On 6 August 2026, Nickolay Mladenov, the High Representative for the Gaza Strip in the “Board of Peace”, publicly thanked the United Arab Emirates, mentioning it alongside Qatar, Türkiye, Egypt and the United States in recognition of its role in supporting the negotiating process.
Because the UAE was not formally listed among the official mediators in the ceasefire talks, the acknowledgement amounted to a partial disclosure of a role that had largely remained in the shadows.
Three days later, on 9 August, an even clearer indication emerged. In comments concerning the proposed “Green City” east of Rafah, the office of the Israeli prime minister was reported as saying that the UAE would be responsible for construction and financing, and that the occupation authorities had formally requested that local militias cooperating with them handle security administration and the screening of residents inside the project.
The Emirati role had therefore moved from a passing diplomatic reference in statements by the Board of Peace to an explicit Israeli acknowledgement of direct involvement.
These two developments, occurring within days of one another, returned attention to a role that had remained ambiguous in media coverage since the early months of the war. The declared Emirati role had been associated primarily with humanitarian relief under the “Gallant Knight” campaigns, carried out with Israeli facilitation. Yet the undeclared role played by Abu Dhabi in shaping the “day after” in Gaza predates the Trump plan and is tied to a network of diplomatic and security tracks, many of them secret and some publicly documented.
The “Day After” and the Struggle Over Gaza’s Future
The “day after” became a contentious issue from the early months of the war. As the genocidal war intensified, attention turned to the nature of governance in Gaza after military operations ended, together with questions surrounding security, border crossings, reconstruction and Gaza’s relationship with the West Bank.
Three distinct visions emerged around these issues. All shared one central assumption, that the situation that existed before 7 October would not return, but they differed sharply in objectives and mechanisms.
The Israeli vision, as outlined by Benjamin Netanyahu in early 2024 and repeated before the US Congress in July of that year, rejected any Palestinian administration connected either to Hamas or the Palestinian Authority. Netanyahu summarised the position as “neither Hamastan nor Fatahstan”.
The approach relied on local actors to manage civilian affairs while “Israel” retained security control.
Washington under Joe Biden agreed with Tel Aviv on excluding Hamas, but rejected a permanent Israeli security presence. After Israeli opposition to the return of the Palestinian Authority, the US position shifted towards the idea of an Arab force assuming responsibility during a transitional period under international oversight.
By contrast, the “Arab Six” proposed transferring governance entirely to the Palestinian Authority as part of a political process leading towards statehood. Reports later indicated that then-US Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected the proposal as unrealistic.
On the Palestinian side, the position remained that any arrangement for the day after the war should be exclusively Palestinian and based on internal national consensus.
That consensus, however, never materialised. Successive interventions, the Moscow and Beijing conferences, and the outcomes of the Palestine summit in Cairo all failed to produce a comprehensive formula. The continuing Palestinian division therefore remained a gap through which external projects could advance.
Within this landscape, the UAE distinguished itself from the publicly declared Arab positions.
On one hand, it rejected Israeli proposals that would preserve an Israeli security presence in Gaza under an Arab cover. Responding in May 2024 to Netanyahu’s suggestion that Abu Dhabi could help administer Gaza, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed said the UAE would not act as a “cover or supporter” for continued Israeli presence, and that Netanyahu had no legal right to determine such steps.
On the other hand, Abu Dhabi also expressed reservations about the return of the Palestinian Authority under its existing leadership. As documented by the president of the Emirates Policy Center, the UAE viewed Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa as lacking both independence and the capacity to carry out reform.
The UAE therefore began shaping a third path of its own.
The Emirati Vision and Its Early Features
The UAE’s third position did not remain merely a matter of reservation. It developed into a practical framework that Abu Dhabi was the first Arab party to put forward publicly.
On 17 July 2024, Lana Nusseibeh, Assistant Minister for Political Affairs, outlined the vision in an article published by the Financial Times.
