Month: January 2026

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Note. A lightly edited version of this was article published in Canadian Dimension on January 22, 2026.

Donald J. Trump via Truth Social

I’ll speak today about the rupture in the world order, the end of the pleasant fiction and the dawn of a brutal reality in which great-power geopolitics is unconstrained.

Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, opening his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 20, 2026 

Before dawn on January 3, the US launched “a large-scale strike against Venezuela” during which its president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were kidnapped and flown out of the country. They were subsequently arraigned in a New York court on drug and weapons charges. Though there were no American deaths, at least 100 people were killed in the assault, including Venezuelan civilians and 32 Cubans.

Four days later, in Minneapolis, MN, a masked ICE agent, Jonathan E. Ross, fatally shot a 37-year-old American woman, Renée Nicole Good, three times in the face at point-blank range.  Video analysis by the New York Times of “bystander footage, filmed from different angles, appears to show the agent was not in the path of the victim’s SUV when he fired.” Contrary to the claims put out by the Department of Homeland Security within two hours, this was a brutal murder—not self-defense.

What has any of this to do with Gaza? The short answer is: everything. For it was above all in Gaza that the New World Order of which these are symptoms was forged.

The Donroe Doctrine

Later on January 3, Trump told journalists that “We’re going to run the country [Venezuela] until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.” 

With a nod to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine (which he has modestly renamed the “Donroe Doctrine”), Trump warned that “Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.”

“I understand the anxiety over the use of military force,” vice-president J. D. Vance posted on X, “but are we just supposed to allow a communist to steal our stuff in our hemisphere and do nothing? Great powers don’t act like that. The United States, thanks to President Trump’s leadership, is a great power again. Everyone should take note.“

By “steal our stuff” he meant Venezuela’s nationalization of foreign oil companies in 2007 under Hugo Chávez.

When Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt in 1956 aiming to depose president Gamal Abdel Nasser following his nationalization of the Suez Canal, US president Dwight D. Eisenhower pressured them to accept a United Nations ceasefire and voted for UN resolutions publicly condemning the invasion and approving the creation of a UN peacekeeping force. That was under the old post–WW2 “rules-based” order.

Today, according to Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller,; 

We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world. We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.

Move fast and break things

As Maya Angelou once said, when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

Trump made his determination not to have American hands tied by involvement in multilateral organizations, treaties, or agreements very clear from the get-go. On his first day in office, he withdrew the US from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Paris Climate Agreement. 

Two weeks later he pulled the US out of the United Nations Human Rights Council, prohibited any future US funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), and ordered a review of US funding and involvement in the UN, including what he called the “anti-American” UNESCO (from which he would withdraw the US in July 2025). 

Following that review, which was led by secretary of state Marco Rubio, on January 7 this year Trump withdrew from a further “35 non-United Nations organizations and 31 UN entities that operate contrary to U.S. national interests, security, economic prosperity, or sovereignty” and “advance globalist agendas over U.S. priorities.” 

One of these was the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to which all other countries in the world belong. This frees up the US from any future international obligations regarding action on carbon emissions and global warming. Trump has long made it clear to the world that he proposes to “Drill, baby, drill!”

More recently (and very ominously), in the words of former UK prime minister Gordon Brown Trump has made “the momentous decision to constitute an alternative” to the United Nations, a so-called “‘board of peace’, with a remit for interventions far beyond Gaza, and with membership offered to about 60 favoured states, including Russia.” 

That the UN opened the road for this when it cravenly endorsed Trump’s “Gaza Peace Plan” on November 17 is indicative of just how moribund the old order has become.

Triumph of the will

The invasion of Venezuela is not a one-off. Despite running on an anti-war platform, the use of force (or threat thereof) has been a defining feature of Trump’s presidency.

He has threatened to annex Greenland, “take back” the Panama Canal, and employ economic force to compel Canada to become “a cherished and beautiful 51st state.” 

Notwithstanding his petulant lobbying for a “Noble Peace Prize” (like Obama) and his specious claim to have “ended eight wars,” in 2025 Trump bombed Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Nigeria, and Venezuela, and the US has killed at least 112 people in strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. Asked whether “killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime,” J. D. Vance responded: “I don’t give a shit what you call it.” 

On December 16 Trump declared “A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela … Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” As of January 13, the US Navy had seized five tankers. Asked what would happen to the oil, Trump responded “We’re gonna keep it.”

Trump has now extended the blockade to Cuba, warning “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY [from Venezuela] GOING TO CUBA — ZERO! I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.” He has also threatened to take military action in his quarrels with Mexico and Colombia. Nothing like showing them who’s boss.

