President Donald Trump’s Gaza plan is being sold as the answer. Announced by Trump at the White House in late September, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his side, the twenty-point framework promises to end the war, restart aid, and stand up a transitional authority to run Gaza. It creates a “temporary International Stabilisation Force”, an apolitical technocratic Palestinian committee under a new international “Board of Peace”, chaired by Trump himself. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair would help oversee the transition. The body will aim to manage Gaza’s redevelopment through modern, “efficient” governance, to attract foreign investment. The plan’s clauses include an exchange of hostages for prisoners and detainees, amnesty for Hamas members who disarm, safe passage for the members who choose to leave, a surge of humanitarian deliveries, and a multi-stage withdrawal of the Israel Defence Forces tied to “security benchmarks”—including Hamas’s demilitarisation and border-control arrangements, all verified by independent observers. The document also notes that civilians will be allowed to leave but “no one will be forced out” of Gaza, a shift from Netanyahu’s earlier talk of “voluntary” emigration and Trump’s “Riviera” proposal “to rebuild and energise Gaza.”

Strip away the framing, and the design is clear. Gaza is to be managed from the outside, without a locally elected government. The P.A. is told to make reforms—anti-corruption and fiscal-transparency measures, increased judicial independence, a path to elections—before it can even be considered for a role in Gaza’s governance. Hamas is removed from political life by decree. Core questions—borders, sovereignty, refugees—are deferred. In this architecture, Gaza becomes a security-first regime, where aid, reconstruction, and “transition” are subordinated to Israeli security metrics under the oversight of the U.S. and its partners. Palestinians are offered administration without authority. The occupation is dressed in managerial language. The danger is that this “temporary” system becomes permanent, sustained by donors, monitors, and memoranda.

As of this writing, the first phase of the deal has moved ahead. Hamas has released the remaining living hostages, and Israel freed some two thousand Palestinian prisoners and detainees. Aid convoys are scaling up, and Israel said that it has partially withdrawn troops from parts of Gaza. What remains unclear are the enforcement mechanisms and the timelines. Who commands the proposed “stabilisation force”, and under what rules of engagement will it operate? Where will I.D.F. units be positioned during the transition? What binding guarantees—if any—protect Palestinians against an open-ended military return? Negotiators say that these questions are still being debated, paragraph by paragraph. A parallel diplomatic track is also opening. On Monday, Trump co-chaired the Sharm El-Sheikh summit, a meeting in Egypt focussed on postwar governance, with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the P.A., was in attendance. Benjamin Netanyahu was not. The meeting was aimed at rallying broader backing for the plan and locking down its operational details.

Hamas had little room to manœuvre in the latest round of talks. Many Arab governments endorsed Trump’s Gaza plan before the organisation had even received a formal copy of it, boxing the group into a defensive posture. Netanyahu, meanwhile, used the moment to reaffirm his rejection of a Palestinian state.

Still, ending the war always required that Hamas agree to a deal—perhaps an ugly one, certainly an imperfect one, but one that would bring a stop to the killing. There were earlier windows during the war when a deal might have opened space for hard bargaining that could have won real gains for Gazans. Instead, Gazan leadership fell into refusals and delays without any coherent strategy. Each rejection narrowed the horizon until what Gazans face now is a comprehensive package imposed from the outside. This is the price of political failure. Leaders treated negotiations as a stage for factional gain rather than as a matter of national survival. Now the choices are brutally tight: partial occupation under terms the people can still contest, or a broader occupation that comes with more widespread displacement. Palestinian negotiators owed the people some kind of plan. It was necessary to get aid flowing and to spare lives. Anyone who gambled with that blood for the sake of symbolic triumph would have been accountable for the cost.

The plan now opens a narrow opportunity—if Palestinians can turn its vague text into leverage. On paper, it pledges an I.D.F. withdrawal and sketches a “credible pathway” to self-determination and, eventually, statehood. Much of the machinery is still unspecified, but that uncertainty can be converted into demands: a public U.S. commitment on statehood, a dated and enforceable timetable for full withdrawal, a U.N. Security Council resolution that hardens the guarantees with penalties for violations, and third-party monitoring. Whatever form the final deal takes, it will serve as a hinge into a new political order in Gaza. Now that the bombardment has stopped, it has left a political vacuum in the territory. The question is, what will rush to fill it?

