The End of Gaza

A year after the Trump administration negotiated an agreement to end the war in Gaza, Palestinians are still waiting for the “day after” to arrive. The October 2025 cease-fire plan freed the last remaining Israeli hostages and ostensibly ended hostilities, but Israel continues to constantly strike targets in Gaza, often killing civilians, including some 300 children in the past year. The deal also envisioned a phased political process that would help reconstruct the devastated territory. Jared Kushner, the U.S. president’s son-in-law and point person for the Middle East, promised in January this year that restoration of core services and infrastructure—including water and sewage systems, electricity networks, hospitals, and bakeries—would begin within 100 days. And yet, nine months later, Gaza has seen no reconstruction, no restoration of basic services, or even an end to daily violence. Instead, the vast majority of its inhabitants remain packed into squalid and sprawling tent cities along a tiny—and ever-shrinking—strip of coastline, plagued by disease and rodent infestations, enduring extreme shortages of food, medicine, clean water, and access to basic sanitation.

Gazans may not be in the grip of famine as they were in prior years, but the humanitarian situation remains catastrophic—and it is not sustainable. The intolerable conditions could very well lead to a further explosion of violence. They are also enabling the endgame that many Israeli leaders want: the eventual eviction of Gaza’s over two million Palestinian residents.

Indeed, the status quo seems to suit the Israeli leadership. In a recent interview, Nikolay Mladenov, the Bulgarian diplomat serving as the high representative of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, which is overseeing the Gaza peace plan, revealed where the main obstacle to progress lies. On Israel’s commitments, Mladenov gently noted, is “where we are little bit stuck right now.” Kushner has also blamed Israel’s “crazy elections” later this month, which he says have made the Netanyahu government “a little irrational” in regard to Gaza.

Although electoral considerations are undoubtedly a factor—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is locked in a tight and, for him, existential reelection campaign—the totality of Israeli words and actions point to something deeper and more alarming: ultimately, the Netanyahu government’s strategy has less to do with stabilizing Gaza or even disarming Hamas than with rendering the territory uninhabitable and ejecting its population.

Whether or not the Trump administration shares this goal, its extraordinary deference to Netanyahu’s far-right government and general indifference to the plight of Palestinians is facilitating just such an outcome. Unless the United States and its allies and partners are prepared to force Israel to abide by its commitments, it may only be a matter of time before Gaza is lost forever.

HELL ON EARTH

It is hard to overstate the scale of death, destruction, and suffering inflicted on Gaza and its roughly 2.2 million inhabitants over the past three years. In the wake of Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack on Israel, Israeli military and political leaders vowed to “flatten” Gaza and turn it into a “city of tents,” promising that “Gaza will never go back to what it was.” They have delivered on those threats. The 223,000 tons of explosives dropped on Gaza—roughly equivalent to 15 times the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima—have killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians, and reduced most of Gaza to rubble. Israel’s assault, over which it is currently on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice, has wiped out some 92 percent of Gaza’s housing stock, 95 percent of its farmland, all 12 of its universities, and nearly half of its 36 hospitals—in other words, the very institutions and infrastructure that sustain life.

After such devastation, last year’s cease-fire came as an undoubted relief. Under the first phase of Trump’s Gaza plan, the parties agreed to an immediate end to all military attacks, the exchange of hostages and prisoners, the restoration of basic services, and a massive surge in humanitarian aid. Apart from Hamas’s release of Israeli hostages, however, most of these commitments have been only partially fulfilled. Phase two, formally launched in January even though Israel had yet to meet its phase one obligations, envisioned the stabilization of Gaza through the deployment of an international force and the establishment of a Palestinian technocratic governing body, known as the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, coupled with the gradual disarmament of Hamas and the phased withdrawal of Israeli forces. Those last steps together serve as prerequisites for the long-term reconstruction of the Gaza Strip as laid out in phase three.

