On Monday the United Nations Security Council endorsed President Donald Trump’s twenty-point peace plan for Gaza, which creates a “Board of Peace,” chaired by Trump and with the participation of foreign leaders including former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, to oversee governance of the Strip. Trump hailed the approval as “a moment of true Historic proportion” and a harbinger of “further Peace all over the World.” The plan, which is appended to the UN resolution, sidelines the Palestinian Authority, rejects Hamas governance, and promises “jobs, opportunity and hope” for Palestinians in Gaza; it also affirms their right to choose whether to stay or leave, and the right of those who have left Gaza to return.
But in reality, by putting the possibility of rebuilding homes and civilian infrastructure out of reach for many Palestinians in Gaza, the plan may make it impossible for them to remain. The crux of the issue is a demand, now codified in the Security Council resolution, that Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups give up their weapons. If they refuse—as they have to date, given their decades-long commitment to armed struggle—the UN resolution permits the Israeli military to retain direct control over an area it calls a “security perimeter.”
That is a strange choice of words. The area in question currently amounts to 53 percent of the Strip, not just covering its entire border with Israel but extending deep into the territory, and including most of its arable land and industrial zones. Although the resolution calls for the Israeli military to progressively withdraw from Gaza, it links that withdrawal to Palestinian demilitarization, sets no timetable, and allows Israel to maintain a security perimeter “until Gaza is properly secure from any resurgent terror threat.” It approves the creation of an International Stabilization Force to oversee disarmament in close cooperation with Israel and Egypt—but if the Israeli military could not disarm Hamas in two years of intense warfare, it’s unlikely that foreign forces will attempt to do so. In other words, with no credible plan for Palestinian demilitarization, it seems all too likely that Israel’s troop presence in most of Gaza will become permanent.
This is especially disastrous for Palestinians, because the plan forgoes reconstruction in the areas still controlled by Hamas. US officials, meanwhile, are reportedly moving forward with plans to build housing in the eastern zone that the Israeli military directly controls, beyond the so-called yellow line. Israeli officials have recently begun demarcating that line with painted concrete blocks, and they have killed Palestinians, including children, who have crossed it. The land beyond it will likely remain off-limits to nearly all of Gaza’s two million residents, who are concentrated closer to the sea, in the area from which the Israeli military withdrew as part of the cease-fire that went into effect on October 10.
The need for rebuilding could not be more urgent. Satellite imagery shows that 81 percent of Gaza’s structures have been damaged or destroyed; most Palestinians there no longer have homes. Although the laws of war forbid controlled destruction of civilian infrastructure except under narrow conditions of military necessity, the Israeli military conducted extensive planned demolitions, leveling entire neighborhoods on both sides of the yellow line, often with the help of private contractors whose compensation was linked to the number and size of the structures they destroyed. (The Israeli military says the demolitions were justified because it was destroying “terrorist infrastructure.”) The UN resolution calls both for World Bank support and for the creation of a multinational fund to pay for repairing this nearly incomprehensible level of devastation, and Egypt is planning to host a meeting of donor countries, likely from Europe and the Gulf, to raise money. But since building materials cannot enter Gaza without Israeli permission, the UN-endorsed plan effectively ensures that it will be impossible to rebuild in ways that would benefit the vast majority of Palestinians.
What this means in practice is that although the Israeli government has toned down its calls for the “voluntary emigration” of Gaza’s residents, and although the Trump plan affirms the right of people in Gaza to stay, Palestinians will struggle to remain even in the 47 percent of Gaza still accessible to them. That may well, in fact, be precisely what the current reconstruction plans are meant to achieve.
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This wouldn’t be the first time that Israeli authorities took land from Gaza on the pretext of needing a security perimeter. The Gaza Strip, now a 140-square-mile enclave the size of Philadelphia surrounded by walls, fences, and the sea, was created in 1948, after Israeli authorities established a Jewish state in most of mandatory Palestine, ethnically cleansing the areas it controlled of an estimated 750,000 Palestinians. About 200,000 of those refugees arrived in Gaza, turning the Strip, even before the latest war, into one of the most densely populated places on earth.
In 1949 Egypt, which had occupied Gaza, reached an agreement with Israel that established de facto borders according to the troop positions at the time of the armistice—the so-called green line. During the 1967 war, however, the Israeli military captured Gaza and eventually established civilian settlements there in violation of the laws of war, creating zones within the Strip that were off-limits to Palestinians. The Israeli government justified the settlements as necessary for security, and therefore authorized under the laws of war.
In 2005, after the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the outbreak of the second intifada, Israeli authorities withdrew both the troops and the settlers. And yet they then created a “buffer zone,” extending between 100 and 1,500 meters from the Gaza side of the fence—amounting to 17 percent of Gaza’s total remaining area and 35 percent of its remaining arable land. The Israeli military restricted Palestinians from accessing the area near the fence and shot at those who got too close.
Lopping off another seventy-three square miles from Gaza leaves its two million residents squeezed into the area nearest the coast and cuts off access to arable land badly needed for food production. Following the extensive bombardment and planned destruction of the past two years, only 4 percent of Gaza’s farmland is undamaged and accessible; two thirds of it is beyond the yellow line. Even if Israeli authorities were to allow Palestinians to reenter that area, it’s unclear how many people would be willing to risk putting themselves in such close proximity to a military that has killed more than 69,000 people in Gaza since October 2023, according to Palestinian health officials (undoubtedly a vast undercount), including over three hundred since the cease-fire began.
With this land now inaccessible to Palestinians, we must ask who stands to benefit from the reconstruction that is slated to occur on it. One constituency has made no secret of its designs on the land: right-wing settlers who, since the start of the war, have held rallies and family and holiday events at the Gaza border vowing to reestablish Jewish settlements there, an aspiration backed by far-right Israeli government ministers and some lawmakers from the ruling Likud party. (Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not called for Jewish settlement but has called for Palestinians in Gaza to leave voluntarily.) In endorsing this so-called peace plan, Western powers, Arab states, and now the UN itself risk endorsing an illegal expansion of the Israeli government’s territorial-maximalist settlement project—and leaving two million Palestinians with no viable path for rebuilding their lives.