On Friday, October 10, when Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire in Gaza, I heard from a Palestinian buddy within the Strip. Gaza had been celebrating because the information broke, however grief was by no means distant. “Our feelings are mixed,” he wrote:
Sure, we’re relieved that the genocide has stopped, despite the fact that we stay unsure about what lies forward…. I consider the households whose kids are nonetheless buried underneath the rubble. I consider the mom who doesn’t know the place her son is, the daddy who hasn’t but been capable of even see his kids’s our bodies. It is going to take us a very long time to inform the untold tales.
By then circumstances had deteriorated to some extent “beyond human imagination,” as one other buddy in Gaza put it to me close to the tip of June. The bombing had hardly let up for months; meals had run out or was outrageously unaffordable; costs for transit have been hovering. Many Palestinians within the Strip have been risking their lives to safe assist from the infamous distribution facilities run by the American-backed Gaza Humanitarian Basis. In early October Gaza’s Ministry of Health reported that Israeli forces had killed over 2,500 assist seekers and injured practically 19,000 in only greater than 4 months. “They tell us that there is aid today, and when [people] arrive, they are shot,” stated the buddy who wrote me this summer time. “And so every day, massacre after massacre…. If they could take the air away from us, they would.”
Because the begin of Israel’s devastating marketing campaign, in accordance with the well being ministry, over 68,000 males, ladies, and youngsters within the Strip have been killed and over 170,000 injured. As of Might 2025 that loss of life toll included greater than 2,180 households which have been completely annihilated, erased from Gaza’s civil registry; greater than 5,070 have just one surviving member. These are the official statistics, which embrace solely reported deaths compiled by hospitals and morgues and attributable to Israeli army motion. They’re, with out query, gross underestimates. Between ten and fifteen thousand extra persons are presumed buried underneath the rubble of their properties—additionally thought-about a dramatic undercount, each as a result of wartime circumstances impede knowledge assortment and since the killing of so many whole households has left nobody to report. The spokesperson for the United Nations Workplace for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Olga Cherevko, stated in a September briefing that “the unmistakable smell of death is everywhere—a grisly reminder that the ruins lining the streets hide the remains of mothers, fathers, and children…their lives cut short by the war’s killing machines, many to never be found again.” Authorized consultants, to not point out the testimony of our personal eyes, inform us that this will solely be termed a genocide.
Then there are oblique deaths, from such causes as infections left untreated amid the virtually whole collapse of the well being care system, publicity to poisonous air pollution and uncontrolled fires, and, more and more these previous months, malnutrition and hunger. On August 22, greater than 5 months after Israel broke its earlier cease-fire with Hamas and blocked assist shipments from getting into the Strip, the Built-in Meals Safety Section Classification confirmed that over half 1,000,000 Gazans—1 / 4 of the Strip’s inhabitants—have been affected by catastrophic starvation; malnutrition threatened at the very least 132,000 kids underneath 5. In a correspondence piece for The Lancet, a number of researchers argued that, based mostly on knowledge from current conflicts, there might nicely be 4 oblique deaths for each direct one—which might by now imply that a whole bunch of 1000’s of individuals have died in Gaza over the previous two years. In August, earlier than Israel launched an offensive to occupy Gaza Metropolis and issued evacuation orders to nicely over 600,000 of the realm’s exhausted, hungry residents, a 3rd buddy—who had by then misplaced three of his sisters—instructed me, “Death is harvesting my family one by one.”
Not a lot of the Strip is left standing. Israel has broken or destroyed greater than 90 p.c of Gaza’s properties, destroyed twenty-two of its thirty-six hospitals (leaving the rest partially useful), broken most of its street community, devastated most of its business sector, and razed 1000’s of instructional amenities, together with all twelve of its universities. Unexploded ordnance—Israeli- and US-made missiles, artillery shells, cluster and different high-tech munitions, anti-personnel mines, and anti-tank weapons, in addition to makeshift rockets made by Hamas—fills what stays of the panorama, a few of it programmed to detonate at a future date. Folks returning to their properties and neighborhoods after the cease-fire discovered nothing however vistas of rubble.
Nor has the cease-fire stopped the killing. Simply eight days after the truce, Gaza’s media workplace accused Israel of getting damaged it forty-seven occasions and killed thirty-eight Palestinians because the supposed cessation of hostilities; a day later, after accusing unknown combatants of killing two Israeli troopers in Rafah, Israel launched a wave of strikes throughout the Strip that killed dozens extra. By October 22, in accordance with the International Centre for the Duty to Defend, Israel had apparently violated the cease-fire eighty occasions, killing over ninety-five Palestinians.
Hani al Madhoun—who coordinates the Gaza Soup Kitchen, and whose brother Chef Mahmoud was killed by an Israeli drone strike final November—appeared to anticipate such violations in a social media submit from October 9. The settlement was nearly to enter impact, he wrote, however Israeli tanks stationed on Gaza’s most important north-south street have been nonetheless “shooting at people trying to return” to their properties. “There’s hope,” he continued, “but this is what it looks like right now: an army literally controlling who can move, and people holding their breath for the promise of safety.”