Asked in a lengthy interview for the New York Times in January 2026 whether there was any limit on his powers, Trump replied: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me … I don’t need international law.”

A global protection racket

In a sharp reversal of the free trade consensus that has governed the world economy since World War II, Trump has imposed tariffs ranging from 10–41 percent on imports from all US trading partners, and certain goods (e.g. steel, aluminum, critical minerals, automobiles, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, lumber) face higher levies. As I write, the legality of Trump’s use of tariffs is being litigated before the US Supreme Court.

On February 1, 2025 he imposed 25 percent tariffs on most goods from Canada and Mexico, supposedly because neither country was doing enough to stem the flow of fentanyl (and in Mexico’s case immigrants) across the US border. On March 24 he imposed 25% tariffs on all goods from countries that import Venezuelan oil—a tactic he extended on January 12, 2026 to “any country doing business with” Iran.

On July 30, 2025, Trump put tariffs on various goods from Brazil “due to Brazil’s actions regarding the prosecution of former President Bolsonaro, the regulation of online platforms, and other issues.” In August he imposed a whopping 50 percent tariff on India, which included a 25 percent punishment for continuing to buy Russian oil. In October he made a $20 billion line of credit to Argentina contingent upon his rightwing ally Javier Milei’s party winning the upcoming parliamentary elections. 

On January 17 he threatened a 10 percent tariff, rising to 25 percent, on Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, and Finland, which would “be due and payable until … a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland”—despite having signed recent trade agreements with the UK and EU. Following pushback from European powers he backed down, announcing that talkswith NATO chief Mark Rutte had “formed the framework of a future deal.”

When French president Emmanuel Macron declined to join his Board of Peace, Trump threatened to impose 200 percent tariffs on French wine and champagne.

It is clear is that irrespective of prior agreements or treaties, Trump will not hesitate to use economic means to achieve political ends. He’s running a global protection racket.

Strongarming the courts

Not only has Trump flouted international law. He has gone out of his way to discredit international legal institutions, including the world’s two highest courts. 

Accusing South Africa of taking “aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice” (ICJ) the Trump administration instituted a series of measures intended to discredit South Africa’s moral authority to bring the case, pressurize South Africa to drop it, and discourage other countries from joining it. 

In February 2025, Donald Trump imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) for indicting Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes. ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan was the first victim. The US sanctioned four more judges on June 5, adding two more judges (one of them was Canadian justice Kimberly Prost) and two assistant prosecutors on August 20. Rubio sanctioned two more judges in December, and the administration is now leaning onthe court to amend its guiding documents to exempt US citizens from its jurisdiction. 

Such sanctions include an asset freeze, a prohibition on Americans doing business with sanctioned individuals, and a ban on their entering the United States. Unable to access the world banking system, victims—who also include UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese—cannot even use credit cards or book a flight or a hotel online. 

“The purpose is clear,” Prost told the Irish Times: 

Effectively, they are interfering directly with the independence of a judge. I can’t think of any other way to describe it but an attack on the independence of the judiciary and the International Criminal Court’s independence as an institution.

Securing the home front

Trump has moved just as fast on the domestic front, in ways that test the legal limits of his executive power. His actions have resulted in at least 583 challenges in the courts. While lower courts have overturned many of his orders, the conservative-dominated Supreme Court—which previously gave him immunity for “actions relating to the core powers of his office”—has so far generally proved more compliant.

The administration took an axe to the federal government and its programs, with the loss of 317,000 jobs by the end of 2025. Elon Musk’s Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), which was created by executive order on Trump’s first day outside the normal machinery of government, was responsible for much of the early carnage. The now-defunct DOGE has been widely criticized as “illegal and unconstitutional.” 

The 26 executive orders Trump signed on his first day—more than any previous US president—included a ban on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs across the federal government, attempts to limit birthright citizenship, and the declaration of a “national energy emergency” that has led to a bonfire of environmental regulations. 

From removing over 8,000 government web pages related to DEI initiatives, “gender identity, public health research, environmental policy, and various social programs,” to excluding transgender soldiers from the military and athletes from women’s sports, waging a “war on science” and whitewashing how history is presented in the nation’s museums, Trump has used his executive powers to advance MAGA’s culture wars.

He also found time on his first day to unconditionally pardon almost all 1,600 rioters convicted in the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol and commute the sentences imposed on Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia members for seditious conspiracy. While this was within his powers as president, it shows scant respect for the courts. House Democrats are now asking how many of the rioters have joined Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which increasingly looks like Trump’s Gestapo.