A full year after the cease-fire was announced, Israel continues to block the entry of Palestinian governing and policing bodies that would allow Hamas to relinquish power and reconstruction to begin. Hamas and Israel are still at loggerheads about the sequencing of the group’s disarmament in relation to an Israeli withdrawal. Although the food situation has improved since last year’s famine, Israel continues to restrict humanitarian aid, allowing only a fraction of the daily 600 truckloads required in the cease-fire deal to enter the territory. More than 90 percent of Gaza’s inhabitants are internally displaced. Moreover, since the cease-fire, the Israeli army has unilaterally expanded its control from just over half of Gaza’s territory to around 65 percent of it. Frequent airstrikes by Israel have killed more than 1,400 Palestinians since the cease-fire was declared. That the death toll continues to mount during a cease-fire is a testament to the dystopian reality that has become Gaza’s new normal. As the UN’s Middle East envoy Sigrid Kaag put it, Gaza’s “living conditions are hell on earth with no prospect of significant change in sight.”

Israel is not solely responsible for the persistence of hellish conditions in Gaza. Hamas bears some of the blame. The Hamas leadership spent months stubbornly resisting calls for disarmament, as required by the Trump plan, ultimately agreeing to do so only under intense pressure from Egypt and other mediators. The Trump administration also bears significant blame. It has let the political process stall, gives Israel tremendous latitude, and is highly lopsided in its enforcement of the terms of the cease-fire. It has effectively allowed Israel to continue the war in Gaza, albeit on a smaller scale.

Only a few months ago, it seemed as if the impasse had been finally broken. In late July, Trump announced a breakthrough on implementing the second phase of his Gaza plan. After seven months of intensive and highly fraught negotiations, Hamas and the Board of Peace reached a deal on the disarmament of the Palestinian militant group, paving the way—theoretically, at least—to start the desperately needed recovery and reconstruction work as well as the entry of new Palestinian governance and policing mechanisms. The plan’s success hinged on a carefully crafted sequence of events: Hamas would disarm in parallel with an Israeli military withdrawal, a scheme designed to ensure progress and prevent either side from exercising a “veto” over the process.

That Hamas, a group founded on armed resistance, had agreed to any form of disarmament was unprecedented and rightly hailed by Trump as a “historic” achievement. Even so, Netanyahu categorically rejected this road map, insisting there could be no Israeli withdrawal until Hamas was fully disarmed and that Israel remained free to continue military operations in Gaza. In other words, Israel is insisting that Hamas meet all its phase two obligations even before Israel has met any of its phase one obligations—a position that renders the plan unworkable.

The process is once again stuck. Without progress on either Hamas’s disarmament or Israel’s withdrawal, the Palestinian governing committee (currently marooned in Cairo) and police force cannot enter Gaza; neither can any international force. The Trump administration and the Board of Peace have tried to fudge the issue of sequencing since the summer—publicly embracing the Israeli position that Hamas must be fully disarmed first while privately assuring Hamas and others that the road map has not changed. But ambiguity typically plays to the advantage of the stronger party; such hedging from Washington was as good as an explicit endorsement of the Israeli position. Having already given Israel an effective pass on most of its phase one obligations by refusing to condemn Israel’s near-daily cease-fire violations, the Trump administration was now effectively relieving it of second phase obligations as well. Gaza’s reconstruction and rehabilitation remain on hold indefinitely.

GONE FOR GOOD

The dangers of the current impasse were best outlined by Mladenov in an interview in September. He warned that the absence of any meaningful progress in Gaza was foreclosing the future of the territory and the possibility of a two-state solution, with grave consequences for the wider region. “If we allow for Gaza to continue in the situation that we have now,” Mladenov cautioned, “Gaza will be gone. It will be gone for good.” He continued: “If the international community does not focus on the situation in Gaza, where you have two million Palestinians who live in terrible conditions, we will not be able to find our way back to a credible path to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian question.” At the same time, “we are putting the seeds of a next security, military crisis that is going to emerge.”