The cease-fire deal that was introduced on October 10 was just like the deal the 2 events signed in January, earlier than Israel broke it two months later. On October 13 Hamas launched all of the residing Israeli hostages nonetheless in captivity and began returning among the our bodies of those that had died; Israel launched 250 Palestinians serving life sentences—over half of whom have been deported to Egypt after which on to 3rd international locations—and 1,700 who had been seized in Gaza and imprisoned since October 7. Humanitarian assist resumed, though by October 21 solely two of Gaza’s 4 crossings—Kerem Shalom within the southeast and Kissufim in central Gaza—have been open for assist shipments, and even these are topic to restrictions. Israeli troops partially withdrew to an “agreed upon” line; they continue to be in charge of 53 p.c of the territory.
This time, nevertheless, the deal was a part of a extra clear scheme for the area’s political future. On September 29 Donald Trump introduced that the White Home had developed a “comprehensive,” twenty-point “plan to end the Gaza Conflict,” reportedly drafted in coordination with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s shut advisor Ron Dermer; President Trump’s US Particular Envoy to the Center East, Steve Witkoff; and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Eight Arab and Muslim-majority states—Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey, Pakistan, and Indonesia—additionally participated and agreed on a draft, though sources instructed Axios that Netanyahu subsequently negotiated last-minute adjustments in his favor, giving Israel a veto over the withdrawal timetable and extra energy to situation its military’s rollback on the disarmament of Hamas. Most strikingly, not one Palestinian official appears to have been consulted, both from Hamas or the Palestinian Authority (PA). When Trump introduced the deal, he was thus, in impact, giving Hamas an ultimatum. “If both sides agree to this proposal,” he stated, “the war will immediately end.”
Trump’s plan was solely the newest of dozens of proposals, agreements, and studies about rebuild and restore the territory for what’s persistently referred to as “the day after.” I do know of twenty-nine such plans—from Israel itself, from the PA, from the EU and the US, from international locations within the Arab world, from Israeli, Arab, and American suppose tanks, and from NGOs. I think I haven’t discovered all of them. They arrive from a spread of ideological beginning factors—from those who deal with Gaza’s rehabilitation purely as a technical drawback to people who go as far as to explicitly envision a future for Gaza with as few Palestinians as doable, if any in any respect. They fluctuate tremendously of their content material, emphasis, and stage of element; some deal with Israeli safety, others on humanitarian help and reconstruction. Trump’s plan has displaced the others, however it didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Understanding this wider corpus of proposals, particularly the extra outstanding amongst them, might reveal the place the Trump plan got here from and what it’ll imply for Gaza.
As I’ve argued in these pages, Israel has lengthy thwarted the viable growth of the Gaza Strip, with the first objective of precluding the institution of a Palestinian state by weakening if not eliminating the financial basis on which it could possibly be constructed. Starting within the early Nineteen Nineties successive Israeli governments stepped up their efforts to implement insurance policies to that impact, inserting Gaza underneath a closure—now in its thirty-fourth yr—that restricted and finally ended the free motion of labor and commerce between the Strip and its pure markets; expropriating and dispossessing Gazans of their water and land; and constraining the event of native establishments that enabled Palestinians to keep up a way of nationwide identification, social group, and inside cohesion. Over time these insurance policies rendered the vast majority of the inhabitants depending on worldwide help to outlive, reworking Palestinians within the eyes of the world from a folks with political and nationwide rights right into a humanitarian drawback. In addition they labored to isolate the folks of Gaza from different Palestinians, thereby fragmenting Palestinian politics as an entire, additional obstructing Palestinian statehood. Israel’s genocidal warfare on Gaza represents the newest stage of this longstanding mission.
Probably the most outstanding “day after” plans at present on supply—from Trump’s to the one proposed in September by former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair—proceed this effort to preempt Palestinian independence and sovereignty. They impose types of governance that exclude Palestinians as political brokers, denying them management over decision-making, making certain that Israel—and by extension the US and EU—retain final energy over Palestinian life in Gaza. In lots of the proposals, as Nur Arafeh and Mandy Turner argued in a far-sighted essay printed in July by the Carnegie Endowment for Worldwide Peace, these governance constructions appear poised to allow “land grabbing, resource extraction, and reconstruction profiteering” on the a part of international traders. Some would additionally implicitly preserve a political and financial separation between Gaza and the West Financial institution, the place Israel stays free to subjugate and cantonize Palestinians at will. Consequently, these supposed plans for a brand new future in Gaza would actually entrap Palestinians in a well-recognized, exhausting, ruinous loop.
