Donald Trump’s 20-point “peace plan” for Gaza, unveiled with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s endorsement, has been presented as a blueprint to end the war. In reality, it is a document designed less to resolve conflict than to reframe it.
Its language is intentionally vague, its mechanisms impractical, and its assumptions historically dishonest. The plan reinforces Israel’s position while leaving Palestinians with little more than recycled illusions. Yet at this stage, it may be the only practical path to pause the killing and save what remains of Gaza’s population from Israel’s unhinged war machine.
US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Monday.Credit: NYT
The first problem is the deliberate ambiguity woven into every stage of the plan. Netanyahu’s speech following Trump’s announcement revealed as much: his objectives bear no alignment with the text in either substance or consequence. Take the proposed release of 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences. The plan does not say who will be freed or who decides. Prisoner names have long defined the substance of negotiated exchanges between Israel and Palestinian factions, and this time will be no different.
Netanyahu tied the success of the proposed international “Board of Peace” to what he called a permanent end to the war, a framing that – when read alongside the plan’s provision that Israeli forces will retain a “security perimeter presence” until Gaza is deemed fully secure – signals Israel’s intention to maintain open-ended control over Gaza’s security apparatus. Leaving such matters undefined all but guarantees Israeli control of the process.
The reference to aid flows is equally telling. By acknowledging that aid “will proceed without interference”, the plan implicitly concedes what has long been obvious: that Israel has systematically obstructed humanitarian access. Yet, the mechanism it outlines invites a continuation of the same problem, leaving space for the much-criticised Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to dominate the delivery system, while the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the region’s foremost and most capable body for delivering aid and managing humanitarian affairs, is left out. In its current format, the plan ensures aid remains an extension of politics.
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Perhaps the most farcical element is the creation of a so-called Board of Peace featuring figures such as former UK prime minister Tony Blair. Blair previously led the Quartet – the US, EU, UN and Russia’s Middle East peace envoy mechanism – from 2007 to 2015, an experiment that already demonstrated the bankruptcy of such models. During his tenure, Israel entrenched its system of settlements, thwarted Palestinian reconciliation attempts, and cemented its control over the West Bank. To imagine Blair overseeing Palestinian “modern governance” is not diplomacy, but satire. It suggests a Palestinian future managed indefinitely by the very international actors complicit in entrenching occupation.
The call for reforming the Palestinian Authority is another recycled talking point. But what exactly are the “international standards” the authority must meet? Washington and its allies rejected the authority’s UN statehood bid in 2011 despite the UN, World Bank, and IMF confirming it had achieved benchmarks for sound governance that should have readied it for statehood.
Talk of a “New Gaza” that commits to peaceful coexistence with its neighbours obscures the very nature of Gaza itself. Gaza is not a self-contained polity, nor were its people ever meant to exist in isolation. It is, fundamentally, a refugee camp, the concentrated result of expulsions in 1948. International law recognises the right of return. Yet the plan treats Gaza’s residents as if they were a distinct nation, severed from the Palestinian whole.
