Israel’s Bet on Foreign Control Has Blown Up In Their Face

Right, so the UN Security Council has just signed off on Donald Trump chairing a foreign board to run Gaza, a multinational force with authority to use “all necessary measures” to disarm the very groups Israel has spent the last two years trying and failing to destroy whilst committing genocide, and a transition plan that keeps Israel’s perimeter exactly where it is while pretending the occupation has somehow ended. And the only people cheering are Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which should have been the giveaway from the start. Because when every faction actually living under the siege rejects the plan, when even the Jerusalem Post is warning this looks like 1982 Beirut all over again, and when Netanyahu is already talking about driving “Hamas and its supporters” out of the region, you can see what’s going on. This isn’t peace. It’s the same illegal occupation having been rewritten in a different diplomatic font.
Right, so the UN Security Council has just passed a “peace plan” for Gaza that Gaza didn’t write, Gaza didn’t approve, Gaza wasn’t asked to shape and Gaza is now being told it must live under, and that alone tells you exactly what kind of political game is being played here. It passed with thirteen votes in favour, Russia and China stepping aside with abstentions, arguably now letting the plan fail as it people start to see what its actually about and what is going on here and the Americans dressing it up as the diplomatic breakthrough they’ve been insisting is just around the corner, Trump bragging about ending another war, when this has never been war, its been genocide and he’s been the one mostly funding it; and everyone else pretending the optics are fine because, on paper, this looks like a stabilisation blueprint instead of what it actually is, which is an attempt to rebrand the occupation under international colours. You can see it the moment you read the text. The plan creates a Board of Peace chaired by Donald Trump of all people, installs a foreign transitional authority with legal personality over the strip, pulls in a multinational armed force with authority to use “all necessary measures”, which is the language of cover for more force, violence, coercion, whatever gets the job done, and hands them responsibility for disarming every armed faction in Gaza before Israel budges one centimetre from the perimeter it has held for decades. If this is peace, then words have no meaning anymore.
The interesting part isn’t that the plan is flawed. Everything that gets pushed under time pressure and geopolitical exhaustion tends to be flawed. The interesting part is that the only entities who love it apart from Trump are Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the two actors who don’t speak for Gaza and don’t carry the cost of the siege. That’s really the starting point for understanding this whole thing. If a so-called peace plan is rejected by Hamas, rejected by Islamic Jihad, rejected by the PFLP, rejected by the DFLP, rejected by every faction operating inside the strip, rejected by the civil committees, and embraced only by the authority Israel protects in the West Bank and the government besieging the territory itself, then this isn’t a settlement. It’s administration. And when administration comes wrapped in diplomatic ceremony, you already know the story: it’s power dressed as neutrality, occupation dressed as peacekeeping, and coercion passed off as compromise.
The mechanics of Resolution 2803 make the politics painfully clear. Israel keeps the perimeter, so the occupation continues. That’s stated openly. The International Stabilisation Force coordinates with Israel and Egypt rather than a Palestinian body that has been chosen by Palestinians themselves. Again, this is written down in the framework. Demilitarisation is mandatory and must be completed to the satisfaction of the foreign force before Israel even considers stepping back. Aid isn’t handled by the UN’s established channels but routed through this new Board of Peace structure chaired by Trump, meaning Washington controls every pallet of food and every cubic metre of cement going into the strip and we saw what that was like with the US backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation didn’t we? Where Palestinians were as likely to have their lives ended as they were to receive aid. The technocratic Palestinian body that is meant to run daily life is selected, not elected, supervised by foreigners, not chosen by the population, and accountable to a board no one in Gaza had a voice in creating. When you add in that the transition runs until at least 31 December 2027 with the possibility of renewal, you are looking at a trusteeship, not a peace process. There’s no democratic horizon here. There’s no national liberation trajectory. There’s management. And you can see why Israel applauds it: it gives them everything they failed to win through military force, but without the diplomatic cost of admitting the occupation continues.
Now, look at who rejects it and what that tells you about the ground reality. Hamas has rejected it outright, and not for the reasons Western commentators always default to. They aren’t protecting a government they’ve already agreed to step away from during unity discussions. They aren’t protecting patronage networks that barely function under bombardment. Their stated reason is simple enough: no armed group under occupation disarms while the occupier still holds the perimeter, and no population under siege accepts a foreign administration imposed without representation. They say it openly. Assigning a foreign force to disarm the resistance makes that force a party to the conflict. It turns peacekeepers into enforcers for an occupying power. Whoever takes part in this International Stabilisation Force becomes complicit in the genocide going forwards in other words. They reaffirm their right to resist under international law. They point to the structure of the plan and say it achieves the objectives Israel failed to secure through its two year-long genocide: destruction of the resistance, foreign control, conditional withdrawal, and political sorting that treats fighters and supporters as categories to be removed or neutralised. You can agree with them or disagree with them, but the logic is straightforward.
Islamic Jihad has rejected it for the same reasons. They call it a new form of occupation and they’re right to do so because if the occupation’s structures remain in place, just administered by outsiders, then the occupation hasn’t ended has it? The PFLP and DFLP follow the same line. Even the smaller armed groups, the ones no one in the West pretends to understand but everyone in Gaza knows personally because they’re embedded in the local areas, have said the same thing: no foreign guardianship, no internationally mandated disarmament, no externally chosen administrative committee, no perimeter controlled by Israel. These are the people who live under the siege. They are the people who have been bombed for a year. They are the ones burying their families. They are the ones watching entire districts flattened. Their rejection is not ideological theatre. It’s material. They know exactly what trusteeship means because they lived the last one. Foreign supervision does not protect Palestinians. It limits them.