The same contempt for the rule of law is shown by the fact that nearly a month after Congress set a deadline of December 19 for the release of all files relating to the Jeffrey Epstein case, Trump’s Department of Justice has made public only 12,285 out of over 2 million relevant documents, and many of these have been heavily redacted.

I am your retribution

Not content with stacking the governing bodies of public institutions from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—now renamed the Trump-Kennedy Center—to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with loyalists, Trump has good on his promise to his MAGA supporters that “I am your justice … I am your retribution.” 

The president has purged the US military, the justice department, immigration judges, and at least 17 inspectors general (the independent watchdogs who oversee federal government departments).  The list of those whose security clearances been revoked in retaliation for past actions deemed hostile to Trump is growing very long indeed. 

Weaponizing the justice department, Trump has opened criminal investigations or prosecutions against among others Letitia James, Jack Smith, James Comey, John Bolton, Eric Swalwell, Adam Schiff, Mark Kelly, John Brennan, and Jerome Powell, all of whom he has crossed swords with in the past. The administration’s response to pushback against the murder of Renée Good from elected city and state officials has been to issue subpoenas against governor Tim Walz and mayor Jacob Frey. 

Trump has sanctioned big law firms (e.g., WilmerHale, Jenner and Block, Covington & Burling) because they represented clients of which he disapproved. Rather than face being shut out of business with federal agencies, excluded from federal buildings (including courtrooms), and losing security clearances, several firms have caved to Trump’s demands and promised millions in pro bono work to causes he supports.

Silencing speech

The administration has dismantled Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia and defunded PBS and NPR on grounds that the former has “a “leftist bias” and fails to project “pro-American” values and the latter do not offer “a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.”

Trump removed Associated Press from the White House press pool and stripped the White House Correspondents’ Association of its traditional power to decide which journalists have access to the president. In October, reporters from all but one news organization—including even the regime-friendly Fox News—turned in their Pentagon access badges rather than agree to new rules from secretary of defence (now styled “secretary of war”) Pete Hegseth restricting what they were allowed to report. 

Trump has personally sued among others ABC News (obtaining $15 million in an out-of-court settlement), the Daily Beast, CBS News (a $16 million settlement), the Des Moines Register, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. He is suing the BBCfor defamation for no less than $10 billion, a sum that would bankrupt the UK’s public broadcaster (whose entire income in 2025 was £5.9 billion, or $US 7.88). 

CBS canceled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert after Colbert criticized Trump. The next month, ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! after Kimmel commented on the assassination of rightwing darling Charlie Kirk, leading Trump to muse: “They’re giving me all this bad press, and they’re getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away.” This is hardly a climate conducive to free speech.

Kneecapping the universities

A recent report by PEN America documents how 

From executive orders and memos, to investigations, the withholding of funds for research and financial aid, and efforts to detain, deport, or deny visas to international students and academics, the federal administration has weaponized every imaginable lever to bring the higher education sector to its knees. 

The report instances 90+ Title VI investigations, $3.7 billion in cuts from federal research dollars from previously awarded grants, and NIH and NSF funding cuts with an estimated annual cost of $10-15 billion in decreased US economic output. 

The federal government has proposed suspending 38 universities including Harvard and Yale from a research partnership program because they engage in DEI hiring, fined UCLA $1.2 billion, and required that it not enroll “foreign students likely to engage in anti-Western, anti-American, or antisemitic disruptions or harassment.” Since January 2025 the State Department has revoked over 8,000 student visas, targeting in particular those who have taken part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. 

Faced with these pressures many schools, including New York’s Columbia University, have traded academic freedom for federal dollars and accepted unprecedented political oversight of their hiring practices and the content of their research and teaching. 

Others have resisted—up to a point. Though Harvard is suing the administration, it has suspended its research partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank and dismissed the director and associate director of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

The cruelty is the point

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Act allocated a mindblowing $75 billion over four years (in addition to $10 billion already appropriated for 2025) to ICE to arrest, detain, and deport immigrants. The law provided $45 billion to increase ICE detention capacity and $46.6 billion for the construction of border barriers and surveillance systems. 

Advertising “You do not need an undergraduate degree,” a generous pay and benefits package, and a $50,000 signing bonus, ICE recruited 12,000 additional agents during 2025, expanding its workforce by 120 percent. Mobilizing “Uncle Sam” imagery, the ads are crafted to attract MAGA supporters, if not outright white nationalists. 