The proposal centred on the creation of a “temporary international mission” in Gaza tasked with three responsibilities: responding to the humanitarian crisis, establishing law and order, and laying the foundations for a qualified government capable of preparing the way for reunifying Gaza and the West Bank under a single legitimate Palestinian authority.
Nusseibeh stipulated that such a mission should be established only following a formal invitation from a Palestinian government led by a new prime minister who was both competent and independent. She also called for a strong US commitment to the two-state solution and Israeli cooperation, describing “Israel” as the occupying power.
Several days later, on 25 July, Reem Al Hashimy, Minister of State for International Cooperation, reaffirmed the same framework in official remarks.
She said that security and stability must begin with a just and sustainable solution and a political path leading to an independent Palestinian state, and that returning to conditions that existed before 7 October could not produce lasting peace. She added that Abu Dhabi was prepared to play its role within a sustained effort to resolve the conflict.
The concept was promoted internally as the “first practical proposal from an Arab party”, one designed to accommodate the minimum interests of all parties, Palestinian, Arab, Israeli and American, while bringing all of them into the proposed arrangements.
That formulation itself reflected Abu Dhabi’s ambition to position itself as the actor capable of steering the architecture of Gaza’s future.
Alongside the public proposal, less visible discussions were also taking place.
Media reports indicated that a meeting was held in Abu Dhabi in July 2024 at the invitation of Abdullah bin Zayed. Participants reportedly included Brett McGurk, then an adviser to the US president, Ron Dermer, the Israeli minister of strategic affairs and a close Netanyahu ally, and two Israeli defence officials.
According to reports, the meeting was intended to bridge differences between the Emirati position and the American and Israeli positions.
Notably, it took place one day after Nusseibeh published her proposal in the Financial Times, a sequence that suggested both the seriousness of the initiative and the level of official sponsorship behind it.
Where Trump’s Plan Overlaps With the Emirati Vision
Between Abu Dhabi’s proposal in the summer of 2024 and Trump’s 20-point plan announced in October 2025, there is a degree of overlap difficult to dismiss as coincidence.
The architecture proposed by Nusseibeh included temporary international administration, a qualified technocratic government, the sidelining of existing national structures in favour of an alternative civilian administration, Gulf-funded reconstruction and linkage to a political process.
Direct counterparts appeared in the structure of the Trump plan: the “Board of Peace” as a transitional authority, a Palestinian technocratic committee to manage daily affairs, the disarmament of the resistance and an international stabilisation force.
This overlap suggests that Emirati ideas formed a major structural basis from which the American plan was later developed.
That does not mean the US document was copied directly from the Emirati proposal. A more precise reading is that Abu Dhabi was the early advocate of a framework whose main components were later carried into the American plan more than a year afterwards.
The overlap was also an extension of an organised Arab process that had begun before the Trump administration.
During the Biden era, a grouping known as the “six states”, consisting of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar and the Palestinian Authority, coordinated with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and presented its ideas for Gaza’s post-war future during his shuttle diplomacy.
That process reached its limits when Blinken rejected the Arab proposal, leaving the initiative stalled between US rejection and Israeli refusal to accept any political horizon.
With the transfer of the file to the Trump administration, this nucleus expanded into a framework involving eight states, continuing what the “six states” had begun.
Within that process, the UAE retained an advanced position based on three factors that gave it an advantage over its partners: its normalisation ties with the Israeli occupation government, which were neither severed nor downgraded during the war; its financial weight in reconstruction; and its early role in formulating the framework itself.
These factors made Abu Dhabi the Arab actor best positioned to move simultaneously between the American, Israeli and Arab arenas.
From this point, the overlap became operational. The Emirati vision increasingly functioned as a reference framework for the arrangements being developed, while other Arab proposals remained constrained by the unresolved requirement of Palestinian consensus.
The Abu Dhabi formula was therefore the proposal most closely aligned with what “Israel” was prepared to accept and what the United States was willing to sponsor.
The UAE’s Expected Role in Gaza
Beyond written proposals, the emerging practical arrangements indicate an Emirati role that goes further than financing and humanitarian relief.