The only Palestinian body that supports the plan is the Palestinian Authority, and this is where the thing gets truly surreal because the PA hasn’t governed Gaza since 2006, cannot enter the strip without Israeli military escort, and has no mandate from the population living under bombardment. Their endorsement is a political reflex. They say yes because Washington says yes, because Israel says yes, because their entire survival mechanism depends on being aligned with the international architecture that keeps their funding flowing and their security cooperation intact. They are Israel’s pet Palestinians no more no less. The plan gives them a route back into Gaza without facing an election they would lose and without negotiating with rivals the population prefers. It’s a restoration through foreign mandate, not reconciliation. It’s the carrot Israel has always hung out: be useful, line up behind the American framework, and you’ll be handed authority you cannot win by yourself. That you only have via our permission. That is why the PA is on board. It’s dependency dressed up as statesmanship. And Gaza knows it.
The Israeli reaction is the tell and always has been. Israel’s ambassador to the UN Danny Danon applauds the plan on the grounds that the international community must commit to disarming Hamas because of course he does. The plan places the burden of disarmament on a foreign force so Israel doesn’t have to grind through another catastrophic ground operation. It hands them a legitimate-looking mechanism to maintain the perimeter. It allows them to step back physically while retaining control conceptually. And then Netanyahu himself goes on record calling for neighbouring states to help drive Hamas and “its supporters” out of the region, which is exactly the phrase he used, and that’s the quiet part said so clearly you can’t pretend otherwise. Drive them out. Fighters and supporters alike. If you were trying to hide the population-sorting logic behind this plan, the prime minister didn’t get the memo because he’s already describing the outcome: those who surrender disarm under foreign supervision, those who refuse can take the so-called safe passage out of Gaza, and the international force will be left with the remainder, who will then be branded as hardline holdouts. You don’t need much imagination to see how that plays out. The plan creates a funnel: disarm, leave, or be treated as a threat. And that’s why the resistance factions call it an extension of what Israel has been doing for two years.
Even inside Israel, the narrative is fracturing though. The Jerusalem Post has already run an opinion piece warning that this looks like 1982 Beirut all over again, with Washington legitimising Hamas the way they legitimised the PLO, which frightened the Israeli establishment for a generation. The fact that a loyal, establishment-aligned Israeli outlet is sounding that alarm tells you how unstable this whole move is. Because in 1982 Israel tried to destroy the PLO through military force, failed, and then watched the Americans pull the organisation into diplomacy, which delivered it more international power than Israel ever wanted it to have. The Post is worried the same thing happens here. They worry the Americans, in trying to stabilise Gaza, will give Hamas the international recognition they claim to want to avoid. You don’t have to share their anxiety to recognise what it reveals: even Israel’s own media can see this plan doesn’t fix the political crisis. It re-stages it with a different cast.
And if you really want to understand the political terrain, then look at the polling data. The PCPSR says Hamas support in Gaza has ticked up again, from thirty-seven to forty-one per cent. Fatah is sitting at twenty-nine per cent in the strip, which should tell you how little appetite there is for a PA return under foreign mandate. Fifty-five per cent oppose disarming Hamas. It’s been reported that seventy per cent oppose disarming the resistance under international enforcement. If the plan was supposed to capitalise on war fatigue and undermine the resistance’s legitimacy, it hasn’t worked. The support base is steady or strengthening under siege conditions. When people are starving, displaced, living under rubble and still say they won’t disarm or accept foreign guardianship, that tells you the political reality any plan must deal with. You cannot stabilise a territory by imposing authority the population rejects. All you do is defer the conflict until your foreign force leaves or loses patience.
And this is where the whole thing collapses under its own logic. A peace plan that stabilises nothing, represents no one inside the territory, empowers an authority the territory rejects, gives the occupier exactly what it wants, grants the United States total administrative leverage, and expects an international force to enforce compliance, is not a peace plan. It’s an occupation with better manners. It doesn’t treat Palestinians as a people with political rights. It treats them as a population that needs managing. It doesn’t build any path to liberation. It builds a security framework designed to keep Israel out of the headlines while the strip is re-ordered from the outside. Every clause is written from the perspective of external actors protecting their own interests, not the interests of the people who have survived two years of devastation.
And the thing that ties it all together, the thing you can’t unsee once you’ve looked at the structure, is this: Israel loves the plan. They say yes to it immediately. They praise it. They embrace it. They talk openly about how it helps them achieve their objectives. And that alone tells you everything. Because if the occupying power loves your peace plan, then the plan wasn’t written for the occupied. And it wasn’t written to end the occupation. It was written to discipline the population under siege, protect the state doing the besieging, and give everyone in Washington and Europe a script they can read from while pretending the conflict has been resolved.
That’s the truth of Resolution 2803. You don’t need to read the full document to understand it. You just need to see who’s celebrating and who’s resisting. The people living under bombardment reject it. The people administering the occupation endorse it. That’s the whole story. And if you need a single line to carry with you, it’s this: if Israel loves a peace plan, ask whose peace it’s for then, because it’s clearly not going to be Gaza’s.
Russia had presented an alternative though, one they ended up pulling when they instead decided to let the US hang themselves with a plan that will be readily shredded by people who can see it for what it is, case in point. I must confess to have given Russia and China more credit than to sit on their hands and let the US plan pass, but I went over the alternative offer in this recommendation here on what could have been,
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