What ‘Day After’ for Gaza?

1.

On Friday, October 10, when Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire in Gaza, I heard from a Palestinian friend in the Strip. Gaza had been celebrating since the news broke, but grief was never far away. “Our feelings are mixed,” he wrote:

Yes, we are relieved that the genocide has stopped, even though we remain uncertain about what lies ahead…. I think of the families whose children are still buried under the rubble. I think of the mother who doesn’t know where her son is, the father who hasn’t yet been able to even see his children’s bodies. It will take us a long time to tell the untold stories.

By then conditions had deteriorated to a point “beyond human imagination,” as another friend in Gaza put it to me near the end of June. The bombing had hardly let up for months; food had run out or was outrageously unaffordable; prices for transit were soaring. Many Palestinians in the Strip were risking their lives to secure aid from the notorious distribution centers run by the American-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. In early October Gaza’s Ministry of Health reported that Israeli forces had killed over 2,500 aid seekers and injured nearly 19,000 in barely more than four months. “They tell us that there is aid today, and when [people] arrive, they are shot,” said the friend who wrote me this summer. “And so every day, massacre after massacre…. If they could take the air away from us, they would.”

Since the start of Israel’s devastating campaign, according to the health ministry, over 68,000 men, women, and children in the Strip have been killed and over 170,000 injured. As of May 2025 that death toll included more than 2,180 families that have been entirely annihilated, erased from Gaza’s civil registry; more than 5,070 have only one surviving member. Those are the official statistics, which include only reported deaths compiled by hospitals and morgues and caused by Israeli military action. They are, without question, gross underestimates. Between ten and fifteen thousand additional people are presumed buried under the rubble of their homes—also considered a dramatic undercount, both because wartime conditions impede data collection and because the killing of so many entire families has left no one to report. The spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Olga Cherevko, said 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.” Legal experts, not to mention the testimony of our own eyes, tell us that this can only be termed a genocide.

Then there are indirect deaths, from such causes as infections left untreated amid the almost total collapse of the health care system, exposure to toxic air pollutants and uncontrolled fires, and, increasingly these past months, malnutrition and starvation. On August 22, more than five months after Israel broke its previous cease-fire with Hamas and blocked aid shipments from entering the Strip, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification confirmed that over half a million Gazans—a quarter of the Strip’s population—were suffering from catastrophic hunger; malnutrition threatened at least 132,000 children under five. In a correspondence piece for The Lancet, several researchers argued that, based on data from recent conflicts, there could well be four indirect deaths for every direct one—which would by now mean that hundreds of thousands of people have died in Gaza over the past two years. In August, before Israel launched an offensive to occupy Gaza City and issued evacuation orders to well over 600,000 of the area’s exhausted, hungry residents, a third friend—who had by then lost three of his sisters—told me, “Death is harvesting my family one by one.”

Not much of the Strip is left standing. Israel has damaged or destroyed more than 90 percent of Gaza’s homes, destroyed twenty-two of its thirty-six hospitals (leaving the remainder partially functional), damaged most of its road network, devastated most of its commercial sector, and razed thousands of educational facilities, including all twelve of its universities. Unexploded ordnance—Israeli- and US-made missiles, artillery shells, cluster and other high-tech munitions, anti-personnel mines, and anti-tank weapons, as well as makeshift rockets made by Hamas—fills what remains of the landscape, some of it programmed to detonate at a future date. People returning to their homes and neighborhoods after the cease-fire found nothing but vistas of rubble.

Nor has the cease-fire stopped the killing. Just eight days after the truce, Gaza’s media office accused Israel of having broken it forty-seven times and killed thirty-eight Palestinians since the supposed cessation of hostilities; a day later, after accusing unknown combatants of killing two Israeli soldiers in Rafah, Israel launched a wave of strikes across the Strip that killed dozens more. By October 22, according to the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, Israel had apparently violated the cease-fire eighty times, 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 last November—seemed to anticipate such violations in a social media post from October 9. The agreement was just about to go into effect, he wrote, but Israeli tanks stationed on Gaza’s main north-south road were still “shooting at people trying to return” to their homes. “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 announced on October 10 was similar to the deal the two parties signed in January, before Israel broke it two months later. On October 13 Hamas released all the living Israeli hostages still in captivity and started returning some of the bodies of those who had died; Israel released 250 Palestinians serving life sentences—over half of whom were deported to Egypt and then on to third countries—and 1,700 who had been seized in Gaza and imprisoned since October 7. Humanitarian aid resumed, although by October 21 only two of Gaza’s four crossings—Kerem Shalom in the southeast and Kissufim in central Gaza—were open for aid shipments, and even those are subject to restrictions. Israeli troops partially withdrew to an “agreed upon” line; they remain in control of 53 percent of the territory.