There has never been a genuine internal reckoning with Palestinian political failures. The Oslo Accords [1]—brokered by the U.S. and signed in the mid-nineties, after secret negotiations—were framed as the last great compromise. In practice, they created the Palestinian Authority as an interim administrator of Palestine, and postponed the conflict’s major questions to a later date that has yet to arrive. Palestinians were shifted from leading a liberation project to managing enclaves, whilst Israel retained control over their land, movement, and the map itself. Before Oslo, the first intifada [2] had generated momentum for international recognition of Palestinian statehood. Oslo dismantled that momentum. It was meant to be a bridge to peace, but it became the final blow. It provided no way to implement U.N. Resolution 194 [3] on the right of return for exiled or displaced Palestinians, and produced no method of ensuring equality for some two million Palestinians inside Israel, whose struggle was written off as an internal matter. Every inch of Palestinian land remains under Israeli military control in one form or another. The labels changed, but the structure did not.

Hamas won elections in Gaza in 2006. What followed were boycotts and sanctions from the international community; a power struggle with Fatah [4], the party that controls the P.A., that exploded into a street war in 2007; and, ultimately, a geographic divorce. Hamas was left governing Gaza, and the P.A. was confined to the West Bank. Israel then tightened a land-sea-air blockade of the territory, which made normal governance impossible and turned every budget line into a permit request. Hamas never allowed further elections. Over successive wars and siege years, Hamas’s authority hardened until it ran a kind of bunker state: an exiled political bureau abroad, a Gazan command increasingly dominated by the organisation’s military wing, and a public living under limited movement, rationed goods, and permanent emergency.

By October 7^th, decision-making had migrated to the armed cadre. Reporting indicates that the assault’s [5] green light came from only a handful of Hamas leaders and commanders, including Yahya Sinwar, Marwan Issa, and Mohammed Deif (all of whom were later assassinated by Israel). After the catastrophe, even senior figures signalled misgivings. Mousa Abu Marzouk, the head of Hamas’s foreign-relations office, said that he would not have backed the operation had he foreseen the scale of Gaza’s devastation. (Hamas later claimed his words were taken out of context.)

The organisation itself has since crumbled. Today, Hamas operates without a coherent leadership, a reality its remaining figures seem unwilling to confront. Most of those who shaped or even marginally influenced the events of October 7^th are gone, leaving Gaza’s authority withered to the point that even managing the hostages has become paralysingly difficult. Abroad, the leadership was fragile long before a recent assassination attempt on its leaders in Doha, in September. It has only weakened since.

Inside Gaza, criticising Hamas has long been treated by the organisation as a form of betrayal. In a time of constant siege and bombardment, people feared that public dissent would be weaponised by Israel. Patronage networks ran through Hamas, and speaking out could carry real costs for civilians. Families learnt to keep quiet because the price of a wrong word could be a lost permit, a withheld salary, or worse. In wartime, the instinct to hold the line is understandable. But that instinct is breaking down. Nearly seventy thousand Palestinians have been killed, and more than a hundred and seventy thousand have been injured. At least two million have been internally displaced. As many as a hundred thousand have been forced out of the Gaza Strip. Civilian infrastructure—roads, sewage, electricity, and municipal services—has been destroyed. More than ninety per cent of residential buildings have been reduced to rubble. Some ninety-five per cent of people face severe shortages of food, clean water, and medicine. Disease and malnutrition have spread as the medical infrastructure has collapsed. The education system is in ruins.

Many Gazans now point out that Hamas has been negotiating primarily for things that the territory already had before October 7^th—aid lorries, limited freedom of mobility within the Strip, and I.D.F. pullbacks to prior lines. The bargaining looks, to many, like a fight for organisational survival rather than for the protection of the people. The appetite for Hamas’s return to power now feels thin amongst Gazans. Ahed Ferwana, the secretary of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate in Gaza, described a mood of rising resentment at a leadership that dragged Gaza into a war no one could survive. “There is distance, even anger,” he told me. “People were left disappointed.”

