When President Donald Trump stood alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House this week to unveil their latest ceasefire plan for Gaza, Trump spoke in definite terms. He called the occasion “a historic day for peace” and said the deal would bring an end to fighting in the region for the “first time in thousands of years.”
In contrast, the 20-point plan — written by Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, both real estate investors — is both vague and full of contradictions, largely excluding Palestinian involvement while allowing Israel and the U.S. to maintain broad political, military, and economic powers within Gaza, according to observers and experts on the region.
Similar to previous ceasefire proposals throughout Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, the recent plan calls for the immediate cessation of fighting, an exchange of Israeli and Palestinian prisoners, the disarmament of Hamas, and the gradual withdrawal of the Israeli military from Gaza.
Where this plan differs is that U.S. officials are attempting to spell out what a post-war Gaza would look like.
The plan states that “Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza” and that “no one will be forced to leave Gaza.” Palestinians would have the ability to leave or return, a reversal from Trump’s previous calls to expel all Palestinians from the territory. Yet experts cautioned that these assurances do not indicate a reversal of policy for the Israeli government, which has been consistent in its goals toward the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza and total control over the territory.
“Palestinians might be able to stay in Gaza, but they will not be able to really govern its affairs.”
Trump’s plan allows for Israel to have veto power during the military withdrawal phases, with terms largely set by the U.S. and Israel. Internal security of Gaza would then be managed by a so-called International Stabilization Force, led by the U.S. and other Arab states. Even after withdrawal from Gaza, the plan calls for “a security perimeter” around Gaza maintained by the Israeli military until the territory is “secure from any resurgent terror threat.”
Allowing Israel to maintain such a security perimeter around Gaza all but guarantees Israel the opportunity to indefinitely occupy the territory in a similar manner to the decadeslong blockade that rendered Gaza an open-air prison preceding Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks. In 2005, Israel withdrew its military from and dismantled its settlements within Gaza, but the Israeli military remained in control of its borders. Experts said the new proposal promises a similar chokehold on the territory, along with the possible resumption of Israel’s military campaign.
“This is a continuation of the occupation, if not a continuation of the war by other means,” said Amjad Iraqi, a senior analyst on Israel/Palestine with the International Crisis Group. “Palestinians might be able to stay in Gaza, but they will not be able to really govern its affairs.”
At Monday’s conference, Netanyahu thanked Trump, “the greatest friend that Israel ever had in the White House,” for the plan, which he said allows his government the chance to “achieve all of our war objectives without any further bloodshed.”
But the Israeli leader reserved the right to “finish the job … the hard way” and resume its military campaign in Gaza if Hamas were to reject the deal or fail to meet its conditions. Immediately after the conference, in which the leaders declined to take questions from the press, Netanyahu posted a video in Hebrew meant to address his coalition, promising that he does not intend to withdraw Israeli troops from Gaza.
As Hamas weighs how to respond to the plan, Trump on Tuesday threatened the Palestinian militant political group with “a very sad end” if it declines the deal. Trump said he would give Hamas “three to four days” to decide.
The plan already has buy-in from a number of Western nations, including the United Kingdom, France, and Australia, which all were new to recognize Palestinian statehood last week. Other nations that welcome the plan include Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, China, and Russia. Also supporting the plan are a host of Arab and Muslim-majority nations, such as Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, and Indonesia, which had received a draft of the plan one week earlier from the Trump administration at the United Nations headquarters. The West Bank-based Palestinian Authority also said it welcomed Trump’s plan.
Indefinite Occupation of Gaza
Experts worry that Israel’s veto power in the new Gaza plan gives it freedom to resume its military campaign at any moment.
Netanyahu’s government has hardly been a trustworthy partner in peace agreements in recent years: Israel has repeatedly bombed Lebanon even after signing a deal with Hezbollah last November, and in March, it broke the U.S.-brokered peace deal with Hamas by blocking all humanitarian aid into Gaza and resuming its bombing campaign, blaming Hamas for not releasing enough hostages, and falsely accusing the group of preparing new attacks on Israel.
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Regardless of whether Hamas rejects or accepts the plan, Israel is sure to continue its policy of mass removal of Palestinians from the territory, said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a U.S. policy fellow at Al-Shabaka.
“If Hamas rejects the ceasefire proposal, that’ll give Israel the pretext to just steamroll Gaza City and do it in the way that Smotrich and Ben-Gvir want, which is all at once in one fell swoop,” Kenney-Shawa said. But even if Hamas were to follow all of Israel’s demands of disarmament and return of hostages, he said, there is little guarantee that Israel would not renege on the deal as it has in the past.