This time, however, the deal was part of a more transparent scheme for the region’s political future. On September 29 Donald Trump announced that the White House had developed a “comprehensive,” twenty-point “plan to end the Gaza Conflict,” reportedly drafted in coordination with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s close advisor Ron Dermer; President Trump’s US Special Envoy to the Middle 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—also participated and agreed on a draft, although sources told Axios that Netanyahu subsequently negotiated last-minute changes in his favor, giving Israel a veto over the withdrawal timetable and more power to condition its army’s rollback on the disarmament of Hamas. Most strikingly, not one Palestinian official seems to have been consulted, either from Hamas or the Palestinian Authority (PA). When Trump announced the deal, he was thus, in effect, giving Hamas an ultimatum. “If both sides agree to this proposal,” he said, “the war will immediately end.”

Trump’s plan was only the latest of dozens of proposals, agreements, and reports about how to rebuild and restore the territory for what is persistently called “the day after.” I know of twenty-nine such plans—from Israel itself, from the PA, from the EU and the US, from countries in the Arab world, from Israeli, Arab, and American think tanks, and from NGOs. I suspect I haven’t found them all. They come from a range of ideological starting points—from those that treat Gaza’s rehabilitation purely as a technical problem to those that go so far as to explicitly envision a future for Gaza with as few Palestinians as possible, if any at all. They vary greatly in their content, emphasis, and level of detail; some focus on Israeli security, others on humanitarian assistance and reconstruction. Trump’s plan has displaced the others, but it did not emerge in a vacuum. Understanding this wider corpus of proposals, especially the more prominent among them, may reveal where the Trump plan came from and what it will mean for Gaza.

As I have argued in these pages, Israel has long thwarted the viable development of the Gaza Strip, with the primary goal of precluding the establishment of a Palestinian state by weakening if not eliminating the economic foundation on which it could be built. Beginning in the early 1990s successive Israeli governments stepped up their efforts to implement policies to that effect, placing Gaza under a closure—now in its thirty-fourth year—that restricted and eventually ended the free movement of labor and trade between the Strip and its natural markets; expropriating and dispossessing Gazans of their water and land; and constraining the development of local institutions that enabled Palestinians to maintain a sense of national identity, social organization, and internal cohesion. Over time these policies rendered the majority of the population dependent on international assistance to survive, transforming Palestinians in the eyes of the world from a people with political and national rights into a humanitarian problem. They also worked to isolate the people of Gaza from other Palestinians, thereby fragmenting Palestinian politics as a whole, further obstructing Palestinian statehood. Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza represents the latest stage of this longstanding project.

The most prominent “day after” plans currently on offer—from Trump’s to the one proposed in September by former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair—continue this effort to preempt Palestinian independence and sovereignty. They impose forms of governance that exclude Palestinians as political agents, denying them control over decision-making, ensuring that Israel—and by extension the US and EU—retain ultimate power over Palestinian life in Gaza. In many of the proposals, as Nur Arafeh and Mandy Turner argued in a far-sighted essay published in July by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, these governance structures seem poised to enable “land grabbing, resource extraction, and reconstruction profiteering” on the part of foreign investors. Some would also implicitly maintain a political and economic separation between Gaza and the West Bank, where Israel remains free to subjugate and cantonize Palestinians at will. As a result, these supposed plans for a new future in Gaza would in fact entrap Palestinians in a familiar, exhausting, ruinous loop.

2.