DHS boasts that in 2025 “nearly 3 million illegal aliens … left the U.S. … including an estimated 2.2 million self-deportations and more than 675,000 deportations.” The conditions in Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” and other ICE detention centers are grim. A record 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025.  The cruelty is the point—to strike fear.

An unknown number of those deported have not been given due process and in some cases have been sent to third countries with which they have no connection. In what is perhaps the most notorious case of denial of legal rights, the administration defied court orders and summarily deported 238 Venezuelan men to the CECOT prison in El Salvador, which is notorious for torture and “life-threatening prison conditions.” 

ICE has conducted large-scale raids across the US aiming at 3,000 arrests per day. Though DHS claims its targets are “criminal illegal aliens across the country, including gang members, rapists, kidnappers, and drug traffickers,” ICE’s goons have rounded up people from factories, farms, meatpacking plants, restaurants, churches, schools, and even immigration courts. In Minnesota Trump’s Gestapo are going from house to house, breaking down doors and arresting people. Seventy-five percent of those held by ICE in December had no criminal convictions. This is a reign of terror.

Trump has deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles, Washington DC, Chicago and Portland, Oregon, in the latter case to support ICE. He has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to dispatch troops to end the protests in Minnesota. “If I feel it’s important to invoke the Insurrection Act,” he told the New York Times, “I have the right to do pretty much what I want to do.” L’état, c’est moi.

Signs in the window

What has any of this to do with Gaza?

Invoking Václav Havel’s parable of the Czech greengrocer who places a sign in his window reading “Workers of the World Unite” not because he believes it, but to signal his conformity—and thereby helps reproduce the system that oppresses him—Mark Carney’s 2026 Davos speech showed rare honesty from a western political leader.

“For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order,” he begins. But

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

This fiction was useful … So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

Then came Gaza. When the gaps became chasms.

When George H. W. Bush went to war with Iraq over Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, he sought and got authorization from the UN Security Council. When his son, George W. Bush, wanted to fight Saddam again in 2003, he and UK PM Tony Blair—the same Blair that is now on Trump’s “Board of Peace”—used fake intelligence to get support for going to war from the US Congress and UK parliament. The UN was unpersuaded by their claims, but they went through the motions of playing by the rules before going ahead with a “coalition of the willing” anyway. When Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 and invaded Ukraine in 2024, western powers, including the US, EU, UK, and Canada, responded with ever-escalating rounds of sanctions. 

But with Gaza, it is different. As I have documented in more than 25 articles over the last two years, not only have western governments, with the support of mainstream political parties and mass media across the political spectrum, armed, funded, and provided diplomatic cover for the genocide. They have thrown international law out of the window and perhaps fatally undermined the institutions that support it—the UN and its agencies, the ICJ, and the ICC. And they have sacrificed human rights and civil liberties at home, persecuting Israel’s critics under the specious banner of “combatting antisemitism.”

This was not Donald Trump’s doing. The responsibility lies squarely with Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, and Kamala Harris; with Rishi Sunak, David Cameron, Keir Starmer, David Lammy, and Yvette Cooper; with Justin Trudeau, Mélanie Joly, Anita Anand, and—it must be said—Mark Carney; with Emmanuel Macron, Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong, Olaf Scholz and Friedrich Merz, not to mention Kaja Kallas and Ursula von der Leyen. They dealt the final blows to the old order. Trump is just picking up where they left off.

Gaza’s revenge

Asked by Democracy Now on December 26, 2025, to comment on “what’s happening in Gaza,” the Indian novelist and activist Arundhati Roy replied: 

What is there to discuss when you’re murdering children, destroying hospitals, destroying universities, murdering journalists, and boasting about it, boasting about it? And everybody’s sort of ambiguous—I mean, what we are witnessing also is, I think, there are surveys that say that almost 90% of the population of the world wants this to stop, but there is no connection between democratically elected governments and the will of the people. It’s ended. So, the whole charade of Western liberal democracy is as much of a corpse under the rubble as the tens of thousands of Palestinians.

Trump’s triumph might be seen as Gaza’s revenge. Revenge for the West’s complicity in the worst crimes of the century. Revenge for its repeated trampling on international law. Revenge, above all, on the American Democrats who demanded everyone’s vote despite Biden’s “ironclad” support for Israel and Kamala Harris’s refusal to break with his legacy—and told protestors against genocide to shut up because “I’m speaking!” 

She is not speaking any more. Donald Trump is Aimé Césaire’s imperial boomerang. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. The imperial chickens are coming home to roost.

