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East. Many thoughtful investment proposals and exciting development ideas have been crafted by well-meaning international groups, and will be considered to synthesize the security and governance frameworks to attract and facilitate these investments that will create jobs, opportunity, and hope for future Gaza. 

11. A special economic zone will be established with preferred tariff and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries.” (emphasis added)

While there is no direct reference to charter cities in these lines, the references to “modern cities miracles” and “investment proposals and exciting development ideas” clearly echo a whole set of libertarian plans which build on the notion of SEZs and which consist of creating pockets of (urban) spaces which would find themselves disconnected from their surrounding political geography, i.e. taken out of the pocket of the given national territory of a state. Furthermore, a major concern with such a “peace plan” is how the transformation of Gaza into a SEZ, with the resulting security and governance frameworks emanating from ideas on “modern miracle cities” (which could very well be the “charter”, indeed) will stand in the way of a two state solution in the long run. 

Charter cities and the construction of new urban spaces more generally can cut in different ways: they can be deployed in order to project utopian plans for a supposedly better urban future for those who buy into a particular vision, they also inevitably work to the detriment of large masses of people who would suffer enormously from the concrete realization of these plans. In the Gaza example this is even more readily apparent than in the case of “freedom cities”. Although Point 12 of the Comprehensive Plan on Gaza now mentions that “no one will be forced to leave Gaza and those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return” (apparently rectifying one of the most troubling aspects of original Trump Gaza plan), there are well-grounded concerns that this plan could eventually result in the mass expulsion of civilians from Gaza which would, if carried out, potentially qualify as a crime against humanity. 

The endorsement of Trump’s 20 points by the Security Council and the accompanying resolution raise further questions. A key element of Resolution 2803 is that the so-called Board of Peace (BoP), which is supposed to govern Gaza until the Palestinian Authority has reformed to a degree that the “credible pathway to Palestinian statehood” can finally be identified, is bestowed with international legal personality. This step is an extraordinary form of creating a new entity with international legal personality by virtue of a UN Security Council Resolution which does not seem to be anchored in international law categories but instead      has contours more akin to those of a corporate identity. Arguably, this Resolution also constitutes an unprecedented means through which the Security Council bypasses the UN itself and internationally recognized post-conflict efforts in favour of an entrepreneurial experiment centred on private investment, which is another reason why we agree with Burgis-Kasthala that this is “a historic and deeply problematic Resolution”. 

As with many other aspects of Trump’s 20 points plan for Gaza, it is very uncertain whether and if so in which form it will be implemented. It is just as likely for the BoP to see the light of day as the entire 20 points plan being shelved entirely. While this question of the practical implementation of the plan is of course crucial for the lives of Gazans, one can argue that the side-effects of this type of regional private ordering by the UN Security Council will persist in any way. By fully endorsing the 20 points plan and elevating the BoP to the level of an actor with international legal personality, this international legal development contributes to an entrenchment of libertarian ideas of private ordering – perhaps reminiscent of older forms of “territorial and infrastructural acquisition” and of “commodification of an entire territory” (Nijman)— into current and messy world re-ordering moves.