The “day after” plans are only the latest in a long line of attempts by Israel and the West to resolve the problem that Gaza has posed for Israeli policymakers. The Strip contains, after Jordan, the second-largest concentration of Palestinian refugees in the world; of its total population, approximately 66 percent are refugees from the Nakba and their descendants. Israel has long sought to extinguish their right of return, which not only poses an existential threat to the character of the Jewish state but also affirms and legitimizes Palestinians’ claim to their ancestral homes, which were destroyed with Israel’s establishment in 1948.¹

Gaza has also long been the center of Palestinian nationalist resistance. In the aftermath of the war of 1967, when Israel occupied the Strip, guerrilla fighters based in Gaza’s refugee camps started launching cross-border attacks into Israeli territory (which were put down in the early 1970s by the Israeli army). Militant groups like Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine also intensified their activity, and civilian groups built up local institutions that provided a range of social and economic services.

Israeli leaders’ anxieties about Gaza increased during the first intifada, a popular uprising against Israeli occupation that began in December 1987 and continued until its official end with the signing of the first Oslo Accord in September 1993. This was also the period during which Hamas first emerged as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood dedicated to armed struggle against the occupation—but the resistance during these years was based for the most part on civil disobedience. I lived in Gaza in 1988 and 1989 and saw how, for the first time, Israel was confronted by largely nonviolent, highly organized Palestinian collective action, founded on reasonable, arguably attainable political demands to which the state’s leaders were nonetheless unwilling to agree: the end of the occupation and the recognition of Palestinians as a people with authentic national rights.

The intifada forced both the Israeli public and international observers to confront the subjugation of a people. Civil disobedience actions such as boycotts and strikes made that injustice visible and audible. New community-based institutions sprang up both in Gaza and in the West Bank to provide services in a range of areas—education, health, food distribution, and conflict resolution mediated by and for Palestinians. To Israeli leaders, this social revolution presaged stronger and more cohesive resistance to the occupation; it also threatened Israeli control by inspiring more support for Palestinians in the West. Going forward, Israeli officials realized that they needed to extinguish, however they could, the agency of Palestinians to act as a unified people and articulate political demands. In particular, as Amjad Iraqi has written in these pages, they learned they had to “dismantle Gaza as a pillar of Palestinian society and national struggle.”

What followed were decades of ever-tightening restrictions on the Strip’s economic development. Adding to Gaza’s misery was the construction of an electric fence around its perimeter in the mid-1990s, the bombing of its airport in 2001, the barring of its students from West Bank universities since 2000, and the banning of its residents from living in the West Bank since 2003. To this, of course, one must add the many Israeli wars on the Strip—fifteen since 1948, according to 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 year—that cut off the normal trade on which the Strip heavily relied. Gaza’s economy declined dramatically, unemployment increased rapidly, and food insecurity deepened. By the end of 2017 every second person in Gaza, including over 400,000 children, lived in poverty; by the same time the following year 68 percent were food insecure. Between 70 and 80 percent of Gaza’s population came to depend on international humanitarian assistance, further depoliticizing Gaza’s plight both on the world stage and among Palestinians themselves. “No one thinks about Jerusalem or the right of return anymore,” a highly educated women, the mother of two young children, told me before October 7, but about finding a job and feeding their families. Another man told me that his dream was to have “a concrete slab as my roof.”²

As it imposed ever-harsher control on Gaza, Israel and its benefactors in the West also released a slew of plans for improving, reconstructing, or rebuilding the territory. A far from exhaustive list would include the Gaza Plan for the year 2000 (a confidential Israeli government plan drawn up in 1986, which I was able to obtain three years later); plans devised in the 1990s by international organizations to turn Gaza into the “Singapore of the Middle East”; the 1994 Gaza-Jericho agreement and the Safe Passage protocol connecting Gaza to the West Bank (both part of the Oslo Accords); the infrastructure visions that accompanied the opening of the Gaza International Airport in 1998 and the fraught construction of the Gaza Seaport in 2000; the 2003 US Roadmap for Peace; the 2004 privately proposed Gaza Free Trade Zone; the 2005 Israeli disengagement plan; the RAND Corporation’s 2005 “Arc” plan for a Palestinian state; the Israeli-proposed 2011 Gaza Artificial Island; the 2014 Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism brokered by the Israeli government, the UN, and the PA; the Trump-proposed 2020 Peace to Prosperity Plan; and the Israeli-proposed 2021 Gaza Development Plan.