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The first three months of Donald Trump’s “Comprehensive Gaza Peace Plan”

Canadian Dimension/ January 8, 2026 

Trucks carrying humanitarian aid wait to cross into Gaza from Egypt through Rafah. Photo by Eskinder Debebe/UN.

On September 29, 2025, standing beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House, Donald Trump announced his 20-point Comprehensive Gaza Peace Plan to the world. Over the next few days the US president put heavy pressure on Hamas to sign up to his deal, threatening that Israel “would have my full backing to finish the job” of destroying the group if they didn’t.

Though neither Hamas nor any other Palestinian organization had been involved in drawing up Trump’s 20 points, Hamas signed an agreement with Israel at noon on October 9 to implement the first phase of the plan, which came into effect the next day.

This agreement—which, let us be absolutely clear, is all that Israel and Hamas have signed up to so far—committed both sides to a ceasefire in Gaza, following which Israel would withdraw its forces to an agreed-upon “yellow line” and “not return to areas it has withdrawn from, as long as Hamas fully implements the agreement.”

In the 72 hours following the IDF withdrawal, all Israeli hostages in Gaza (or their remains) were to be exchanged for “250 life sentence prisoners [in Israeli jails] plus 1,700 Gazans who were detained after October 7, 2023, including all women and children detained in that context.”

“Full aid” would also “be immediately sent into the Gaza Strip… at a minimum in consistence with the January 19, 2025 agreement regarding humanitarian aid.” The latter stipulated the entry of at least 600 trucks, including 50 fuel trucks, per day.

Though this aspect of the October 9 agreement received less media attention than the release of the Israeli hostages, it was critical for the Palestinians. The world’s top authority on food supply, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), had declared the “irrefutable” existence of famine in Gaza more than a month earlier.

The Sharm el-Sheikh Peace Summit

The ceasefire officially began on October 10. Hamas released its last 20 living hostages, and Israel began to release Palestinian prisoners on October 13.

At the Sharm el-Sheikh “Peace Summit” in Egypt that same day, Donald Trump declared that “the war in Gaza is over.” His audience included over 30 world leaders, among them Mark Carney, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz, and Giorgia Meloni, as well as leaders from Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Middle Eastern and Muslim states and UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

The “president of peace” (as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio baptized his boss) was praised on all sides. Elbows up as ever, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney offered “congratulations to President Trump for his essential leadership” in delivering this “historic peace plan… opening a new chapter for Israelis, Palestinians, and the world.”

Their enthusiasm is comprehensible—though totally unfounded. For months, Western leaders outside the US had been facing mounting public opposition over their support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza, as well as growing concerns over their own potential liability for complicity in what was increasingly widely being recognized as a genocide. Tensions between the US and its allies peaked when (to Israel’s fury) Britain, France, Canada, Australia, and several other Western countries recognized a Palestinian state at the 80th UN General Assembly session in September in New York.

Trump’s Gaza plan provided them with an off-ramp. As I wrote at the time, “One can almost hear the huge collective sigh of relief that went up in Western capitals as soon as the Trump plan was announced. The cracks are papered over, the delinquent allies are back in the US fold, and our craven leaders are off the genocide hook.”

The end of the war?

The reality, however, is less rosy—as everybody present in Sharm el-Sheikh must have known.

To begin with, the October 9 agreement did not commit either Israel or Hamas to accepting the rest of Trump’s 20-point plan. Hamas had always been ready to engage in prisoner exchanges—that was, after all, the reason they took hostages on October 7—Israel rather less so. Other issues have proved more intractable.

Several members of the Israeli government stridently opposed the ceasefire, and Netanyahu himself likely only entered into it under pressure from Donald Trump (who was openly campaigning for a Nobel Peace Prize). Challenged by the opposition to endorse Trump’s plan, Netanyahu’s coalition boycotted a Knesset vote on the issue.

In the ensuing days and weeks, Israeli leaders made it clear that they remained opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state now or ever and had no intention of pulling the IDF out of Gaza anytime soon. Fifty-three percent of the strip, including almost all of its arable land, lies in the area the IDF now controls behind the yellow line.

For its part, on October 24 Hamas communicated that while it was willing to “hand over the administration of the Gaza Strip to a temporary Palestinian committee composed of independent ‘technocrats’” as the Trump plan envisaged, it was not prepared to disarm without serious negotiations on establishing a Palestinian state.

Like much of what comes out of the US president’s mouth, Trump’s statement in a December 29 interview with PBS Newshour that “Hamas pledged, they swore that they were going to disarm” is quite simply false.

