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Gaza, following which Israel would withdraw its forces to an agreed-upon “yellow line” and “not return to areas it has withdrawn from, as long as Hamas fully implements the agreement.”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.

Canadian Dimension, Oct 2, 2025

It will soon be two years since Hamas launched its “Al-Aqsa Flood” attack on southern Israel. Israel’s retaliatory “war” has since reduced Gaza to an uninhabitable wasteland and caused—at a very conservative minimum—more than 66,000 Palestinian deaths, with some 83 percent of them, according to Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) data, being civilians. Since Israel broke its January ceasefire agreement and resumed its offensive in March, 15 of every 16 out of the 16,000 Palestinians the IDF has killed have been civilians.

In the aftermath of October 7 there was enormous support for Israel, especially in the West. But as the “war” ground on, with no apparent end in sight and ever-mounting civilian casualties, the tide of Western public opinion turned. Recent pressure led several Western governments to reluctantly berate Israel for its “intolerable and unacceptable” and “utterly reckless and appalling” actions—while doing precious little to stop them.

Despite the chorus of condemnation, we have seen nothing approaching the battery of sanctions that played such a large part in bringing down the apartheid regime in South Africa, not to mention the swingeing economic, political, and cultural sanctions imposed on Vladimir Putin’s Russia immediately following its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

This paralysis on the part of the “international community” is remarkable, given that what is at issue is increasingly being recognized as a genocide—the worst of all crimes under international humanitarian law. But it is not, perhaps, surprising. Given their previous support for Israel, not to mention their vulnerability to economic bullying by Trump’s US, Western leaders found themselves tossed on the horns of an impossible dilemma.

The genocide dilemma

As far back as January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that there was a “plausible risk” of genocide in Gaza and ordered Israel to take several measures to avert this outcome. At that point the official death toll stood at 27,500—less than half of what it is now. Israel ignored these and further ICJ orders of March and May 2024.

It will likely be years before the ICJ reaches a final verdict on whether or not Israel is guilty of genocide. The world’s highest court on war crimes, the International Criminal Court (ICC), has however already issued arrest warrants in November 2024 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for using “starvation as a method of warfare” and other war crimes and crimes against humanity.

On September 16, 2025, an authoritative new report by a UN Independent Commission of Inquiry, based on two years of investigation, concluded that:

Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces committed four of the five genocidal acts defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, namely killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the Palestinians in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Federation for Human Rights, the University Network for Human Rights, Médecins Sans Frontières, the Israeli groups B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security, as well as some of the world’s leading genocide and Holocaust historians like Israeli scholars Raz Segal and Omer Bartov, have all come to the same conclusion.

It takes some chutzpah to contend that all of these are part of some global antisemitic conspiracy to discredit Israel. Denying the genocide—the US position—is becoming less and less credible, while refusing to take a stance until the final ICJ verdict is in, which the British and Canadian governments are doing, simply looks evasive.

The problem for Western politicians is that the 1948 Genocide Convention—to which all members of the G7 apart from Japan are parties, as is Israel—requires them not only to refrain from committing genocide themselves, but “to prevent and to punish” genocide “whether [its perpetrators] are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.”

The argument made by Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, and others against the ICC warrants that “there is no equivalence—none—between Israel and Hamas“ has no standing in international law. A war crime is a war crime and a genocide is a genocide, no matter who is committing it, guerrilla “terrorists” or the elected leaders of a democratic nation state.

Complicating things further, “complicity in genocide” is also a punishable offense. If Israel is committing genocide, then it is a genocide in which Western governments have been complicit throughout the last two years, by supplying arms, providing diplomatic cover, ignoring their own intelligence assessments that Israel has been obstructing aid, and suppressing protest. No wonder some politicians are beginning to get cold feet.

A rift in the West?

On September 18 all members of the UN Security Council except the United States voted to adopt a resolution calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, the release of all hostages, and for Israel to immediately and unconditionally lift all restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid. The US vetoed the measure. This is the sixth time in the last two years that the US has (ab)used its veto power to block a ceasefire in Gaza.