The “day after” plans are solely the newest in a protracted line of makes an attempt by Israel and the West to resolve the issue that Gaza has posed for Israeli policymakers. The Strip accommodates, after Jordan, the second-largest focus of Palestinian refugees on the planet; of its whole inhabitants, roughly 66 p.c are refugees from the Nakba and their descendants. Israel has lengthy sought to extinguish their proper of return, which not solely poses an existential menace to the character of the Jewish state but additionally affirms and legitimizes Palestinians’ declare to their ancestral properties, which have been destroyed with Israel’s institution in 1948.1
Hrant Nakashian/1949 UN Archives/Wikimedia Commons
Palestinian refugees from the Nakba boarding ships from Gaza to Lebanon or Egypt, 1949
Gaza has additionally lengthy been the middle of Palestinian nationalist resistance. Within the aftermath of the warfare of 1967, when Israel occupied the Strip, guerrilla fighters based mostly in Gaza’s refugee camps began launching cross-border assaults into Israeli territory (which have been put down within the early Nineteen Seventies by the Israeli military). Militant teams like Fatah and the Well-liked Entrance for the Liberation of Palestine additionally intensified their exercise, and civilian teams constructed up native establishments that supplied a spread of social and financial providers.
Israeli leaders’ anxieties about Gaza elevated throughout the first intifada, a well-liked rebellion towards Israeli occupation that started in December 1987 and continued till its official finish with the signing of the primary Oslo Accord in September 1993. This was additionally the interval throughout which Hamas first emerged because the Palestinian department of the Muslim Brotherhood devoted to armed wrestle towards the occupation—however the resistance throughout these years was based mostly for essentially the most half on civil disobedience. I lived in Gaza in 1988 and 1989 and noticed how, for the primary time, Israel was confronted by largely nonviolent, extremely organized Palestinian collective motion, based on affordable, arguably attainable political calls for to which the state’s leaders have been nonetheless unwilling to agree: the tip of the occupation and the popularity of Palestinians as a folks with genuine nationwide rights.
The intifada pressured each the Israeli public and worldwide observers to confront the subjugation of a folks. Civil disobedience actions akin to boycotts and strikes made that injustice seen and audible. New community-based establishments sprang up each in Gaza and within the West Financial institution to offer providers in a spread of areas—training, well being, meals distribution, and battle decision mediated by and for Palestinians. To Israeli leaders, this social revolution presaged stronger and extra cohesive resistance to the occupation; it additionally threatened Israeli management by inspiring extra help for Palestinians within the West. Going ahead, Israeli officers realized that they wanted to extinguish, nevertheless they may, the company of Palestinians to behave as a unified folks and articulate political calls for. Particularly, as Amjad Iraqi has written in these pages, they discovered they needed to “dismantle Gaza as a pillar of Palestinian society and national struggle.”
What adopted have been a long time of ever-tightening restrictions on the Strip’s financial growth. Including to Gaza’s distress was the development of an electrical fence round its perimeter within the mid-Nineteen Nineties, the bombing of its airport in 2001, the barring of its college students from West Financial institution universities since 2000, and the banning of its residents from residing within the West Financial institution since 2003. To this, in fact, one should add the various Israeli wars on the Strip—fifteen since 1948, in accordance with the historian Jean-Pierre Filiu.
In 2006, largely in response to Hamas’s electoral victory, Israel imposed a debilitating siege on Gaza—now in its nineteenth yr—that minimize off the traditional commerce on which the Strip closely relied. Gaza’s financial system declined dramatically, unemployment elevated quickly, and meals insecurity deepened. By the tip of 2017 each second individual in Gaza, together with over 400,000 kids, lived in poverty; by the identical time the next yr 68 p.c have been meals insecure. Between 70 and 80 p.c of Gaza’s inhabitants got here to rely upon worldwide humanitarian help, additional depoliticizing Gaza’s plight each on the world stage and amongst Palestinians themselves. “No one thinks about Jerusalem or the right of return anymore,” a extremely educated ladies, the mom of two younger kids, instructed me earlier than October 7, however about discovering a job and feeding their households. One other man instructed me that his dream was to have “a concrete slab as my roof.”2
Because it imposed ever-harsher management on Gaza, Israel and its benefactors within the West additionally launched a slew of plans for enhancing, reconstructing, or rebuilding the territory. A removed from exhaustive record would come with the Gaza Plan for the yr 2000 (a confidential Israeli authorities plan drawn up in 1986, which I used to be capable of receive three years later); plans devised within the Nineteen Nineties by worldwide organizations to show Gaza into the “Singapore of the Middle East”; the 1994 Gaza-Jericho settlement and the Secure Passage protocol connecting Gaza to the West Financial institution (each a part of the Oslo Accords); the infrastructure visions that accompanied the opening of the Gaza Worldwide Airport in 1998 and the fraught building of the Gaza Seaport in 2000; the 2003 US Roadmap for Peace; the 2004 privately proposed Gaza Free Commerce Zone; the 2005 Israeli disengagement plan; the RAND Company’s 2005 “Arc” plan for a Palestinian state; the Israeli-proposed 2011 Gaza Synthetic Island; the 2014 Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism brokered by the Israeli authorities, the UN, and the PA; the Trump-proposed 2020 Peace to Prosperity Plan; and the Israeli-proposed 2021 Gaza Improvement Plan.
Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG/Getty Photos
PLO supporters celebrating after the signing of the Oslo I Accord, Gaza, 1993
These plans assorted broadly of their content material, however they shared a elementary intention: to pacify Gazans utilizing financial cooptation, if not coercion. Whether or not implicitly or explicitly, they perpetuated a declare that Israel has lengthy promoted: that Gaza represents an issue of safety quite than of occupation. The worldwide, primarily Western powers, for his or her half, justified that occupation so long as there was no accepted settlement to finish it, by no means forcing Israel to just accept the compromises that will have made such an settlement doable—particularly permitting the creation of an empowered, impartial Palestinian entity.
In 2021 Israel constructed a twenty-foot-tall iron wall that prolonged forty miles across the Strip. It was geared up with cameras, radar, sensors, and a remote-controlled weapons system that additionally extends underground and out to the ocean—all of which failed, tragically, to guard Israelis from the horrific assault of October 7, 2023. For Gaza’s Palestinians, the indefinite or transitional grew to become a situation of life. Many got here to imagine that the long run would solely deliver better struggling than the current. Not solely was it “a crime to think about things improving,” a buddy instructed me over two years in the past, it was “a crime even to think about things staying the same.”
If we take the present crop of plans at their phrase that their intention is to rehabilitate and rebuild Gaza, then the destruction of the Strip over the previous two years presents formidable, unprecedented challenges. Even when tomorrow the Israeli military withdrew utterly, Gaza’s infrastructure would by some accounts take a long time to rebuild—84 p.c of the Strip has been destroyed, in accordance with the UN, and 92 p.c of Gaza Metropolis. In October the UN estimated that reconstruction would price $70 billion.
That staggering quantity is perhaps an underestimate. In September the United Nations Setting Programme discovered that Gaza contained 61 million tons of rubble, equal to “fifteen Great Pyramids of Giza or twenty-five Eiffel Towers by volume.” Months in the past the UN assessed that it might take 100 vans fifteen years to clear all of it. The rubble is combined, by one account, with six to 9 thousand items of unexploded ordnance (the Gaza Authorities Media Workplace estimates that there are 20,000 unexploded bombs throughout the territory), contaminated supplies (the World Financial institution, UN, and EU estimate that “2.3 million tons of debris may be potentially contaminated with asbestos”), and human stays. Charles Birch, an explosives clearance knowledgeable for the UN Mine Motion Service, instructed The Washington Put up that merely clearing all of the unexploded ordnance will take years and value tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars}.
Gaza’s atmosphere has been ruined. In response to the UN Meals and Agriculture Group, only one.5 p.c of the Strip’s agricultural land continues to be “accessible and not damaged.” Roughly 89 p.c of Gaza’s water and sanitation amenities and waste disposal programs, severely compromised lengthy earlier than October 7, have been both destroyed or broken, sending at the very least 26 million gallons of sewage and wastewater flowing into the Mediterranean daily. Sewage overflows within the streets. Within the rapid aftermath of Trump’s cease-fire announcement, Drop Website reported, the Israeli military set fireplace to the Sheikh Ajlin Sewage Remedy Station, “a central component of Gaza City’s sanitation network.” Its destruction—because the director of Gaza’s important municipal water utility instructed the outlet—might scale back Gaza Metropolis’s wastewater system “to point zero.”
Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto/Getty Photos
Displaced Palestinians ready for clear ingesting water, Gaza Metropolis, June 22, 2025
Homelessness will nonetheless be persistent and inescapable; bodily and cognitive harm from famine and malnutrition will nonetheless jeopardize future generations; illnesses that have been beforehand eradicated or scarce will reemerge. (That is already the case with Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a uncommon neurological dysfunction that may trigger paralysis and is spreading quickly throughout the Strip, due largely to Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure.) The inhabitants will nonetheless endure from extreme bodily disabilities, mass trauma, financial shortage, and continued Israeli army management.
How do the various “day after” plans at present in circulation intention to restore this long-term harm, and what do they inform us in regards to the worldwide group’s targets for Palestinians’ political future? A number of proposals, principally from exterior the US and Western Europe, take the tip of Israel’s occupation as their express place to begin: the July 2024 Palestinian Nationwide Unity Plan agreed to in Beijing by fourteen Palestinian factions (together with Fatah and Hamas), the March 2025 Egyptian plan endorsed by the twenty-two members of the Arab League (though it should even be famous that not one of the League’s strongest members have imposed any main financial sanctions on Israel for its destruction of Gaza), numerous UN resolutions and statements, the Worldwide Courtroom of Justice’s 2024 Advisory Opinion, and the 2025 French–Saudi “New York Declaration,” amongst others.3 These initiatives, to various levels, present much-needed alternate options to their US- and UK-led counterparts. And but all the most high-profile Western plans—not least Trump’s personal—proceed from the identical premises: that Palestinians don’t have any proper to find out their future, that the very best they will hope for is to trade self-determination for building tasks and settle for apartheid instead of genocide.