Left unsaid by Mladenov, however, is that Netanyahu is quite content for the process to remain stuck in this way. Israel’s prime minister, who only reluctantly acceded to Trump’s 2025 Gaza cease-fire, has managed to continue waging war in Gaza without incurring significant costs. The ongoing military operations and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza don’t incite meaningful outrage in Israel, while even Netanyahu’s main election rivals have felt compelled to trash the U.S.-backed Gaza road map. International outrage over the carnage in Gaza, meanwhile, has largely subsided, with many countries preferring a failing peace process to none at all.

For Netanyahu, ongoing violence at this level—just enough to prevent Gaza’s meaningful recovery and reconstruction but not enough to trigger a major international outcry—has become an end unto itself. Much as he insisted on the implausible goal of “total victory” during the first two years of war, he insists now on the equally unachievable objective of Hamas’s “total disarmament.” It is one thing for Hamas to give up its rockets, missiles, mortars, and other heavy weapons, but it is unrealistic to imagine that the group will surrender every last rifle or handgun, particularly when Israeli forces continue to operate in the territory. Netanyahu’s uncompromising stance helps placate his extremist coalition partners, justify permanent Israeli military control over Gaza, and indefinitely forestall any political accommodation with the Palestinians.

More crucially, keeping Gaza in a kind of political, military, and humanitarian limbo—with neither a real cease-fire nor a return to full-scale war, limited short-term relief but no long-term reconstruction, and a population consumed with the imperatives of survival but lacking any real hope for the future—serves the broader vision harbored by many Israeli hard-liners: making Gaza uninhabitable to the point that its residents are forced to leave. For Netanyahu and his far-right government, the immiseration of Gaza is not ancillary but central to Israel’s strategy. Israeli leaders, including Defense Minister Israel Katz, have vowed to remain in Gaza indefinitely and not withdraw. More tellingly, in the two-thirds of Gaza now under direct Israeli control, the Israeli army has wiped out virtually all traces of Palestinian life, systematically razing thousands of structures and flattening entire neighborhoods and agricultural lands, while erecting military bases and other permanent infrastructure.

Members of the Netanyahu government have made no secret of their desire to remove Gaza’s population and allow the territory’s eventual settlement by Israeli Jews. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, among the most vocal and notorious proponents of expelling Palestinians, recently unveiled a seven-year plan for the “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza, including moving 250,000 Palestinians out of Gaza in the first year. Ben-Gvir is not the only government member to say the quiet part out loud. Katz has called for facilitating the emigration of Gazans “by any means,” adding that “there is no real solution for Gaza in the end without this migration.” Netanyahu himself has advocated for the same, privately confirming in 2025 to a group of lawmakers that Israel has been “destroying more and more houses” in Gaza so that Palestinians “have nowhere to return.” “The only obvious result will be Gazans choosing to emigrate outside of the Strip,” observed Netanyahu.

The Trump administration may not be averse to such an outcome. In January 2025, Trump proposed the United States “take control” of Gaza and “clean out” its more than two million inhabitants as part of an ill-conceived vision of turning a depopulated Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East.” Although Trump backed off the idea following an immense international outcry, the administration’s laissez-faire attitude toward Israeli violations suggests it can tolerate prolonged Palestinian suffering.

LOSING GAZA

The consequences of perpetuating Gaza’s misery are dreadful. As Mladenov has warned, continuing along the current path is likely to produce two outcomes: inducing growing numbers of Palestinians to leave the Gaza Strip and increasing the likelihood of violent escalation, including a return to full-scale war. In both cases, once again, the costs would be borne overwhelmingly by Palestinians in Gaza, although others would also pay a price, as the wider region grows more unstable and as Israel’s and the United States’ international standing further erodes.