Very far from the Gaza “war” being over, the thorniest issues—Israel’s continuing occupation of Palestinian territories, disarmament of the Palestinian resistance, and the realization of a viable, sovereign Palestinian state—have yet to be resolved. So does the fate of Gaza’s surviving civilian population of over a million people, trapped in appalling conditions between the yellow line and the sea.

Two earlier ceasefires had enabled exchanges of hostages, in November 2023 and January 2025. Israel multiply breached and finally unilaterally ended both. There was—and is—no good reason to think the outcome will be any different this time around.

UN Security Council Resolution 2803

Notwithstanding these serious obstacles to a real peace, in a landmark resolution of November 17, which passed by a vote of 13-0 (with Russia and China abstaining), the UN Security Council welcomed Trump’s plan and endorsed its key provisions.

Resolution 2803 “authorized” a “Board of Peace”—whose composition is not specified in the resolution, but which will be chaired by Donald Trump himself—to:

  • Set up “a transitional governance administration, including … a Palestinian technocratic, apolitical committee of competent Palestinians from the Strip”
  • Establish “a temporary International Stabilization Force (ISF)… with forces contributed by participating States”
  • Create a “newly trained and vetted Palestinian police force,” which will work with the ISF to ensure “the process of demilitarizing the Gaza Strip, including… the permanent decommissioning of weapons from non-state armed groups.”

“As the ISF establishes control and stability, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will withdraw from the Gaza Strip… save for a security perimeter presence that will remain until Gaza is properly secure from any resurgent terror threat,” the text goes on. The “standards, milestones, and timeframes” will be “agreed between the IDF, ISF, the guarantors [the US, Turkey, Egypt and Qatar], and the United States.”

Astonishingly, there is no provision for any Palestinian input into this most important of issues—for both sides. If the Palestinians give up their arms with no internationally backed guarantee of eventual statehood, they are defenceless in the face of an army that has repeatedly proved its ruthlessness. But so long as Hamas is not disarmed, Israelis fear a repetition of the dreadful events of October 7, 2023, which triggered the present so-called “war” and have been invoked to justifyevery Israeli action since.

The deal of the century?

These transitional arrangements, says the resolution, will remain in place “until such time as the Palestinian Authority (PA) has satisfactorily completed its reform program, as outlined in various proposals, including President Trump’s peace plan in 2020… and can securely and effectively take back control of Gaza.”

Both the PA and Hamas denounced Trump’s 2020 plan (which he modestly called “the deal of the century”) at the time, with Hamas describing it as an attempt “to liquidate the Palestinian national project.” Among other things, the plan would have allowed Israel to annex much of the West Bank, including the Jordan Valley, leaving behind a demilitarized Palestinian “state” made up of a series of Bantustans.

Only “after the PA reform program is faithfully carried out and Gaza redevelopment has advanced,” Resolution 2803 continues, “the conditions may”— note it says “may,” not “will”—be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood. The United States will establish a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians to agree on a political horizon for peaceful and prosperous coexistence.”

The postponement of establishing even a “pathway” to Palestinian statehood to the indefinite future—while effectively giving Israel and the US a veto over the process—is particularly ironic, coming so soon after Canada, the UK, and all the rest purportedly “recognized” the state of Palestine.

Unsurprisingly, Hamas and the other factions in Gaza rejected Resolution 2803. In their view, Trump’s plan is no more than a “form of deep international partnership in the war of extermination waged by the [Israeli] occupation against our people.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump during the introduction of the Gaza ceasefire proposal, September 29, 2025. Photo courtesy the White House/Wikimedia Commons.

The legal background

It is difficult to overstate just how major a departure Resolution 2803 is from the UN’s previous policies on the Palestinian question—and from the body of law established by the world’s two highest international courts.

After the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, Security Council Resolution 242 called for:

Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict [and]… Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area…


Israel ignored Resolution 242, as it has ignored literally hundreds of UN resolutions since—usually with the support of the United States, which has frequently employed its veto to shield Israel from sanctions or other UN action. The US has vetoed no less than six United Nations Security Council ceasefire resolutions in the course of the current “war” alone.

Responding to a request from the UN General Assembly, on July 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that “Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful,” and it must “end its unlawful presence… as rapidly as possible,” “cease immediately all new settlement activities,” and “evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

The justices went on to stress that “all states,” as well as international organizations (including the UN), were “under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and not to render aid or assistance” in maintaining the occupation.