A few of these proposals counsel that, in a grim reversal, the identical enclave the place financial growth was intentionally smothered for many years now strikes sure international traders as a sexy enterprise alternative. On August 31—4 days after Trump hosted a gathering on the White Home to debate Gaza’s future with, amongst others, Kushner, Dermer, and Blair—a proposal leaked that will have had notably disastrous implications for Gaza and its folks. “The Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation (GREAT) Trust: From a Demolished Iranian Proxy to a Prosperous Abrahamic Ally” laid out parts of the imaginative and prescient Trump supplied in February—largely rejected by main Arab and European states—for constructing a Riviera within the Strip, a “glittering Gaza,” in Seymour Hersh’s phrase, the place Palestinian residents could be both contained or ethnically cleansed. Echoing the “Gaza 2035” plan to construct a “massive free trade zone” within the area that Netanyahu launched final yr, the GREAT Belief was reportedly developed, in accordance with The Washington Put up, “by some of the same Israelis who created” the Gaza Humanitarian Basis.
The incoherently written doc was, merely put, an abomination. It envisioned a US-Israel bilateral settlement that appeared to name for shifting “control” of the Strip “from Israel to the US (once Hamas is disarmed)”; this association would “evolve to a formal multilateral trusteeship” that would govern Gaza for a “transition period,” till its duties could possibly be transferred to “a reformed and deradicalized Palestinian Polity,” which might then be a part of the Abraham Accords. The GREAT Belief by no means clarified what such a polity would appear to be. (Because the political analysts Mouin Rabbani and Daniel Levy have each famous, it takes a sure nerve to inform the Palestinians—who’ve been dispossessed and occupied for many years and simply skilled two years of genocide—that they’re those who must be “deradicalized.”) It did, nevertheless, word that, so long as Hamas stays in energy, “Gaza faces long-term contraction, poverty, and extreme aid dependency…reducing its worth to practically $0.” As a result of a root explanation for Gaza’s “insurgency” is ostensibly its city structure, the plan’s imaginative and prescient of “reforming” Gaza would additionally contain rebuilding its infrastructure utilizing a “smart cities” design akin to “Hausmann’s strategy in 19th century Paris.” Throughout this course of, the proposal really useful, the Gaza Humanitarian Basis ought to play a big half in “Hamas-free Aid-delivery.” The plan appeared to entrust inside safety to non-public army contractors; Israel, for its half, would retain “overarching rights to meet its security needs.”
Till it deradicalizes, Gaza could be positioned in a belief managed, in impact, by American and Israeli traders for the needs of postwar growth. One “strategic benefit” of this association for the US, the plan said, could be to “strengthen [its] hold in the east Mediterranean, and secure US-industry access to $1.3 [trillion] of rare-earth minerals from the Gulf.” Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, was channeling the spirit of such passages when he instructed an actual property convention in Tel Aviv final month about plans to rebuild Gaza as a profitable enterprise enterprise with American help. “There’s a business plan—listen to me carefully—there’s a business plan set by the most professional people…on President Trump’s table,” he stated. “This thing turns into a real estate bonanza. I’m not kidding; it pays off.”
A vital part of the reconstruction course of could be “voluntary relocation programs.” These would give Palestinians in Gaza two choices. They may “remain in Gaza during reconstruction” and obtain “temporary housing” for so long as a decade, throughout which they might be herded into what the Put up calls “restricted, secured zones.” Or they may settle for a bundle of $5,000 per individual, backed lease for 4 years, and backed meals for one yr in trade for agreeing to “relocation,” which is to say expulsion. The plan estimates that three-quarters of Gaza’s inhabitants would select to remain and 1 / 4 to go away—and that of the latter 75 p.c would “choose not to return.” For each Gazan who chooses “voluntary relocation,” $23,000 in financial savings would accrue to the Belief, rising the Strip’s monetary “worth.” One option to scale back the Belief’s whole funding, the plan specified, would subsequently be to “increase the number of Gazans who volunteer to leave Gaza during the reconstruction.”
The total imaginative and prescient specified by the GREAT Belief appears, for the second, unlikely to be applied. However its echoes resonate by the plans positioned to information present policymaking, which counsel their very own methods of preempting Palestinian autonomy—not to mention sovereignty. Final month Blair, with Trump’s encouragement, issued a plan of his personal on which he had, reportedly, been working for months in session with Arab officers within the area, together with the Saudis, for the formation of a postwar Gaza Worldwide Transitional Authority (GITA), a hierarchical construction with “supreme political and legal authority for Gaza during the transitional period,” which Blair himself was reportedly in talks to steer.