“If Hamas rejects the ceasefire proposal, that’ll give Israel the pretext to just steamroll Gaza City.”
For Ahmed Moor, a fellow with the Foundation for Middle East Peace, who was born in the Rafah refugee camp in Gaza, the Trump–Netanyahu meeting and the language in the deal echoes the Oslo Accords of 1993, which had been intended as a two-state solution, only for Israel’s government to illegally expand its settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank in the 30 years since.
“This is back to the future, right?” Moor said, recalling the 1993 scene on the White House’s South Lawn where Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with Palestine Liberation Organization Chair Yasser Arafat. The Oslo deal, he said, is an example of Israel “front-loading” its demands while committing to the needs of Palestinians “at some indeterminate point in the future.”
“The Palestinians today need relief from genocide. This document is not going to provide that.”
In the hours since Monday’s announcement, the Israeli military has killed more than 50 Palestinians in Gaza, including five people who were attempting to receive aid, according to Gaza health officials. Meanwhile, settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, often sanctioned by the Israeli military, continued unabated with Israeli settlers setting fire to a building outside a Palestinian village near Nablus on Tuesday evening.
“The Palestinians today need relief from genocide,” Moor said. “This document is not going to provide that.”
“Paul Bremer 2.0”
The plan itself also envisions the installment of a transitional government called “a Board of Peace,” overseen by Trump and a panel that includes former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, who since leaving office in 2007 has attempted to establish himself as a power broker between European and Middle East nations. In its purview would be the funding and redevelopment of Gaza, where wide swaths have been rendered uninhabitable by Israel’s brutal military offensives.
It’s “a neocolonial plan designed to enrich Tony Blair and a few other people.”
Adding to the vagueness around the plans’ security details, it also calls for economic redevelopment led by those behind “some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East,” a vision that falls in line with Trump’s own musings for a Gaza Riviera. The plan looks to create a framework that would attract investment, as well as the creation of a “special economic zone” and tariff scheme for nations that agree to participate.
Moor called such aspects of the deal “a neocolonial plan designed to enrich Tony Blair and a few other people.” He further coined the plan “Paul Bremer 2.0,” a reference to the former U.S. State Department diplomat who served as the head of the U.S. puppet government of occupied Iraq. In other words, Gaza would be rendered “a fiefdom for other overlords to manage,” Iraqi added.
There is a clear throughline between the governance structure in the Gaza plan and the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan by the U.S. and U.K.-led coalitions during the post-9/11 wars in the Middle East, said Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser for Sen. Bernie Sanders. Similar to the cases of both Iraq and Afghanistan, Duss expects Israel to prolong its occupation of Gaza until it reaches its eventual aims of permanent control of the territory.
“There’s always going to be some reason why the occupying military needs to stay, especially when you have a government as in Israel that is dominated by these kind of messianic extremists who see conquering and controlling the entire land as their religious duty,” Duss said.
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Duss and others also criticized the attempts to attract investments before guarantees to end Israel’s occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state. Any economic vision should be led by the Palestinian people, Al-Shabaka’s Kenney-Shawa added.
“It’s never too early to to talk about economic visions if it’s coming from Palestinians themselves,” Kenney-Shawa said, “but it’s way too early to be talking about these investments and economic visions when there is no plan to reconstruct Gaza or clear the rubble, or dig out the the 13,000 dead bodies that are under the rubble, and provide long-term care to the 2 million people who are in a very bad state and are desperate for that care.”
Where to Go From Here?
While a report by CBS News indicated that Hamas may be leaning toward accepting the U.S.–Israeli deal, Palestinians are faced with an almost impossible choice.
Kenney-Shawa, who is Palestinian and whose family is from Gaza, said from his conversations with other Palestinians that the deal has left them feeling like there are no good options remaining.
“I’ve spoken to people who are just hoping that they accept the deal because they want this to be over,” he said, “And then there are some who say they hope they don’t accept the deal because it’s surrender.”
He said he thinks Hamas should accept the Trump deal as a way to remove any pretext for Israel to continue its genocide in Gaza. He said that Hamas no longer has leverage and is at its weakest point, given the indifference the Netanyahu government has shown toward the remaining Israeli prisoners in Gaza. Others called for the Arab-led plan to rebuild Gaza introduced earlier this year by Arab states that allowed for Hamas to give up its large-scale arms and be integrated into a Palestinian-led security force within the framework of a Palestinian-led government. Hamas has said it would accept giving up governance of Gaza but has in the past refused disarmament.
