WASHINGTON — With the last remaining Israeli hostage finally returned home, the real work of rebuilding Gaza is now beginning, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee exclusively told The Post.
“It’s just now really starting to take hold. Things will start moving much more rapidly now that the hostages are back,” he said. “Quite frankly, the Israelis were in no mood to start building a new life for people in Gaza until Hamas was finally held responsible for the last of the hostages.”
Israel on Jan. 26 recovered Israeli police officer Ran Gvili’s body, which Hamas had taken to Gaza after killing him on Oct. 7, 2023. With that final return, Huckabee said, Gaza is entering a new and daunting phase: the slow, incremental resurrection of a territory left in “absolute ruins” after years of war.
“This isn’t going to be an event; it’s going to be a process,” he said. “People will begin to move out of areas that are really dangerous — the red zones — into the green zones. Housing is being constructed. Utilities will be restored.”
Materials and now flowing into the territory with the first steps involving the installation of pre-fabricated homes “so people can start a new life and maybe have a future in Gaza,” he said.
“People will be able to access not just housing, but utilities that work — rebuilding a society pretty much from the rubble of a war that never should have lasted this long,” he said.
“Rebuilding from scratch”
Huckabee cautioned that the rebuild won’t be an overnight fix; the extent of the destruction could stretch out the timeline — especially depending on global commitment and funding.
“We’re talking years,” Huckabee said. “It could be two, three years. It could be 10 years. A lot of it depends on how many nations actually step up.”
Oversight of Gaza’s reconstruction will fall to a technocratic governing committee tasked with the gritty, real-world work of restoring Gaza’s infrastructure.
“This is the heavy lifting,” Huckabee said. “Electricity. Water. Sewer. Roads. Cell towers. Internet. These are not political appointees looking for an office and a badge — these are people with real skills who know how to make things work.”
Most of the technocrats, he said, will come from Arab and Muslim states in the region, chosen for technical expertise rather than politics.
“If you’re rebuilding a society from scratch, you need people who actually know how to run things,” Huckabee said. “You need people who can build sewer systems, water systems, power grids, communications networks.”
The committee falls under President Trump’s international “Board of Peace,” which Huckabee said is focused more on the funding and enforcement of standards. To date, the board’s members include 25 member states — but European Union countries have so far refused to sign on.
“I find it interesting that some of the nations that criticized Israel the most — saying they weren’t doing enough humanitarian work — you’d be hard pressed to find them doing the heavy lifting right now,” Huckabee said. “A lot of them have talked. They haven’t walked.”
A central responsibility of the group will be ensuring Hamas or other extremist networks do not infiltrate the reconstruction effort — whether through aid groups, contractors, or payrolls.
“You’ve got to make sure the people getting paychecks and doing the rebuilding don’t have ties to terrorists,” he said. “Israel has been through too much to be careless about that.”
Beyond rebuilding streets and buildings, Huckabee said Gaza must undergo a deeper transformation — including a complete overhaul of an education system he said has fueled hatred for decades.
“Education will be restored to something that no longer incites children to hate Jews or want to kill them,” he said. “That’s been part of the curriculum in Gaza for over 20 years. That’s got to stop. And it’s going to stop.”
A brighter future
Looking ahead, Huckabee pointed to Jared Kushner’s ambitious vision of transforming Gaza’s Mediterranean coastline into a thriving economic and tourism hub — a future he said investors are beginning to take more seriously as stability improves.
“People have scoffed at that vision,” Huckabee said. “But we’re in a very different place than we were a month ago. A year from now, we’re going to be in a much better place.”
He argued Gaza’s collapse was not inevitable — saying it could have become a Middle Eastern success story decades ago if not for Hamas’ grip on power.
“Gaza could have been Singapore,” Huckabee said. “Instead, they turned it into Haiti.”
To underscore the scale of Hamas’ militarization, he described Gaza as small in size but hollowed out by terror infrastructure beneath the surface.
“All of Gaza is about the size of Las Vegas,” Huckabee said. “And underneath it is a tunnel system larger than the London Underground — more than 500 miles — not to get kids to school or people to hospitals, but to shelter terror activity and hide hostages.”
Much of that underground tunnel system was destroyed in the war — along with most everything that sat above it outside of Gaza City, making the rebuild process exceedingly daunting.
“We’re rebuilding a society pretty much from the rubble of a war that never should have lasted this long,” Huckabee said, placing full responsibility for the war’s length on Hamas dragging out the conflict.
“I hope people never forget why this lasted this long,” he said. “It lasted this long because Hamas refused to let the hostages go. They held on and held on — killing people, torturing people, raping hostages, starving hostages.”
But with the war’s end and hostages now home, Huckabee said Gaza’s rebuild is finally moving in the right direction.
“It’s a gargantuan undertaking,” he said. “But we are in a better place than we were a week ago, two weeks ago, a month ago — and it’s moving forward.”