Though France and the UK voted for the resolution, no Western government has yet been prepared to defy America and trigger the nuclear option, which would be to put a United for Peace resolution to the General Assembly. If passed by a two-thirds majority, this would override any Security Council veto and could pave the way for armed UN intervention in Gaza. This procedure was invoked 13 times between 1951 and 2022.

There were nevertheless straws in the wind suggesting that some Western governments were more prepared to risk Israeli and (more importantly) US wrath and take baby steps toward pressuring Israel to end its genocide than at any time during the present “war”—if only to retrospectively cover their collective asses and avoid indictments from the ICC.

The EU Commission has finally proposed to strip Israeli goods of privileged access to European markets, with new tariffs imposed on billions of euros of exports, as well as sanctioning extremist individual Israeli ministers—though such a measure may still not pass, given continuing support for Israel by Germany and some other EU states.

Recognition of Palestine—an empty gesture?

Canada, the UK, Australia, France, and several other Western countries announced with great fanfare at the 80th UN General Assembly session in September in New York—or the day before it, “out of respect for the Jewish new year”—that they were recognizing the State of Palestine. They were very late to the party. One hundred and forty seven states had recognized Palestine prior to their move, including Spain, Ireland, Norway, and Slovenia in 2024.

While it would be wrong to dismiss the legal significance of recognition out of hand, in the absence of other measures it will likely have limited practical impact on the ground. That does not mean it is insignificant. It underlines the tensions between the US and some of its most important Western allies (as well as splits within Europe itself).

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was refreshingly candid about why his government was changing tack:

The current Israeli government is working methodically to prevent the prospect of a Palestinian state from ever being established. It has pursued an unrelenting policy of settlement expansion in the West Bank, which is illegal under international law. Its sustained assault in Gaza has killed tens of thousands of civilians, displaced well over one million people, and caused a devastating and preventable famine in violation of international law. It is now the avowed policy of the current Israeli government that ‘there will be no Palestinian state’.

Netanyahu responded with predictable fury—and in the process confirmed that Carney’s charges were amply justified:

I have a clear message to those leaders who are recognizing a Palestinian state after the horrendous October 7 massacre: You are rewarding terror with an enormous prize.

And I have another message for you: It’s not going to happen. There will be no Palestinian state to the west of the Jordan River.

For years I have prevented the creation of that terror state, against tremendous pressure, both domestic and from abroad.

We have done this with determination, and with astute statesmanship. Moreover, we have doubled the Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria [i.e., the West Bank], and we will continue on this path.

In the face of such clarity on the part of Israel, we have to ask why Western leaders are still peddling the fantasy of a “two-state solution” at all. The suspicion must be that it is yet another evasion, designed to cover up their unwillingness to tackle the role played by ethnic cleansing and genocide in Israel’s Zionist project head on.

Trumpery at the UN

The US, by contrast, has made its opposition to recognizing Palestine at this point in time crystal clear. Interviewed recently by Tony Dokoupil of CBS Mornings, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio insultingly dismissed recognition as “almost a vanity project for a couple of these world leaders who want to be relevant, but it really makes no difference.”

In between gratuitously insulting America’s Western allies (“I look at London where you have a terrible mayor, a terrible, terrible mayor and it’s been so changed, so changed. Now they want to go to Sharia law”) and trumpeting his own imaginary achievements (“I have ended seven unendable wars… Everyone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize for each one of these achievements”), Trump found time to briefly mention Gaza in his address to the UN General Assembly on September 23.

His concern was not the ongoing genocide:

Now, as if to encourage continued conflict, some of this body [the UN] is seeking to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state. The rewards would be too great for Hamas terrorists for their atrocities. This would be a reward for these horrible atrocities, including October 7th…

Three days later, in his own address to the UN General Assembly, Netanyahu accused Carney and company of capitulating “under pressure of a biased media, radical Islamist constituencies, and antisemitic mobs.”

The Israeli prime minister said little that did not repeat what he had told the same body in 2023 and 2024. What was different this time was that Netanyahu’s plane was forced to take a circuitous route to New York in order to avoid the airspace of countries that were legally bound to enforce the ICC arrest warrant. And he spoke to a largely empty hall.

On his entry, over 100 delegates from over 50 countries walked out in protest. Of those that remained, the UK and even the US filled their seats with junior staff instead of senior diplomats. The majority of those who left were from the Global South.