Recalling the ICJ ruling as well as earlier resolutions, on December 3, 2024 the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution requiring Israel to “comply with international law, including ceasing all settlement activities and evacuating settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” The vote was 157 in favour, eight against, and seven abstentions. Though both the US and Israel opposed the motion, the overwhelming majority of Western democracies, including Canada and the UK, backed it.

On November 21, 2024 the International Criminal Court (ICC), which was established by the Rome Statute in 1998 as “an independent, permanent court of last resort… to investigate and prosecute the most serious crimes of international concern, namely genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression,” issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

Though not recognized by the US or Israel, this is the same court that convicted Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadzic for their part in the 1995 Srebrenica genocide and—with US approval—indicted Vladimir Putin in 2023 for war crimes in Ukraine.

The Trump administration’s response to the ICC indictments of Netanyahu and Gallant has been to impose sanctions on both the court and several of its individual officials and judges.

The UN betrays Palestine—and itself

The Security Council’s acceptance of the Trump “peace plan” is a watershed moment for the postwar international order. It marks the definitive abandonment of attempts to resolve the Israel-Palestine dispute within this framework of international law, and their replacement by obeisance to the imperatives of great power realpolitik.

Though Russia and China both criticized the Trump plan, they conspicuously did not veto Resolution 2803. Russia has no more interest in upholding international law than Israel or the US, given its invasion of Ukraine, while China would welcome a free hand in Taiwan, which it has always insisted is an integral part of its national territory (and therefore not governed by international law regarding relations between states).

In a blistering response to Security Council Resolution 2803 Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, got to the heart of the matter.

“Despite the horrors of the last two years and the ICJ’s clear jurisprudence,” she wrote:

the Council has chosen not to ground its response in the very body of law it is obliged to uphold: international human rights law, including the right of self-determination, the law governing the use of force, international humanitarian law, and the UN Charter.


Instead, “the resolution risks entrenching external control over Gaza’s governance, borders, security, and reconstruction” and “betrays the people it claims to protect.”

Specifically:

A military force answering to a so-called ‘Board of Peace’ chaired by the President of the United States, an active party to this conflict that has continually provided military, economic and diplomatic support to the illegal occupying Power, is not legal. It is a brazen attempt to impose, by threat of continued force against a virtually defenceless population, US and Israeli interests, plain and simple.

Essentially, it will leave Palestine in the hands of a puppet administration, assigning the United States, which shares complicity in the genocide, as the new manager of the open-air prison that Israel has already established.


In abnegating its legal responsibilities and outsourcing Gaza’s future to Trump’s “Board of Peace,” she charges, the UN has betrayed not only the Palestinian people but its own founding principles as embodied in Articles 1 and 2 of the UN Charter.

You cease, I fire

Nearly three months have passed since the Gaza “ceasefire” came into effect. Israel has repeatedly stalled progress on moving to phase two of Trump’s “peace plan” until all the bodies of deceased Israeli hostages have been returned—no small task, given the difficulty of recovering them in Gaza’s devastation. By December 4 the remains of all but one hostage, police officer Ran Gvili, had been recovered. Israel is still stalling.

Though both sides have accused the other of multiple violations of the ceasefire, the monstrous asymmetry of casualties suggests the fault lies overwhelmingly with Israel.

Since October 10, at least 416 Palestinians have been killed and more than 1,110 wounded in Israeli attacks. Over the same period, just three Israeli soldiers lost their lives in Gaza. According to Palestinian sources, two of them died when their vehicle ran over unexploded ordinance, and not, as Israel claimed, in a Hamas ambush.

While there hasn’t been a single reported incident of Hamas firing rockets into Israel, the Gazan authorities claim that between October 10 and December 28 “Israel shot at civilians 298 times, raided residential areas beyond the ‘yellow line’ 54 times, bombed and shelled Gaza 455 times, [and] demolished people’s properties on 162 occasions.”

In total, Israel violated the ceasefire agreement at least 969 times from October 10 to December 28. To describe Trump’s ceasefire as “fragile,” “precarious,” or “tested,” as mainstream Western media habitually do, is to stretch the meaning of words beyond all credibility. On the Israeli side, at least, this has been a ceasefire in name only.

Restriction of aid

Let me finally turn to the only other provision in Trump’s Gaza Plan aside from the exchange of prisoners that was actually agreed in the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas on October 9, the resumption of “full aid” into Gaza.