Composed of billionaires and businesspeople, together with Muslim businessmen (to “ensure regional legitimacy and cultural credibility”), the board would even have a senior UN official and “at least one qualified Palestinian representative (potentially from the business or security sector).” Palestinians appointed to work in municipal governance would, it stipulates, want to fulfill “strict standards of political neutrality.” The plan doesn’t say whether or not the identical commonplace would apply to GITA’s worldwide board.
GITA would work intently with Israel, the US, and Egypt. Inside Gaza, it will have energy over a Palestinian Govt Authority (PEA)—to not be confused with the Palestinian Authority. Envisioned as a “nonpartisan, professional administration” tasked with the “neutral and efficient” supply of “essential public services,” from well being and training to welfare and housing, the PEA would function underneath GITA’s final command, with no independence of its personal. Underneath this plan Palestinians would have far much less authority than they might underneath the Egyptian-led Arab plan for Gaza, which requires a brand new governance construction of technocrats to interchange Hamas and work with the PA, which might finally assume whole management. Blair’s plan does point out that GITA would work “in close consultation” with the PA within the West Financial institution with the objective of finally “unifying…all [of] the Palestinian territory under the PA.” However there may be nothing within the doc that specifies how and when this unification would happen.
AFP/Getty Photos
The Rimal neighborhood of Gaza Metropolis, October 23, 2025
Underneath Blair’s plan Gazans wouldn’t be displaced however might attraction to a “Property Rights Preservation Unit” tasked with making certain that “any voluntary departure of residents from Gaza during the transitional period is documented, legally protected, and does not compromise the individual’s right to return [to Gaza] or retain property ownership.” It declines to specify how these rights could be enforced, on condition that Israel would, in all probability, reject them.
Then got here Trump’s Gaza proposal, which includes some main parts of Blair’s plan and affords him an essential function in Gaza’s postwar future. It, too, insists that Palestinians won’t be pressured or incentivized to go away; it additionally emphasizes that “Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza.” However Israel has, in apply, lengthy been the occupying energy in Gaza—whether or not instantly or by way of closure, siege, and blockade—and Trump’s proposal neither acknowledges that brutal historical past nor requires an finish to it.
As a substitute it advocates for a course of dictated largely by Israeli details on the bottom. Duty for the Strip’s redevelopment would lie with a top-down governing and financial authority—a “new international transitional body”—identified incongruously because the “Board of Peace.” The board could be administered by international, non-Palestinian actors, “headed and chaired” by Trump and staffed by “other members and heads of state…including Former Prime Minister Tony Blair.” Hamas would demilitarize, with no assure that Israel would withdraw from the territory or stop attacking it. Actually, as Daniel Levy has famous, “the stages and conditionalities as set out allow the IDF to remain in most of Gaza.”
Trump’s is among the many many plans to name for demilitarizing Hamas and reassigning governance duties in Gaza to a global occupying drive till the deeply troubled Palestinian Authority is “reformed” or one other model of it created. The Wilson Middle’s “Plan for Postwar Gaza,” as an example, requires the formation of a “Multi-National Authority” to which the present PA would function an advisory physique; right here, as in Trump’s plan, it by no means turns into fairly clear who would outline the brand new authority’s legitimacy. “One option to establish the MNA’s legitimacy would be if the PA asked the MNA to take responsibility for Gaza,” in accordance with the plan. “However,” it provides candidly, “this is likely to lead to the PA insisting on assurances about the political endstate for Gaza when Israel is not ready for those discussions.”4
The PA’s function in these proposals is revealing. It has little if any legitimacy amongst Palestinians and is commonly considered a subcontractor to the occupation, appearing towards the pursuits of its personal folks. It is because its main operate is safety coordination with Israel, which includes suppressing Palestinian protest towards the occupation. The PA’s legitimacy has been additional diminished by its crackdown on critics, intolerance of dissent, and more and more authoritarian rule. That the PA wants reform is unquestioned; what “reform” seems to be like is a tougher matter. Trump’s plan refers to applications outlined in his 2020 “Peace to Prosperity” initiative and within the July 2025 Saudi-French proposal adopted by the UN. As co-chairs of a September 2025 worldwide convention on the two-state resolution, France and Saudi Arabia issued an announcement specifying the PA reforms they regard as important: repealing its present funds to prisoners and to the households of deceased prisoners, creating an academic curriculum that meets Western requirements, and promising to carry elections inside a yr of a Gaza cease-fire.
