The call about rebuilding Gaza is a piece of reporting John Kiriakou delivered at the top of his own programme on Friday 7 November 2025, on the basis of a telephone call he says he had received that day from a contact inside the Israeli government.
What he was told
Kiriakou stamped the date himself before giving the substance. “we’re recording this on Friday the 7th of November and I wanted to tell you about a call I received today. It was from a contact of mine in the Israeli government. He said something that was very interesting. He said that the Israeli government has reached out to private American companies to redevelop Gaza. private American companies working with the Israeli government, not with Gaza Palestinians, to rebuild Gaza.”[1]
He then put a competing plan to the contact — the arrangement circulating in the Israeli press under which “Israel would own Gaza, but Saudi Arabia would administer it and would spend its own oil money there to create a a port and an airport and hospitals and pave the roads.”[2]
The answer he reports drawing a distinction between the press and the military: “he said that’s being discussed in the newspapers but not by members of the Israeli military.” Kiriakou’s own gloss followed immediately — “So it looks like the fix is already in.”[3]
Why he treats it as settled
The reason Kiriakou reads a single call as confirmation is that he says he watched the same proposal die once before. In his account of his first overseas tour, recorded at the Chas Freeman Gaza plan, Saudi Arabia offered in 1991 to fund a port, an airport, a desalination plant and an electrical grid in Gaza, and Israel refused outright — at a time when Hamas was small enough that “nobody was even paying attention to it.” His question about the current version is therefore rhetorical: “There was never any plan to develop Gaza … Why why would it be different now?”[2]