Sadly, Canada’s Ambassador Bob Rae remained seated. It was, he explained to CTV News, his job.

Trump’s “peace plan”

This is the background against which, on September 29, Trump and Netanyahu jointly unveiled the latest US “peace plan” at a White House press conference. Netanyahu had reportedly made several last-minute changes to the draft drawn up by Trump’s team, all to Israel’s advantage.

The 20-point plan calls for immediate suspension of all military operations, followed by the release of all Israeli captives within a 72-hour period. Israel will then release “250 life sentence prisoners plus 1,700 Gazans who were detained after Oct. 7, 2023, including all women and children detained in that context.”

This is only a fraction of more than 10,000 Palestinians languishing in Israeli jails, 3,600 of whom are held without charge or trial in “administrative detention”—many more hostages, as they are, than the 251 Israelis captured by Hamas in the October 7 attack.

It is grim testimony to the disproportionality of this “war” that “For every Israeli hostage whose remains are released, Israel will release the remains of 15 deceased Gazans.”

After the hostages are released, an amnesty will be extended to Hamas members who “commit to peaceful coexistence and to decommission their weapons,” while any who wish to leave Gaza “will be provided safe passage to receiving countries.” Hamas will disarm and “all military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapon production facilities, will be destroyed and not rebuilt.” Hamas and other factions “agree to not have any role in the governance of Gaza, directly, indirectly, or in any form.”

Once the agreement has been accepted, full aid “will proceed without interference from the two parties through the United Nations and its agencies, and the Red Crescent,” as well as unspecified third parties (likely a reference to the US-based private so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians queuing for food).

Though this provision is likely to play badly in Israel, which has banned the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA from operating within its boundaries, this is is the only role envisaged for the UN in the entire document.

The plan stipulates that “Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza” and promises that “No one will be forced to leave Gaza,” while “those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return.” As “a temporary International Stabilization Force” put together by “The United States… with Arab and international partners” trains “vetted Palestinian police forces in Gaza,” the IDF will gradually withdraw from the Strip to a perimeter “security zone.”

Gaza will meantime be governed by “a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee… of qualified Palestinians and international experts, with oversight and supervision by a new international transitional body… headed and chaired by President Donald J. Trump, with other members and heads of State… including Former Prime Minister Tony Blair.”

This “Board of Peace” will “set the framework and handle the funding for the redevelopment of Gaza until such time as the Palestinian Authority has completed its reform program… and can securely and effectively take back control of Gaza.”

As Patrick Wintour has perceptively noted in the Guardian, though it is not explicitly stated in the document, this “reform program” requires that the Palestinian Authority ends its participation in legal proceedings against Israel at the ICJ and ICC. (The text refers to the reform programme “as outlined in various proposals, including president Trump’s peace plan in 2020,” and the latter demands this.)

The Board of Peace will oversee a “Trump economic development plan to rebuild and energize Gaza”—is Trump’s dream of a “Riviera of the Middle East” about to come true?—and “A special economic zone will be established with preferred tariff and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries.”

Surrender or annihilation

It is significant that Hamas—whose negotiators Israel had attempted to assassinate in a September 9 air strike on Qatar—was not involved in drafting the plan or even provided with an advance copy. Palestinians are being presented with an ultimatum reminiscent of the one the Germans gave Rotterdam in 1940: surrender or your city will be destroyed.

And indeed, even while Hamas is considering the plan—for which Trump has demanded their answer “within three or four days”—Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz has issued a “final warning” on October 1 that “This is the last opportunity for Gaza residents who wish to do so to move south and leave Hamas operatives isolated in Gaza City,” making clear that “Those who remain… will be considered terrorists and terrorist supporters.”

If the Palestinians reject the plan, then in Donald Trump’s words at the White House press conference:

Israel would have my full backing to finish the job of destroying the threat of Hamas.

But I hope that we’re going to have a deal for peace, and if Hamas rejects the deal… Bibi, you’d have our full backing to do what you would have to do.

Netanyahu added: “If Hamas rejects your plan, Mr President, or if they supposedly accept it and then do everything to counter it, then Israel will finish the job by itself. This can be done the easy way or it can be done the hard way, but it will be done.”