As a few of these dictates counsel, within the eyes of Israel and its allies, rehabilitating the PA is a matter of creating it much more compliant to their pursuits. In a current evaluation for the European Council on Overseas Relations, Hugh Lovatt and Muhammad Shehada observe that the PA has largely met the primary two circumstances and has dedicated itself to the third. And but, they word, Trump’s 2020 plan consists of additional calls for: it will require the PA to surrender its proper to hitch “any international organization without the consent of the State of Israel” and chorus from pursuing any motion on the Worldwide Courtroom of Justice and Worldwide Felony Courtroom—or, furthermore, invoking any instrument of worldwide regulation. On September 29 Netanyahu added that he would additionally anticipate the PA to acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state. If the PA have been to cross these “long-standing Palestinian red lines,” Lovatt and Shehada write, it will erode no matter legitimacy it has left. Because the Israeli analyst Jeff Halper lately argued, “reform” as outlined by the US and Israel refers back to the unconditional give up of your complete “Palestinian struggle for self-determination.” All this, for that matter, is perhaps moot as a result of Israel has up to now rejected any prospect of the PA returning to Gaza and taking part in postwar reconstruction—to not point out any prospect of real liberation. “In our meeting today Prime Minister Netanyahu was very clear about his opposition to a Palestinian state,” Trump acknowledged on September 29.
Maybe essentially the most telling side of Trump’s plan, nevertheless, is what it doesn’t embrace. No point out is product of Israel’s harmful actions within the West Financial institution, nor of the prospect of unifying that territory politically with Gaza, nor of Palestinian sovereignty normally, aside from a imprecise and tepid reference to “a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood” as soon as sure circumstances of reform are met (little question imposed by the US, Israel, and different Western powers). In the meantime the plan makes clear reference to Israeli safety, which has lengthy served in such proposals as an ever-receding horizon that justifies indefinite Israeli army management over the Palestinian folks. In my 4 a long time of engagement with Israel and Palestine, I’ve but to seek out any Israeli official or citizen who can really outline what safety means to them or what Palestinians should say or do to make Israelis—their occupiers—really feel safe.
Once I learn the plan, the identical feeling of dread came visiting me as once I first learn the Oslo Accords over thirty years in the past. As soon as once more the US and Israel have develop into the ultimate arbiters of Palestinian life in Gaza and the West Financial institution; as soon as once more Palestinian freedom from Israeli occupation pales as a precedence compared to Israeli safety from Palestinian political violence, or for that matter from these types of resistance to which Palestinians are entitled underneath worldwide regulation; as soon as once more an ostensible “peace plan” merely describes the continuation of occupation in a unique type.
The fact of that occupation—and the sensible constraints it imposes—can also be what dooms these proposals for postwar Gaza that ignore politics altogether, treating the Strip as a purely financial, technical, or humanitarian drawback.5 Of those maybe essentially the most thought-about is a current proposal from the RAND Company, “From Camps to Communities: Post-Conflict Shelter in Gaza,” which builds upon the group’s January 2025 plan “Pathways to a Durable Israeli-Palestinian Peace.”
At first look “From Camps to Communities” may seem affordable and punctiliously thought-out. It casts its suggestions in modest phrases, as “notional” and “illustrative” responses to circumstances “that will no doubt change.” However it additionally addresses the huge rapid wants for postwar shelter in appreciable and cautious element, with an intention to “lay the foundation for good urban planning in the future, restore some sense of community, enable people to live in decent conditions while reconstruction is ongoing, and achieve effective reconstruction so that Gazans can thrive and go home.”
And but the RAND report, too, rests on defective assumptions. All of its eventualities, for one factor, presume the provision of land on which to construct—but none of them account for Israel’s continued management over huge areas of the Gaza Strip. Even now, after Israel’s partial withdrawal underneath the phrases of the cease-fire settlement, it controls virtually all the Rafah governorate, greater than half of the Khan Younis governorate, components of Gaza Metropolis, Beit Hanoun within the north, round a 3rd of the Netzarim Hall (which separates the northern and southern Strip), and the crucial Philadelphi Hall—a strategic space of roughly 9 miles alongside Gaza’s border with Egypt. Most critically, it continues to regulate all crossings into and out of Gaza.
Even in a hypothetical postwar future, Israel is very unlikely to take away all of those obstructions anytime quickly. In response to Trump’s plan, Israeli forces will stay in over a 3rd of the Strip even after the second part of its withdrawal (ought to that happen) and retain a safety buffer zone round Gaza that would embody between 15 and 17 p.c of the territory. The buffer zone will stay in place “until Gaza is properly secure from any resurgent terror threat,” which might simply translate into nonetheless extra indefinite Israeli management.
Neither is Israel possible, underneath current circumstances, to permit, not to mention facilitate, housing reconstruction, “good urban planning,” and group constructing for Palestinians in the remainder of the Strip—at the very least with out the specter of future destruction. Certainly, in accordance with the right-wing paper Israel Hayom, Dermer stated final week that if Hamas doesn’t demilitarize, building will start solely within the components of Gaza which are underneath Israeli management. His feedback possible mirror a plan being thought-about by the US and Israel to separate Gaza into two separate areas, one managed by Israel and the opposite by Hamas. In response to The Wall Road Journal, reconstruction would happen solely on the Israeli aspect “as a stopgap until [Hamas] can be disarmed and removed from power,” with the objective of geographically increasing the “safe area” in order that building can start. This is able to enable Israel to ascertain everlasting management inside Gaza.