As life in Gaza does not meaningfully improve and as deadly Israeli attacks continue, the likelihood of an explosion grows. Hamas, which has been decimated but not yet unseated, has so far shown relative restraint and a willingness to absorbs regular hits, including a series of assassinations of its members and regular airstrikes by Israel. Its current pragmatism will probably not hold forever. Netanyahu, who thinks that keeping Israel on a constant war footing will allow him to retain power, may welcome the opportunity to wage what is in effect a forever war in Gaza. A prolonged occupation in Gaza, however, is unlikely to produce tangible military benefits while sapping Israeli resources and public morale, deepening Israel’s international isolation and foreclosing the possibility of normalizing ties with more Arab states. Likewise, the prospect of a Palestinian exodus from Gaza might fuel the fantasies of those in Israel who want to see the creation of a “Greater Israel,” but it would also confirm Israel’s pariah status and condemn Israelis and Palestinians to further decades of conflict.

For the United States, meanwhile, continued violence and an increasingly farcical peace process could lead to the unraveling of one of Trump’s few concrete foreign policy achievements while keeping the region in a state of perpetual turmoil. With the Iran war casting the United States as unreliable and encouraging Washington’s regional allies to pursue alternatives to a collapsing U.S. security umbrella, failure in Gaza would cement the impression of the United States as a superpower has-been.

SALVAGE JOB

There is little doubt that both Trump’s Gaza plan and the mechanisms created to oversee it, including the Board of Peace, are deeply flawed. The process they outlined is intensely lopsided in Israel’s favor, does not demand any accountability for past (and ongoing) atrocities, denies Palestinian agency and self-determination, and for several reasons, including its bypassing of the stipulations of the Geneva Conventions, is inconsistent with international law. But in the absence of a more serious and equitable peace process, the current road map for Gaza offers the best chance for bringing desperately needed relief and recovery to the territory’s suffering population—as long as it is implemented fairly.

Assuming the Trump administration genuinely supports the plan and wants to see its fruition, a way forward through the current impasse still exists. The United States and its partners must do three things. The first is to recognize that Israel’s interests in Gaza are not the same as, and in many ways run directly counter to, those espoused by the Trump administration and the broader international community. Whereas the latter is focused on the long-term stabilization and the rehabilitation of Gaza, the former seems bent on making it impossible for Palestinians to continue living in the territory. Second, improvements in the daily lives of ordinary people in Gaza should be insulated, if not totally delinked, from the political process. The safety and dignity of more than two million civilians cannot continue to be held hostage to the decisions of Hamas, much less the machinations of internal Israeli politics. The well-being of Palestinians should not be a bargaining chip used by Israel, or for that matter the Board of Peace, to extract political or military concessions from Hamas.

Finally, the United States and the other mediators must work to ensure that both sides abide by their obligations under the October 2025 cease-fire and should be prepared to impose consequences for noncompliance. This includes ending armed attacks by both sides, allowing a massive influx of unconditional humanitarian aid, and restoring basic services, clearing debris, and helping revive local livelihoods as required in phase one of the Trump plan. Likewise, Hamas’s disarmament, Israeli withdrawal, the installation of a new administration in Gaza, and the territory’s reconstruction are not separate issues but parallel ones. They must be pursued in parallel, as laid out in the Board of Peace’s original road map, for the process to work. Finally, for any of these to be possible, the United States and the Board of Peace must press Israel to allow Palestinian technocrats and the newly trained Palestinian police force to enter Gaza as soon as possible.

These measures will be a tough sell in Washington, particularly given Trump’s close alignment with Netanyahu and the latter’s commitment to his extremist coalition partners. But there is no way around them, regardless of the outcome of October’s election in Israel. Although many observers expect a Netanyahu victory would give the prime minister the space to move ahead with Trump’s Gaza plan and the road map, the evidence of the last three years and the nature of the current government suggest he will not. A radical coalition under Netanyahu with a renewed mandate will likely spend the next four years working to finish destroying Palestinian life in Gaza, to say nothing of the West Bank, where Israel’s de facto annexation is proceeding at a breakneck pace.

Trump may well want to consider whether it is worth sacrificing his Gaza peace plan, on which he has staked considerable political capital, for an Israeli government that may be on its way out. The fallout from Gaza’s destruction and the suffering of its people will be felt for generations. Only Israel and its chief enabler in the White House can determine whether the years to come will be a time of rebuilding and healing or one of perpetual violence and instability.

Loading...