These plans varied widely in their content, but they shared a fundamental aim: to pacify Gazans using economic cooptation, if not coercion. Whether implicitly or explicitly, they perpetuated a claim that Israel has long promoted: that Gaza represents a problem of security rather than of occupation. The international, primarily Western powers, for their part, justified that occupation as long as there was no accepted agreement to end it, never forcing Israel to accept the compromises that would have made such an agreement possible—especially allowing the creation of an empowered, independent Palestinian entity.

In 2021 Israel constructed a twenty-foot-tall iron wall that extended forty miles around the Strip. It was equipped with cameras, radar, sensors, and a remote-controlled weapons system that also extends underground and out to the sea—all of which failed, tragically, to protect Israelis from the horrific attack of October 7, 2023. For Gaza’s Palestinians, the indefinite or transitional became a condition of life. Many came to assume that the future would only bring greater suffering than the present. Not only was it “a crime to think about things improving,” a friend told me over two years ago, it was “a crime even to think about things staying the same.”

3.

If we take the current crop of plans at their word that their aim is to rehabilitate and rebuild Gaza, then the destruction of the Strip over the past two years presents formidable, unprecedented challenges. Even if tomorrow the Israeli army withdrew completely, Gaza’s infrastructure would by some accounts take decades to rebuild—84 percent of the Strip has been destroyed, according to the UN, and 92 percent of Gaza City. In October the UN estimated that reconstruction would cost $70 billion.

That staggering number might be an underestimate. In September the United Nations Environment Programme found that Gaza contained 61 million tons of rubble, equivalent to “fifteen Great Pyramids of Giza or twenty-five Eiffel Towers by volume.” Months ago the UN assessed that it could take a hundred trucks fifteen years to clear it all. The rubble is mixed, by one account, with six to nine thousand pieces of unexploded ordnance (the Gaza Government Media Office estimates that there are 20,000 unexploded bombs across the territory), contaminated materials (the World Bank, UN, and EU estimate that “2.3 million tons of debris may be potentially contaminated with asbestos”), and human remains. Charles Birch, an explosives clearance expert for the UN Mine Action Service, told The Washington Post that simply clearing all the unexploded ordnance will take years and cost tens of millions of dollars.

Gaza’s environment has been ruined. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, only 1.5 percent of the Strip’s agricultural land is still “accessible and not damaged.” Approximately 89 percent of Gaza’s water and sanitation facilities and waste disposal systems, severely compromised long before October 7, have been either destroyed or damaged, sending at least 26 million gallons of sewage and wastewater flowing into the Mediterranean every day. Sewage overflows in the streets. In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s cease-fire announcement, Drop Site reported, the Israeli army set fire to the Sheikh Ajlin Sewage Treatment Station, “a central component of Gaza City’s sanitation network.” Its destruction—as the director of Gaza’s vital municipal water utility told the outlet—could reduce Gaza City’s wastewater system “to point zero.”

Homelessness will still be persistent and inescapable; physical and cognitive damage from famine and malnutrition will still jeopardize future generations; diseases that were previously eradicated or scarce will reemerge. (This is already the case with Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a rare neurological disorder that can cause paralysis and is spreading rapidly across the Strip, due in large part to Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure.) The population will still suffer from severe physical disabilities, mass trauma, economic scarcity, and continued Israeli military control.

*

How do the many “day after” plans currently in circulation aim to repair this long-term damage, and what do they tell us about the international community’s goals for Palestinians’ political future? Several proposals, mostly from outside the US and Western Europe, take the end of Israel’s occupation as their explicit starting point: the July 2024 Palestinian National Unity Plan agreed to in Beijing by fourteen Palestinian factions (including Fatah and Hamas), the March 2025 Egyptian plan endorsed by the twenty-two members of the Arab League (although it must also be noted that none of the League’s most powerful members have imposed any major economic sanctions on Israel for its destruction of Gaza), various UN resolutions and statements, the International Court of Justice’s 2024 Advisory Opinion, and the 2025 French–Saudi “New York Declaration,” among others.³ These initiatives, to varying degrees, provide much-needed alternatives to their US- and UK-led counterparts. And yet all of the most high-profile Western plans—not least Trump’s own—proceed from the same premises: that Palestinians have no right to determine their future, that the best they can hope for is to exchange self-determination for construction projects and accept apartheid in place of genocide.