Israel has failed to open the Rafah crossing into Egypt, as is explicitly mandated in the Trump plan, and has severely restricted and on occasion completely stopped traffic at other crossing points throughout the ceasefire. While the number of humanitarian aid trucks that have been allowed into Gaza since the ceasefire is disputed, it is clearly far fewer than the agreed minimum of 600 per day.

Per the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem, “Due to Israeli restrictions, as of December 16, only 57 percent of the 556 aid missions planned by the UN and its partners were carried out, including the delivery of vital aid and equipment, medical evacuations, and infrastructure repairs.”

According to Oxfam, posting on December 22:

Since the current ceasefire began on October 10th, Israeli authorities continue to arbitrarily reject scores of shipments of life-saving assistance into Gaza. Almost $50 million worth of food, water, tents, and medical supplies is still being held up at border crossings and warehouses. Oxfam alone has $2.5 million worth of aid sitting in Jordan, including 4,000 food parcels.


Expressing “serious concerns about the renewed deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Gaza, which remains catastrophic,” on December 30 the foreign ministers of Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom issued a joint statement calling upon Israel to fully open all the crossings and “lift unreasonable restrictions on imports considered to have a dual use… includ[ing] urgently needed medical and shelter equipment.”

Hobbling of INGOs

The statement further demanded that international NGOs “are able to operate in Gaza in a sustained and predictable way,” and that “the UN and its partners can continue their vital work.” It emphasized that “this includes United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East [UNRWA], which provides essential services, such as health care and education, to millions of Palestinian refugees.”

This last point matters because Israel banned UNWRA—the single most important agency for coordinating aid efforts in Gaza—from operating in Israel from January 2025, on the basis of accusations (for which it provided no evidence) that some of its employees participated in the Hamas October 7 attack. That ban remains in place.

Tightening the screw further, on December 29 the Knesset passed a law cutting off electricity and water supplies to facilities owned by or operating on behalf of UNRWA in the occupied Palestinian territories, and banned provision of telecommunications, banking, and other financial services to the agency.

Under rules introduced in March 2025, Israel required aid organizations operating in Gaza and the West Bank to submit lists of their Palestinian staff by December 31 for vetting by intelligence services. Fearful that this would put their employees in danger of targeting by the IDF, many refused. Their fears are well founded. In 2024 alone, 125 UNRWA aid workers were killed in Gaza, the highest death toll in UN history.

Despite the ceasefire in Gaza, Israel has insisted on implementing this so-called “security” measure. As a result, 37 INGOs have now lost their accreditation and will have to cease operating by March 1. These include Médecins Sans Frontières, Oxfam, Vision International, ActionAid, International Rescue Committee, CARE, Medico International, Medical Aid for Palestinians, and the Norwegian Refugee Council.

These restrictions on aid entering Gaza are too numerous and systematic to be an accident. The guns may have temporarily quieted, but Israel is continuing its ethnic cleansing and genocide by other means.

As winter bites, the old, the infirm, and above all the children will continue to die. In these circumstances the survivors may be that much more willing to abandon their homeland for “voluntary” exile. In another press conference with Netanyahu on December 29, Donald Trump suggested that more than half the population would like to take advantage of such an offer (“To me it’s common sense”).

Coincidentally or otherwise, on January 2 Israel became the first country in the world to recognizethe breakaway state of Somaliland, an enclave strategically situated on the coast of the Gulf of Aden. The government of Somaliland has denied agreeing to host Israeli bases or accept displaced Gazans, but suspicions remain.

What comes next?

Three months on, the prospects for Donald Trump’s “comprehensive peace plan” are looking decidedly shaky. Having got all its hostages back, and secure in its military occupation of 53 percent of the Gaza Strip, Israel may decline to move on to phase two and find some excuse to resume the conflict as in the previous ceasefires.

Hamas is unlikely to agree to disarm in the absence of guarantees of eventual statehood that Israel will never give—what more, after all, do Palestinians have to lose by keeping their weapons? Meantime the states that were mooted as contributors of troops to Trump’s proposed international stabilization force, including Egypt, Turkey, and Indonesia, are reportedly getting cold feet about being dragged into the quagmire.

But in a sense none of this matters. The Trump plan has done its job. Gaza is out of the headlines, the allies are back on board, and the US is calling the shots—with the imprimatur of the United Nations Security Council, which has accepted the inevitable.

The “rules-based order” established at the end of World War II is over. The world is entering “a new era of great power competition; a generational struggle to maintain peace through strength”—to quote US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, speaking after the US invasion of Venezuela—an era in which right gives way to might.

Resolution 8302 is the embodiment of that capitulation. Gaza is the future. And not just for Palestinians.