Development policy · Post-conflict reconstruction · Gaza
Reconstruction is a political question before it is a technical one.
I research how Gaza gets rebuilt, who decides, and why plan after plan is written without the people it is written about. Palestinian from Gaza, working on post-conflict governance and international development policy.
The short version
A Distinction
I graduated with an MPhil in Development Studies, awarded a Distinction for the overall degree and a Distinction for my dissertation, "The Reconstruction of Failure".
Read where it counts
My overview of the reconstruction plans written for Gaza by others was sent to United Nations working groups on Palestine and used in their work, and circulated to diplomats and ministry staff.
Two full scholarships
Educated in Gaza's public schools, then a full scholarship to Washington and Lee University in the United States, and a full tuition scholarship for the MPhil at Cambridge.
One of roughly 2,500
Selected for the Azm Global Leaders Fellowship, a two year programme building a new generation of leaders from across the Muslim world.
The record
Selected work
Research, platforms, and briefings, most recent first.
How I work
"Policy should meet reality, not what some want to believe is happening."
Mohammed Mourtaja
Read the plan closely
Reconstruction frameworks are written to be skimmed. What they assume about who governs, and what they quietly leave unfunded, is usually in the annexes.
Check it against the ground
Pledges are not disbursements, and disbursements are not delivery. The distance between a donor conference and a household in Gaza is where the politics lives.
Keep the record
Findings only hold if the evidence behind them can be traced, cited, and defended later. That is why I built GazaIndex.
Areas of focus
Four questions I keep returning to
Post-conflict reconstruction
What rebuilding Gaza would actually require, and why every major international plan has fallen short, read against UN frameworks, donor reports, and conditions on the ground.
Governance after conflict
How Palestinian institutions function, who is permitted to govern during reconstruction, and why frameworks that treat local authority as a risk keep producing the same outcome.
Development and shared prosperity
What actually makes an economy work for the people inside it. How aid, development finance, and investment turn into jobs, services, and prosperity, and why so much of it stops short of reaching a household.
Political economy of the Middle East
Energy markets, labour, and development finance, and how those forces set the boundaries of what reconstruction is possible, and for whom.
Substack
Mourtaja's Newsletter
Writing on Palestine, reconstruction, and development policy: essays, reflections, and analysis of what the week actually changed. Free to read, and free to subscribe.