Some of these proposals suggest that, in a grim reversal, the same enclave where economic development was deliberately smothered for decades now strikes certain foreign investors as an attractive business opportunity. On August 31—four days after Trump hosted a meeting at the White House to discuss Gaza’s future with, among others, Kushner, Dermer, and Blair—a proposal leaked that would have had particularly disastrous implications for Gaza and its people. “The Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation (GREAT) Trust: From a Demolished Iranian Proxy to a Prosperous Abrahamic Ally” laid out elements of the vision Trump offered in February—largely rejected by major Arab and European states—for building a Riviera in the Strip, a “glittering Gaza,” in Seymour Hersh’s phrase, where Palestinian residents would be either contained or ethnically cleansed. Echoing the “Gaza 2035” plan to build a “massive free trade zone” in the region that Netanyahu introduced last year, the GREAT Trust was reportedly developed, according to The Washington Post, “by some of the same Israelis who created” the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

The incoherently written document was, simply put, an abomination. It envisioned a US-Israel bilateral agreement that appeared to call for shifting “control” of the Strip “from Israel to the US (once Hamas is disarmed)”; this arrangement would “evolve to a formal multilateral trusteeship” that could govern Gaza for a “transition period,” until its duties could be transferred to “a reformed and deradicalized Palestinian Polity,” which would then join the Abraham Accords. The GREAT Trust never clarified what such a polity would look like. (As the political analysts Mouin Rabbani and Daniel Levy have both noted, it takes a certain nerve to tell the Palestinians—who have been dispossessed and occupied for decades and just experienced two years of genocide—that they are the ones who need to be “deradicalized.”) It did, however, note that, as long as Hamas remains in power, “Gaza faces long-term contraction, poverty, and extreme aid dependency…reducing its worth to practically $0.” Because a root cause of Gaza’s “insurgency” is ostensibly its urban layout, the plan’s vision of “reforming” Gaza would also involve rebuilding its infrastructure using a “smart cities” design akin to “Hausmann’s strategy in 19th century Paris.” During this process, the proposal recommended, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation should play a significant part in “Hamas-free Aid-delivery.” The plan appeared to entrust internal security to private military contractors; Israel, for its part, would retain “overarching rights to meet its security needs.”

Until it deradicalizes, Gaza would be placed in a trust controlled, in effect, by American and Israeli investors for the purposes of postwar development. One “strategic benefit” of this arrangement for the US, the plan stated, would 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 told a real estate conference in Tel Aviv last month about plans to rebuild Gaza as a lucrative business enterprise with American support. “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 said. “This thing turns into a real estate bonanza. I’m not kidding; it pays off.”

A crucial component of the reconstruction process would be “voluntary relocation programs.” These would give Palestinians in Gaza two options. They could “remain in Gaza during reconstruction” and receive “temporary housing” for as long as a decade, during which they would be herded into what the Post calls “restricted, secured zones.” Or they could accept a package of $5,000 per person, subsidized rent for four years, and subsidized food for one year in exchange for agreeing to “relocation,” which is to say expulsion. The plan estimates that three-quarters of Gaza’s population would choose to stay and a quarter to leave—and that of the latter 75 percent would “choose not to return.” For every Gazan who chooses “voluntary relocation,” $23,000 in savings would accrue to the Trust, increasing the Strip’s financial “worth.” One way to reduce the Trust’s total investment, the plan specified, would therefore be to “increase the number of Gazans who volunteer to leave Gaza during the reconstruction.”

*

The full vision laid out in the GREAT Trust seems, for the moment, unlikely to be implemented. But its echoes resonate through the plans positioned to guide current policymaking, which suggest their own ways of preempting Palestinian autonomy—let alone sovereignty. Last month Blair, with Trump’s encouragement, issued a plan of his own on which he had, reportedly, been working for months in consultation with Arab officials in the region, including the Saudis, for the formation of a postwar Gaza International Transitional Authority (GITA), a hierarchical structure with “supreme political and legal authority for Gaza during the transitional period,” which Blair himself was reportedly in talks to lead.

