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Israel’s far-right finance minister has said that Gaza could become “a real estate bonanza” and that a “business plan” for the enclave had been sent to President Donald Trump.
“We have paid a lot of money for this war,” Bezalel Smotrich said during an appearance at a conference in Tel Aviv on Wednesday, according to remarks widely published in Israeli media. “We have to see how we are dividing up the land in percentages.”
“There is a business plan, put together by the most professional people here, that is on President Trump’s desk,” Smotrich said, according to the Times of Israel.
“We’ve done the demolition phase, which is always the first phase of urban renewal. Now we need to build. It’s much cheaper.”
Trump previously said the U.S. could “take over” Gaza, displacing the enclave’s residents and transforming the strip into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
The United Nations estimated in April that roughly 92 percent of all residential buildings in Gaza had been damaged or destroyed since October 2023. It added that it would take “decades” to remove the nearly 50 million tons of rubble from the territory.
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