Omar al-Qattaa/AFP/Getty Photos
The Hamad Metropolis residential advanced in Khan Younis, Gaza, October 6, 2025
As a “successful precedent” for “building new neighborhoods quickly and cost-effectively,” the RAND report cites Hamad Metropolis, a neighborhood in Khan Younis, which I visited a few years in the past. Constructed with Qatari funding and inaugurated in 2016, the event consisted of fifty-three buildings with three thousand residences between them. The RAND authors word that final yr Israel destroyed a lot of Hamad Metropolis, however they fail to attract the apparent conclusion that any large-scale housing mission shall be underneath fixed menace of injury or destruction so long as Israeli occupation persists.
On this respect they make a foundational error widespread to all the most important plans. They assume that after the genocide is over—a genocide facilitated if not inflicted by the identical Western powers that now declare to hunt restore—there shall be some type of pure level at which the evil ends and the duty of rebuilding a brand new actuality can mechanically start. This isn’t only a fallacy however an utter lie.
Why have so many planners taken these ahistorical, decontextualized views? A part of the reply is that, for many years, Israel’s defenders have acted as if the Israeli and Palestinian positions are symmetrical. The Oslo course of promoted this notion by casting the battle as a matter not of worldwide regulation and UN resolutions however of bilateral negotiations between two equal actors, regardless of the huge asymmetries in energy and sources between them. Over time Israeli spokespeople have insisted, furthermore, that the nation seeks peace with Palestinians and is ready to make the mandatory compromises if sure circumstances are met.
If nothing else, the annihilation of Gaza has laid these falsehoods to relaxation. It couldn’t be clearer now that, as Edward Stated wrote way back, “the justice and truth of the oppressor—for there is one here—and that of the oppressed are not interchangeable, morally equal, epistemologically congruent.”6 Nor might it’s clearer that Israel and the US search not modes of engagement (or RAND’s “durable peace”) with the Palestinian folks and their management however methods to exclude them from any political course of and maintain them in a state of siege, no matter no matter concessions they may make. (Israel’s try to assassinate the Hamas delegation negotiating the cease-fire in Qatar is only one current, dramatic instance.) Palestinian political infighting and the dearth of a unified Palestinian management are, to make certain, now greater than ever additionally limiting components within the seek for a political decision—however lesser ones. For Israel there has by no means been a “postwar” in Gaza.
Quiet is just not the absence of battle. Neither is it peace. With out a political and strategic dedication to ending the occupation, no plan will meaningfully tackle—not to mention halt—Israel’s long-term imaginative and prescient of, as Smotrich lately put it, “breaking Gaza apart.” It couldn’t be extra essential to maintain meals, medication, and different desperately wanted provides flowing into Gaza, however in the end Palestinians have by no means wished humanitarian assist; they need and want the ability to find out for themselves how they need to dwell and care for his or her kids and who ought to symbolize and govern them. Recognizing Palestinian statehood—because the UK, Canada, France, Australia, Malta, and Belgium lately did—might need symbolic worth, however statehood with out liberation from occupation shall be nothing greater than a diplomatic fiction perpetuating a partitionist actuality.
For because the Palestinian American poet Lisa Suhair Majaj has written, “there is no hiding in Gaza.” On June 20, months earlier than the onslaught on Gaza Metropolis, Physician Ezzideen Shehab, founding father of the Al-Rahma Medical Middle in northern Gaza, posted a message on X in regards to the clinic he works in. He wished us to know the intent, “cold and deliberate,” behind the starvation he noticed there. “The women who collapse in my arms are not statistics,” he wrote. “They are executions carried out in slow motion.” The night earlier than, he wrote, a mom arrived throughout his shift:
Thirty-three years outdated. Unconscious. Pores and skin chilly. Breath shallow. A physique so skinny I might see the define of her bones as I positioned the IV. Her child nonetheless clung to her, unaware that the breast it suckled had nothing left to offer however the scent of loss of life.
Analysis? Dehydration. Acute malnutrition. However in reality she suffers from one thing medication can not treatment: abandonment.
We administered fluids, stabilized her vitals. On paper it’ll appear to be we helped her. We didn’t. We postponed the inevitable.… My colleague, nonetheless untouched by this hell, whispered that she ought to cease breastfeeding. “She must regain her strength,” he stated. I didn’t reply. What might I say? That components is now not a product right here, however a dream? {That a} can of powdered milk now prices greater than a month’s price of meals, if there have been meals?
She can not purchase bread. She can not purchase air. And but we converse to her as if she had selections. That is the cruelty of warfare: not simply the bombs, however the absurdity of giving recommendation to the damned.
Absent principled and intentional motion by the states with the ability to problem Israeli coverage, Gaza’s “day after” will hardly differ from how Dr. Ezzideen described its current: “triage in a mass grave that has not been dug yet.”