Composed of billionaires and businesspeople, including Muslim businessmen (to “ensure regional legitimacy and cultural credibility”), the board would also 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, need to meet “strict standards of political neutrality.” The plan does not say whether the same standard would apply to GITA’s international board.

GITA would work closely with Israel, the US, and Egypt. Within Gaza, it would have power over a Palestinian Executive Authority (PEA)—not to be confused with the Palestinian Authority. Envisioned as a “nonpartisan, professional administration” tasked with the “neutral and efficient” delivery of “essential public services,” from health and education to welfare and housing, the PEA would operate under GITA’s ultimate command, with no independence of its own. Under this plan Palestinians would have far less authority than they would under the Egyptian-led Arab plan for Gaza, which calls for a new governance structure of technocrats to replace Hamas and work with the PA, which would eventually assume total control. Blair’s plan does mention that GITA would work “in close consultation” with the PA in the West Bank with the goal of eventually “unifying…all [of] the Palestinian territory under the PA.” But there is nothing in the document that specifies how and when this unification would take place.

Under Blair’s plan Gazans would not be displaced but could appeal to a “Property Rights Preservation Unit” tasked with ensuring 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 would be enforced, given that Israel would, in all likelihood, reject them.

4.

Then came Trump’s Gaza proposal, which incorporates some major elements of Blair’s plan and affords him an important role in Gaza’s postwar future. It, too, insists that Palestinians will not be forced or incentivized to leave; it also emphasizes that “Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza.” But Israel has, in practice, long been the occupying power in Gaza—whether directly or via closure, siege, and blockade—and Trump’s proposal neither acknowledges that brutal history nor calls for an end to it.

Instead it advocates for a process dictated largely by Israeli facts on the ground. Responsibility for the Strip’s redevelopment would lie with a top-down governing and economic authority—a “new international transitional body”—known incongruously as the “Board of Peace.” The board would be administered by foreign, 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 guarantee that Israel would withdraw from the territory or cease attacking it. In fact, as Daniel Levy has noted, “the stages and conditionalities as set out allow the IDF to remain in most of Gaza.”

Trump’s is among the many plans to call for demilitarizing Hamas and reassigning governance duties in Gaza to an international occupying force until the deeply troubled Palestinian Authority is “reformed” or another version of it created. The Wilson Center’s “Plan for Postwar Gaza,” for instance, calls for the formation of a “Multi-National Authority” to which the current PA would serve as an advisory body; here, as in Trump’s plan, it never becomes quite clear who would define the 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,” according to the plan. “However,” it adds 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 role in these proposals is revealing. It has little if any legitimacy among Palestinians and is often regarded as a subcontractor to the occupation, acting against the interests of its own people. This is because its primary function is security coordination with Israel, which involves suppressing Palestinian protest against the occupation. The PA’s legitimacy has been further diminished by its crackdown on critics, intolerance of dissent, and increasingly authoritarian rule. That the PA needs reform is unquestioned; what “reform” looks like is a more difficult matter. Trump’s plan refers to programs outlined in his 2020 “Peace to Prosperity” initiative and in the July 2025 Saudi-French proposal adopted by the UN. As co-chairs of a September 2025 international conference on the two-state solution, France and Saudi Arabia issued a statement specifying the PA reforms they regard as essential: repealing its current payments to prisoners and to the families of deceased prisoners, developing an educational curriculum that meets Western standards, and promising to hold elections within a year of a Gaza cease-fire.

