Reuters Gulf Currents Newsletter – Investment goals, energy shifts, diplomatic signals on Gaza

By Andrew Mills
Deputy Bureau Chief, Gulf

This week, members of Reuters’ Gulf Bureau and our colleagues from the Middle East Breaking News Hub have been in Abu Dhabi, pitching in to cover and help run the inaugural ReutersNEXT journalism summit to be held in the Gulf.

This week’s edition of the newsletter focuses almost entirely on themes that emerged from the summit, which aimed to take a snapshot of the Gulf region now and to look ahead to the future. Two Saudi hospitality companies made major news during interviews with Reuters’ reporters on Wednesday, as did Masdar, the UAE’s leading renewables company.

The UAE’s foreign ministry also dropped some hints about what it is prioritizing when it comes to the second phase of Trump’s plan for Gaza.

News briefing:

The CEO of Saudi resort developer Red Sea Global told us in an interview on the sidelines of ReutersNEXT that the company plans to expand beyond Saudi Arabia. CEO John Pagano told Reuters that the company, which has previously focused only on building luxury resorts on islands off the kingdom’s Red Sea coast, has finalised a deal for a luxury property in Italy.

Saudi Arabia's AlUla cultural heritage site, which attracted 300,000 visitors last year, plans to offer projects worth $1.6 billion to private sector investors, an official from the site said in an interview at Reuters NEXT on Wednesday. AlUla is mainly funded by the Saudi finance ministry and now hopes to draw in private funds for about 21 projects it hopes to flow to the market next year.

The UAE's leading renewable energy company, Masdar, has deployed $30 billion between capital and leverage over the past two years and is looking to deploy another $20 billion, CEO Mohamed Al Ramahi said in an interview at Reuters NEXT Gulf.

UAE prioritizes Palestinian political reform

Front and centre at ReutersNEXT was the largest diplomatic issue hanging over our region: the effort to negotiate a second phase of U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan for the post-war future of Gaza.

Anwar Gargash, foreign policy adviser to the UAE president, offered some important glimpses of the issues his country would like to see addressed as he called for a new approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s time, he said, to move beyond the rigid, all-or-nothing approaches, which he called “maximalist positions”, in the region.

"This is definitely a moment of opportunity. I think the first thing to say, we see opportunity because we have a chance today to change course," he said.

Gargash’s comments were important because the UAE is pushing to prioritize finding ways to reform the political landscape of Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

“We've had 30 years of the trajectory of political Islam, and political Islam was the main combatant here in the two years of war," Gargash said, adding that political Islam could now be waning.

The UAE sees Islamist groups such as Hamas as an existential threat .

Gargash also urged reform of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, Hamas' rival, which expects to play a significant role in post-war Gaza.

The Emirati priorities for reform that Gargash laid out at ReutersNEXT, focusing on a need for less maximalist political positions, stand in contrast to U.S. President Donald Trump’s emphasis on plans to rebuild the physical infrastructure of the enclave – and he looks to wealthy Gulf Arab states like the UAE to fund that reconstruction.

U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner were also in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday to discuss Trump’s plan with Emirati authorities, according to state news agency WAM.

We don’t know what they discussed, but it’s hard not to wonder if they asked for an Emirati financial commitment towards Gaza’s reconstruction.

Reuters Gulf Bureau Chief Maha El Dahan put a similar question to one of the UAE’s biggest and most successful real estate developers, Emaar founder Mohammed Alabbar.

The Dubai-based developer told ReutersNEXT that he has not been approached to take part in post-war reconstruction in Gaza and added that he wouldn’t be inclined to join if asked. Rebuilding should be the responsibility of those who caused the destruction, he said. “Everybody should clean up his garbage.”

His comments may resonate with other Gulf investors wary of reputational and operational risks tied to post-war projects in Gaza – the very investors the U.S. administration is counting on to fund reconstruction.

The Last Wave:

A team of Reuters journalists in the Middle East provided the ReutersNEXT audience with a glimpse behind the headlines to discuss what we cover, how we do it and the toll the last two years of conflict has taken on many of us working in this region.

The entire conversation is a must watch from the summit at this link.

Reuters’ Beirut Bureau Chief Maya Gebeily explained how difficult it has been to keep reporting on our region after so many journalists have been killed, including our colleagues Issam Abdallah, who was killed by Israeli tank fire in Lebanon in 2023 and Hussam Al-Masri, killed this year in an Israeli attack whole operating a camera at Gaza’s Nasser Hospital.

“One of the things that has been so heavy for journalists across the region is the fact that we want to be able to say never again. Unfortunately we can’t say that because we’re seeing these attacks on journalists. That report investigating Issam’s killing came out nearly two years ago now. We still have not received a response from the Israeli military. And this is what we do, we put out the maximum amount of evidence, the strongest reporting possible on the table and then now we wait for the response, which should come.”

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