This role also aligns with an Israeli veto against Qatari or Turkish participation in the post-war order, whether within the international force, verification committees, or the civil-military monitoring centre, while Emirati involvement has been welcomed and facilitated.
This distinction reflects a strategic sorting process in which Tel Aviv views Qatari influence as hostile to its calculations, while seeing Emirati influence, anchored in normalisation agreements, as more dependable.
Researcher James Dorsey identified this effort at an early stage. In November 2024, he wrote that Mohammed bin Zayed was manoeuvring, with Netanyahu’s support, to replace Qatar with the UAE as the principal Gulf actor in post-war Gaza, and that both saw Emirati-funded aid and reconstruction as a means of marginalising Hamas.
The UAE’s advanced position is also visible in the structure of the Board of Peace itself.
Reem Al Hashimy is a member of the Gaza Executive Board, while several members of the technocratic body, the National Committee for the Administration of the Gaza Strip, reportedly have direct links either to Abu Dhabi or to the UAE-backed Mohammed Dahlan current.
More symbolically and functionally significant is Nickolay Mladenov.
Trump appointed Mladenov as High Representative and as the liaison between the technocratic committee and the Board of Peace. At the same time, Mladenov serves as director-general of the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy in Abu Dhabi, the state institution responsible for training Emirati diplomats.
The overlap between his role within an international administration and his senior position in an Emirati state institution prompted Middle East Eye to describe him as “the UAE’s man in Gaza”.
The description reflects the breadth of space available to Abu Dhabi to influence decision-making structures on the ground and the shaping of Gaza’s future during this critical period.
Mohammed Dahlan Returns to the Foreground
This track also coincides with the notable re-emergence of Mohammed Dahlan.
Sources reported that Dahlan played a role in the final hours before agreement was reached on the roadmap proposed by Mladenov for moving into the second phase of the agreement.
He reportedly relied on his network of relationships inside Gaza and with Palestinian factions, as well as a channel of communication with the US administration and envoy Jared Kushner.
Dahlan himself confirmed the existence of communication regarding the second phase.
This places a UAE-backed Palestinian current at the centre of communication channels surrounding the agreement and gives it a role in maintaining the cohesion of the arrangement.
“Green Rafah” and the Security Architecture on the Ground
These various threads converge most clearly in the “Green Rafah” project, also referred to as the “Rafah Ghetto”.
According to reports citing Netanyahu’s office, the UAE is the party designated to finance and build the proposed city east of Rafah, within the “yellow line” under military control.
The Israeli side has also formally requested that militias drawn from the remnants of Yasser Abu Shabab’s group assume responsibility for security administration and the screening of residents.
This detail is reinforced by earlier field indications concerning alleged Emirati support for the militia.
Images previously published from the group’s positions east of Rafah included vehicles carrying Emirati licence plates, making the connection between external financing and a local security arm more than a purely theoretical assumption.
In addition, sources speaking privately to NoonPost said the UAE-backed Mohammed Dahlan current has been carrying out activities on the ground in Gaza.
These included broad engagement with individuals and professionals in preparation for filling government vacancies once the technocratic committee enters the Strip.
The sources also said that the principal financing so far for the committee tasked with administering Gaza during the transitional phase has come from the UAE, and that the main financial commitment intended to facilitate government operations comes from the same source.
Taken together, these details indicate that the UAE has been a central actor operating behind the scenes across a range of political and field-level arenas, with the aim of taking a leading role in shaping Gaza’s post-war future.
That role has advanced with clear Israeli facilitation, while other Arab and Islamic actors have faced restrictions and outright rejection.
At the same time, the UAE has openly maintained that its project cannot succeed without the complete removal of the Palestinian resistance presence and the promotion of what it describes as “de-radicalisation”.
Abu Dhabi views this as a more viable pathway for expanding an “Abrahamic culture” rooted in normalisation agreements and coexistence with the occupying power.
