By Oscar Rickett
October 3, 2025
Aryeh Lightstone, Naguib Sawiris, Marc Rowan and Sigrid Kaag were named in the leaked Blair plan for Gaza
Earlier this week, a draft plan of what Gaza’s governance would look like under former British prime minister Tony Blair was leaked.
Blair, who took Britain into the war in Iraq and has spent his life since leaving office travelling around the world making money and building influence, is being considered to lead a transitional authority in the Palestinian enclave.
The plan for the Gaza International Transitonal Authority (Gita) reveals a hierarchy in which an international board of billionaires and businesspeople sit at the top, while highly vetted “neutral” Palestinian administrators are at the bottom.
The administration would work closely with Israel, Egypt and the US, and, according to Israeli sources cited by Haartez, has the backing of the White House.
According to the draft, Gita will be run by an international board that has “supreme political and legal authority for Gaza during the transitional period”.
There are four names mentioned in the document as potential candidates for this board. None of them are Palestinian. One is Sigrid Kaag, the UN’s special coordinator for the Middle East peace process.
The others are referred to as “leading international figures with executive and financial expertise”.
These are Marc Rowan, a billionaire who owns one of America’s largest private equity firms, Naguib Sawiris, an Egyptian billionaire in the telecommunications and technology sector, and Aryeh Lightstone, chief executive of the Abraham Accords Peace Institute.
There is no indication that any of these figures has been approached about such a role.
Middle East Eye takes a closer look at Blair’s would-be band for Gaza.
Aryeh Lightstone
A businessman and rabbi, Lightstone has been heavily involved in the creation and advancement of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the US- and Israeli-backed aid distribution mechanism at whose sites in Gaza more than 2,000 people have been killed and thousands more wounded.
Described by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) as a “system of institutionalised starvation and dehumanisation” and as “orchestrated killing”, the GHF took over from the UN as Gaza’s main distributor of aid earlier this year.
A senior adviser to David Friedman when the staunch defender of Israel’s settler movement was the US ambassador to Israel during President Donald Trump’s first term in office, Lightstone is now a close confidant and aide of Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.
The author of a book about the Middle East praised by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is also involved in the Blair plan and has spoken often of the “very valuable” potential of Gaza’s “waterfront property”, Lightstone is officially the CEO of the Abraham Accords Peace Institute, a group describing itself as “a non-partisan, non-profit US organisation dedicated to… these historic peace agreements”.
Lightstone was himself involved in the discussions around – and implementation of – the Abraham Accords, whereby Israel officially established relations with a handful of Arab states, including the UAE.
‘Israel doesn’t want this war, but it has decided it will finish it on its own terms.’
Executive Director of the Abraham Accords Peace Institute, Aryeh Lightstone, blames ‘feckless’ leadership from the West for the escalation in the Middle-East.@TomSwarbrick1 pic.twitter.com/cnu0JoKGX7
— LBC (@LBC) October 2, 2024
Earlier this year, the Jewish News Syndicate reported that The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing US think tank, had acquired the Abraham Accords Peace Institute, which was founded by Kushner and staffed by figures tied to the Kohelet Policy Forum, a right-wing effort to reshape Israel funded by American billionaires.
Lightstone is a sharp critic of the UN and has, according to documents obtained by Haaretz, participated in drafting Gaza “day-after” scenarios in cooperation with the White House.
According to those documents, when the topic of a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine came up in discussions with the UN, Lightstone reportedly said that “the timing was inappropriate for such a step and that the priority should be to remove Hamas from the scene”.
In 2018, when Lightstone was a senior adviser to Friedman, disclosure forms revealed that he had financial ties to entities involved in Israel policy or that could have business with the government.
One of these groups, the anonymously funded Shining City Community, which had given about $1m to Im Tirtzu, an organisation that says it is “working hard to protect Zionism and the state of Israel”, owed Lightstone as much as $50,000.
In 2016, even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu slammed Im Tirtzu for mounting a campaign that labelled hundreds of Israeli cultural figures as “foreign agents” for their affiliation with supposed left-wing groups.
Lightstone served for a period as Shining City’s executive director, saying he was focused on “developing education for state and federal officials regarding the dangers” of boycotts of Israel.
Naguib Sawiris
Worth close to $10bn, Sawiris is from a family of billionaires. His construction magnate father Onsi founded Orascom, which would go on to become Egypt’s first multinational conglomerate.
Now 71, Sawiris made most of his money in telecoms – he co-founded Egypt’s oldest mobile network operator, Mobinil, now Orange Egypt – and mining. He is heavily involved in the gold industry through his Luxembourg-based holding company La Mancha.
The Egyptian billionaire has a long-standing relationship with Blair, one that may even predate the latter’s tenure as prime minister.
Blair was on the guestlist for the wedding of Sawiris’s son, Ansi, which took place in 2020 at the foot of the Pyramids of Giza. In 2013, the two men were photographed together close to where Blair was staying at a villa owned by right-wing Italian media tycoon and former president Silvio Berlusconi.
Other meetings have reportedly taken place on board Sawiris’s luxury yacht in Saint Tropez, on his private plane, in Cairo and in South Africa.