There is already increasing pressure on Israel from other nations to end its incursion. That international pressure, along with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, may be the best chance toward ending the occupation, Moor, the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s fellow, said.
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More nations, such as Spain and Belgium, are enacting arms embargoes on Israel, while Germany and the European Union are weighing proposals on sanctions and blocking trade to Israel. Within the U.S., some Democratic lawmakers have broken with the powerful pro-Israel lobby and have voted or pledged to support legislation designed to block some weapons transfers from the U.S. to Israel. Calls for cultural boycotts have also intensified, with Ireland, Netherland and Spain promising to sit out of the popular singing contest show Eurovision if Israel were allowed to participate in 2026.
Israel’s acceptance of Trump’s Gaza plan can be interpreted as an attempt to rehabilitate its image in the face of such growing international pressure, Moor said. The plan, however, is generating new political conflict within Israel as members of Netanyahu’s far-right coalition have publicly expressed disgust with the deal, such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who called it a “resounding diplomatic failure, a closing of eyes and turning our backs on all the lessons of October 7.”
Trump’s plan references an earlier peace plan authored by France and Saudi Arabia and later codified in the United Nations as the New York Declaration, which, in a July vote, drew support from the vast majority of member states: 142 in favor, with Israel and the U.S. in opposition. The Trump plan borrows from the French–Saudi plan when convenient, such as in the formation of a transitional security force and government, but ignores many of its core provisions — such as allowing Palestinians to lead most points of the peace process, declaring “There must be no occupation, siege, territorial reduction, or forced displacement,” and the need for a Palestinian state with a unified Gaza and West Bank.
The peace plan is “a way to re-intrench Israeli control, just in a way that’s more palatable for the international community.”
Kenney-Shawa took exception to the Trump administration’s labeling of the deal as “a comprehensive peace plan,” a phrasing that some mainstream media outlets have readily disseminated. Instead, he said the deal is similar to Oslo in that it is “a way to re-intrench Israeli control, just in a way that’s more palatable for the international community.”
Moor agreed, adding that Israel is trying to regain its legitimacy as a democratic state that provides equal rights to Jewish people and Palestinians. “That’s not a world that we can ever go back to,” Moor said. “And I interpret this deal as an effort to go back to that world.”
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While nations backing the plan also see it as a possible pathway toward a two-state solution and Palestinian statehood, experts said that such a pathway is circuitous at best. The only mention of Palestinian statehood is in the second-to-last point of the plan, tucked behind myriad requirements such as following advances in redeveloping Gaza and after the Palestinian Authority undergoes reform. Only then would the conditions “finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.” Those reforms, however, rely on further conditions spelled out in Trump’s 2020 peace proposal.
That plan, announced in January 2020, also co-written by Kushner, an old family friend of Netanyahu’s, similarly excluded Palestinians from its drafting and placed stringent conditions and ultimatums on Palestinians. The plan was hazy on details on Gaza’s fate, but it allowed the Israeli government to annex much of the West Bank. It was announced under similar circumstances, with Trump standing side by side with Netanyahu as he faced mounting political pressure.
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On the same day the 2020 plan was unveiled, Israeli officials indicted Netanyahu on corruption charges. His hold on power was weakening heading into his reelection in March of that year. Trump’s 2020 plan was seen by observers as a political life raft for Netanyahu, at the expense of Palestinian lives, further eroding any chance at Palestinian sovereignty.
Now, as Israel’s genocidal military and starvation campaign in Gaza, which has killed at least 66,000 Palestinians, drags toward its third year, and as Israel is at its most isolated on the international stage in decades, the Trump administration has again given Netanyahu a place on a White House podium with this week’s 20-point plan for Gaza.
While watching Monday’s press conference, Iraqi, of the International Crisis Group, said he was thrown back to 2020.
“It really is a repeat of history,” Iraqi said, “and it shows how much that the Trump–Netanyahu alliance, and the alliance of the Israeli right and the American right, has really allowed for the complete withering of any pushback to this one-state reality, where Israelis get to determine the Palestinians’ fate.”
The post The Trump–Netanyahu Gaza Peace Deal Promises Indefinite Occupation appeared first on The Intercept.
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