As some of these dictates suggest, in the eyes of Israel and its allies, rehabilitating the PA is a matter of making it even more compliant to their interests. In a recent analysis for the European Council on Foreign Relations, Hugh Lovatt and Muhammad Shehada observe that the PA has largely met the first two conditions and has committed itself to the third. And yet, they note, Trump’s 2020 plan includes further demands: it would require the PA to give up its right to join “any international organization without the consent of the State of Israel” and refrain from pursuing any action at the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court—or, moreover, invoking any instrument of international law. On September 29 Netanyahu added that he would also expect the PA to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. If the PA were to cross these “long-standing Palestinian red lines,” Lovatt and Shehada write, it would erode whatever legitimacy it has left. As the Israeli analyst Jeff Halper recently argued, “reform” as defined by the US and Israel refers to the unconditional surrender of the entire “Palestinian struggle for self-determination.” All this, for that matter, might be moot because Israel has so far rejected any prospect of the PA returning to Gaza and participating in postwar reconstruction—not to mention any prospect of genuine liberation. “In our meeting today Prime Minister Netanyahu was very clear about his opposition to a Palestinian state,” Trump acknowledged on September 29.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of Trump’s plan, however, is what it does not include. No mention is made of Israel’s destructive actions in the West Bank, nor of the prospect of unifying that territory politically with Gaza, nor of Palestinian sovereignty in general, other than a vague and tepid reference to “a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood” once certain conditions of reform are met (no doubt imposed by the US, Israel, and other Western powers). Meanwhile the plan makes clear reference to Israeli security, which has long served in such proposals as an ever-receding horizon that justifies indefinite Israeli military control over the Palestinian people. In my four decades of engagement with Israel and Palestine, I have yet to find any Israeli official or citizen who can truly define what security means to them or what Palestinians must say or do to make Israelis—their occupiers—feel secure.

When I read the plan, the same feeling of dread came over me as when I first read the Oslo Accords over thirty years ago. Once again the US and Israel have become the final arbiters of Palestinian life in Gaza and the West Bank; once again Palestinian freedom from Israeli occupation pales as a priority in comparison to Israeli security from Palestinian political violence, or for that matter from those forms of resistance to which Palestinians are entitled under international law; once again an ostensible “peace plan” merely describes the continuation of occupation in a different form. 

*

The reality of that occupation—and the practical constraints it imposes—is also what dooms those proposals for postwar Gaza that ignore politics altogether, treating the Strip as a purely economic, technical, or humanitarian problem.⁵ Of these perhaps the most considered is a recent proposal from the RAND Corporation, “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 glance “From Camps to Communities” might appear reasonable and carefully thought-out. It casts its recommendations in modest terms, as “notional” and “illustrative” responses to conditions “that will no doubt change.” But it also addresses the vast immediate needs for postwar shelter in considerable and careful detail, with an aim 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 yet the RAND report, too, rests on faulty assumptions. All of its scenarios, for one thing, presume the availability of land on which to build—yet none of them account for Israel’s continued control over vast areas of the Gaza Strip. Even now, after Israel’s partial withdrawal under the terms of the cease-fire agreement, it controls almost all of the Rafah governorate, more than half of the Khan Younis governorate, parts of Gaza City, Beit Hanoun in the north, around a third of the Netzarim Corridor (which separates the northern and southern Strip), and the critical Philadelphi Corridor—a strategic area of approximately nine miles along Gaza’s border with Egypt. Most critically, it continues to control all crossings into and out of Gaza.

Even in a hypothetical postwar future, Israel is highly unlikely to remove all of these obstructions anytime soon. According to Trump’s plan, Israeli forces will remain in over a third of the Strip even after the second phase of its withdrawal (should that occur) and retain a security buffer zone around Gaza that could encompass between 15 and 17 percent of the territory. The buffer zone will remain in place “until Gaza is properly secure from any resurgent terror threat,” which could easily translate into still more indefinite Israeli control.

Nor is Israel likely, under present conditions, to allow, let alone facilitate, housing reconstruction, “good urban planning,” and community building for Palestinians in the rest of the Strip—at least without the threat of future destruction. Indeed, according to the right-wing paper Israel Hayom, Dermer said last week that if Hamas does not demilitarize, construction will begin only in the parts of Gaza that are under Israeli control. His comments likely reflect a plan being considered by the US and Israel to split Gaza into two separate areas, one controlled by Israel and the other by Hamas. According to The Wall Street Journal, reconstruction would take place only on the Israeli side “as a stopgap until [Hamas] can be disarmed and removed from power,” with the goal of geographically expanding the “safe area” so that construction can begin. This would allow Israel to establish permanent control inside Gaza.