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The tycoon has developed a strong affinity for the Greek island Mykonos, buying up property and flying over his favourite Egyptian musicians and actors to perform and party there. In 2017, he and Blair were photographed in Mykonos at an upscale restaurant frequented by Tom Hanks and British businessman Philip Green.
Sawiris was involved in “rebuilding Afghanistan” in the wake of the US- and UK-led invasion of the country, and it was at this time that he also worked with Blair.
“Sawiris has advised Blair before. And his main expertise is in setting up mobile networks, so he’ll be more of the infrastructure or rebuilding guy, I think,” Nihal El Aasar, an Egyptian writer and researcher, told MEE.
“He’s the richest man in Egypt but he also likes being involved politically. He’s on Twitter [X] all the time but he’s not as bad as Elon Musk politically,” she said, adding that Sawiris has criticised the administration of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and likes to project an image of “balance”.
“But he still thinks the problem with Egypt is that the military is too involved in the economy and doesn’t let the free market reign,” El Aasar said. “He’s a free market purist.”
Given the UAE’s vast investment and involvement in Egypt, Sawiris, who keeps his money out of the country, has developed close ties to the Emiratis, who share Blair’s vision for Gaza as a free capital zone modelled on Dubai.
In 2024, Sawiris set up a media platform called Moniify as a kind of money-oriented CNBC for millennials. It was based in Dubai and launched there earlier this year with a lavish party at which the Egyptian DJed.
But just weeks later, the firm was gutted, with staff losing their jobs and left with nowhere to go.
A strong critic of the Muslim Brotherhood, setting up the centre-right Free Egyptians Party in the wake of the Arab Spring, Sawiris is an ardent believer in western capitalism who has nevertheless criticised Israel and the US – and met with North Korean President Kim Jong Un.
“Israel does not wish good for Egypt, nor does the US. No one wants good for Egypt except the Egyptians themselves,” Sawiris said in an interview earlier this year.
Marc Rowan
One of the wealthiest financiers on Wall Street, Marc Rowan is worth an estimated $10.2bn, according to Bloomberg.
The 63-year-old Jewish American is the CEO of Apollo Global Management, described by CNN as “a behemoth in private equity, an industry notorious for its cutthroat, profit-at-all-costs standards”.
Private equity firms, along with hedge funds and venture capitalists, make up the shadowy world of “private capital”, a market worth more than $24 trillion.
Apollo has $840bn in assets under management, including a significant amount on behalf of Saudi Arabian and Emirati investors. “Abu Dhabi and the Emirates are by far the largest investors in Apollo,” Rowan said during an interview in Israel last year.
In that interview, conducted by Israeli venture capitalist Michael Eisenberg, Rowan described himself as a “proud supporter of Israel” and its military, called the country “our refuge”, and said it was “a unique and special place, and we are the chosen people”.
He said he was “probably in Abu Dhabi” on the day of the 7 October Hamas-led attack on Israel. “Now there’s an opportunity to change the equation,” Rowan said, in reference to what he thought after the attack, “and the equation is Iran”.
In May 2024, he said in relation to Israel’s genocide in Gaza: “What I see is a just war.” But he added that “the idea that we have lost the narrative is just insane”.
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In 2020, Rowan and his wife Carolyn contributed $1m to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. In 2024, he interviewed to be Trump’s treasury secretary, with the president said to be impressed by him.
Rowan is on the board of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school and is one of the university’s major donors.
In the latter half of 2023, he led a campaign to get the president and chairman of the university sacked after it hosted a festival called Palestine Writes, which featured Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, whom Rowan considered to be among a group of “well known antisemites and fermenters of hate and racism”.
After 7 October 2023, Rowan was enraged by what he perceived to be the university’s failure to acknowledge the pain caused by the attack on Israel.
Mounting what one academic called “a hostile Republican takeover of a distressed institution”, Rowan succeeded in having university president Liz Magill resign.
As pro-Palestine protests spread across US college campuses, Rowan denounced them: “It’s not antisemitism. It is anti-Americanism.”
Sigrid Kaag
By far the least controversial name on this list, Sigrid Kaag is a respected European technocrat who served as the UN’s senior humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator for Gaza from late 2023 to mid-2025.
Before that, Kaag was a UN official in Beirut, Damascus and Jerusalem, as well as a minister in her home country, the Netherlands.
Kaag, who belongs to a liberal Dutch party, said in a recent interview that she, among other diplomats and humanitarian workers, “never expected the conflict [in Gaza] to last this long”.
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“Gaza has been destroyed to the point of visually seeing a moon landscape,” Kaag said.
In a reference that would be unlikely to please Blair’s collaborator Kushner, Kaag said of Israel’s genocide in Gaza: “Life has been made unlivable to the extent you suddenly hear proposals such as, ‘well we can turn Gaza into the Riviera’ and people should so-called voluntarily migrate.”
The Dutch politician has said that what is happening in Gaza “will haunt all of us”, and that it is “a stain on our collective conscience”.
Talking about her work administering aid in Gaza, she said that Israel had “severely traumatised and deprived” the population of “basically everything that amounts to human dignity”.
“Political will is everything. The rest is technicalities, it can be arranged,” she said of aid distribution. Kaag said that forcing relief to be delivered through the GHF instead of the UN had seen the “weaponisation of aid” and that accusations that Hamas had been taking aid before were “not proven”.
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