The only positives in the Trump plan for the Palestinians are that it offers a possible road to ending the genocide—as is desperately needed—without Israel annexing Gaza or expelling its people, as the extreme rightwing ministers in Netanyahu’s government have demanded. In his earlier musings on a “Riviera of the Middle East” Trump too had envisaged “cleaning out” all of the Palestinians.

But even these modest consolations for the loss of Palestinian lives, homes, and hopes over the last two years are very far from guaranteed.

The plan requires Hamas to hand over all of the Israeli hostages before any Palestinian prisoners are released and to disarm on the basis of promises of amnesty while the IDF remains in Gaza. The timetable for withdrawal, by contrast, is vague and dependent on transfer of power to new security forces whose composition remains undetermined.

Once Hamas has given up its hostages and its weapons, there is nothing to stop Israel from reneging on the agreement—as it previously did with the January 2025 ceasefire—and “finishing the job” of genocide and ethnic cleansing against a defenceless Gazan population.

It is scarcely reassuring that after his return from Washington, Netanyahu put out a video reassuring Israelis that “the IDF stays in the majority of the Strip.”

Asked in the same video whether he had agreed to a Palestinian state, the Israeli prime minister replied: “Not at all, and it is not written in the agreement. One thing was made clear: We will strongly oppose a Palestinian state.”

This gives the lie to Emmanuel Macron’s claim—echoed by among others Antony Albanese and Mark Carney—that the Trump plan provides a foundation “to build a lasting peace in the region, based on the two-state solution.”

If Bibi has anything to do with it, there will be no such thing. Ever.

The plan does in fact mention Palestinian statehood, only to locate it firmly in the realms of the never-never:

While Gaza redevelopment advances and when the P.A. [Palestinian Authority] reform program is faithfully carried out, the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognize as the aspiration of the Palestinian people. (My emphasis)

A week is a long time in politics

Little more than a week ago, Canada, Australia, Britain, France, and other Western allies broke ranks with Israel and the US and recognized a Palestinian state. Mark Carney and others made it clear that they were taking this step, in part, to forestall Israel’s attempts—about which Benjamin Netanyahu has been quite open—to sabotage any possibility of a two-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

Today, those same states are falling over backwards to lean on Hamas to accept a deal that disarms the Palestinian resistance, requires it to forgo any legal recourse for Israeli war crimes and/or genocide through the ICJ and ICC, hands Gaza over to an unelected foreign junta headed by Donald Trump and Tony Blair—onetime cheerleader of the Iraq War that left over a million Iraqis dead—to “redevelop,” and indefinitely postpones any prospect of Palestinian statehood. The word for this is betrayal.

French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, President of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen, and EU Foreign Minister Kaja Kallas, have all hastened to issue statements lauding “President Trump’s leadership” (Starmer) and hailing the plan as “the best immediate chance to end the war” (Kallas). “Elbows up” Mark Carney was the most sycophantic of them all, welcoming the deal as “historic.”

All agree that “Hamas has no choice but to immediately release all hostages and follow this plan,” with only Macron adding “I expect Israel to engage resolutely on this basis.”

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.

If Hamas fails to “seize this opportunity” (von der Leyen), we must infer, it has only itself to blame for the consequences.

The rewards of terror

Hamas senior leader Mahmoud Mardawi is bang on when he characterizes the Trump plan as offering “an end to this criminal war in exchange for ending the Palestinian people’s right to their state and their rights to their land, homeland, and holy sites.”

Mardawi is adamant that “no Palestinian will accept that,” but genocide is a powerful persuader.

Whether, out of desperation, Palestinians will buy this sordid “deal” remains to be seen. If they do, Israel gets its hostages back and it’s game over for the Palestinian resistance.

If they don’t, Israel will “finish the job” with full US backing and blame Hamas for forcing it to kill yet more Palestinian babies in order to ensure its security. Either way this is a win–win situation for Israel.

If, as Netanyahu says, a purely symbolic recognition of a non-existent Palestinian state is “an enormous prize” for the terror of Hamas’s October 7 attack, then how much greater are the rewards for the IDF’s two years of live-streamed genocide in Gaza?