As a “successful precedent” for “building new neighborhoods quickly and cost-effectively,” the RAND report cites Hamad City, a neighborhood in Khan Younis, which I visited many years ago. Built with Qatari funding and inaugurated in 2016, the development consisted of fifty-three buildings with three thousand apartments between them. The RAND authors note that last year Israel destroyed much of Hamad City, but they fail to draw the obvious conclusion that any large-scale housing project will be under constant threat of damage or destruction as long as Israeli occupation persists.

In this respect they make a foundational error common to all of the most significant plans. They assume that once the genocide is over—a genocide facilitated if not inflicted by the same Western powers that now claim to seek repair—there will be some kind of natural point at which the evil ends and the task of rebuilding a new reality can automatically begin. This is not just a fallacy but an utter lie.

*

Why have so many planners taken these ahistorical, decontextualized views? Part of the answer is that, for decades, Israel’s defenders have acted as if the Israeli and Palestinian positions are symmetrical. The Oslo process promoted this notion by casting the conflict as a matter not of international law and UN resolutions but of bilateral negotiations between two equal actors, despite the vast asymmetries in power and resources between them. Over the years Israeli spokespeople have insisted, moreover, that the country seeks peace with Palestinians and is prepared to make the necessary compromises if certain conditions are met.

If nothing else, the annihilation of Gaza has laid these falsehoods to rest. It could not be clearer now that, as Edward Said wrote long ago, “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 could it be clearer that Israel and the US seek not modes of engagement (or RAND’s “durable peace”) with the Palestinian people and their leadership but ways to exclude them from any political process and hold them in a state of siege, regardless of whatever concessions they might make. (Israel’s attempt to assassinate the Hamas delegation negotiating the cease-fire in Qatar is just one recent, dramatic example.) Palestinian political infighting and the lack of a unified Palestinian leadership are, to be sure, now more than ever also limiting factors in the search for a political resolution—but lesser ones. For Israel there has never been a “postwar” in Gaza.

Quiet is not the absence of conflict. Nor is it peace. Without a political and strategic commitment to ending the occupation, no plan will meaningfully address—let alone halt—Israel’s long-term vision of, as Smotrich recently put it, “breaking Gaza apart.” It could not be more crucial to keep food, medicine, and other desperately needed supplies flowing into Gaza, but ultimately Palestinians have never wanted humanitarian aid; they want and need the power to determine for themselves how they should live and care for their children and who should represent and govern them. Recognizing Palestinian statehood—as the UK, Canada, France, Australia, Malta, and Belgium recently did—might have symbolic value, but statehood without liberation from occupation will be nothing more than a diplomatic fiction perpetuating a partitionist reality.

For as the Palestinian American poet Lisa Suhair Majaj has written, “there is no hiding in Gaza.” On June 20, months before the onslaught on Gaza City, Doctor Ezzideen Shehab, founder of the Al-Rahma Medical Center in northern Gaza, posted a message on X about the clinic he works in. He wanted us to understand the intent, “cold and deliberate,” behind the hunger he saw there. “The women who collapse in my arms are not statistics,” he wrote. “They are executions carried out in slow motion.” The evening before, he wrote, a mother arrived during his shift:

Thirty-three years old. Unconscious. Skin cold. Breath shallow. A body so thin I could see the outline of her bones as I placed the IV. Her baby still clung to her, unaware that the breast it suckled had nothing left to give but the scent of death.

Diagnosis? Dehydration. Acute malnutrition. But in truth she suffers from something medicine cannot cure: abandonment.

We administered fluids, stabilized her vitals. On paper it will look like we helped her. We did not. We postponed the inevitable.… My colleague, still untouched by this hell, whispered that she should stop breastfeeding. “She must regain her strength,” he said. I did not answer. What could I say? That formula is no longer a product here, but a dream? That a can of powdered milk now costs more than a month’s worth of food, if there were food?

She cannot buy bread. She cannot buy air. And yet we speak to her as if she had choices. This is the cruelty of war: not just the bombs, but the absurdity of giving advice to the damned.

Absent principled and intentional action by the states with the power to challenge Israeli policy, Gaza’s “day after” will hardly differ from how Dr. Ezzideen described its present: “triage in a mass grave that has not been dug yet.”