The P.A. offers little alternative. The P.A.’s remit in the West Bank is narrow: running municipal services, payrolls, and security coördination with Israel, all inside a map that Israel still controls. The P.A. depends on foreign donors and on taxes that Israel can withhold at will. Elections were postponed in 2021, and dissent is heavily policed. In recent polling by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research, satisfaction with Abbas hovers at fifteen per cent, and demand for his resignation is overwhelming. For most Palestinians, a P.A. return to Gaza under an Israeli-American umbrella would read as a return to occupation by proxy.

The rest of the political field has also collapsed. Once-influential leftist factions—the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine [6]—have been ground down by decades of arrests, exile, funding collapse, and irrelevance. This war obliterated their remaining infrastructure. Little political order is left. For the first time in decades, Gaza has no actor with a meaningful mandate to define its interests or negotiate its future. “Gaza needs leadership called in by the people themselves, not appointed from the outside,” Sundos Fayyad, a journalist in Gaza, told me. “Rebuilding what’s been destroyed may be impossible, but any future worth living begins with that right for representation.”

The phrase “the day after” is much used in Gaza, but it remains an abstraction. “Everyone has a plan,” Fayyad told me. “But none of them speak to our needs.” The most visible plans are those devised by the same international custodians who have engineered postwar order elsewhere in the Middle East. Last month, a leaked “Gaza Riviera” postwar plan circulated within the Trump Administration. It proposes placing Gaza under U.S. control, recasting displacement as development, and suggesting a temporary relocation for much of its population. The Strip’s coastline and interior would be remade into “modern and AI-powered smart planned cities.”

The peace plan, the most recent proposed trusteeship structure under Trump and Blair, follows the same logic—Palestinian statehood deferred, Israel’s security rights preserved in a Gaza turned into an international project. The Palestinians being floated to join efforts to administer Gaza seem selected primarily for their palatability to foreign governments. “None has a mandate,” Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer and a former legal adviser to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation [7], said. “Their qualification is access to foreign capital.” Governance, she added, “is being rebuilt around external interests, not public legitimacy.” Talal Abo Rokba, a professor of political sociology in Gaza, told me, “These leaders are administrators for someone else’s agenda.”

Some versions of the deal imagine Hamas continuing as a disarmed political party—its weapons placed under international custody whilst a “reformed” movement competes in future elections. Others assume Fatah will regain ground under a “revitalised” P.A., or that a unity government could be assembled between the two groups. Inside Gaza, few believe that these formulas can gain legitimacy again. “Unity has become meaningless,” Heba al-Maqadma, a pharmacist and a writer from Gaza now studying in Ireland, told me. “It’s a slogan that doesn’t have a foothold.” Rokba described two broken camps in the territory: a “trembling political class” waiting on international arrangements to rescue it, and a “reckless current”, embodied in Hamas, that gambled a nation’s survival for its own. “Between timidity and recklessness, neither offers a vision,” he said. The hope, if there is any, is that new political formations can take their place.

It was not easy to find people in Gaza willing—and able—to speak to me for this piece. Almost everyone I knew who could reflect on the region’s politics has been silenced. Professors, writers, journalists, engineers, public servants—around a hundred of them—have been killed. Some others have been displaced, detained, or forced to flee abroad. Entire circles of thought have been wiped out. It will take time for a local political culture to regrow, but there are early signs of hope: neighbourhood relief committees that learnt to coördinate food and shelter during the war; professional syndicates that kept rosters for clinics and pharmacies when governance collapsed; engineers and municipal workers who mapped broken water lines and power runs; women’s associations that organised schools-as-shelters; legal groups that tracked detainees and disappearances. Senior economists such as Raja Khalidi have noted that the private sector has been unusually resilient during the war, and is now poised to wield outsized influence in the rebuild. “Gaza, in the wake of Israel’s genocide, demands a reckoning,” Tareq Baconi, of the Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, told me. “The first imperative is local agency: youth, civil society, unions, and intellectuals must lead planning and implementation. Legitimacy cannot be imported or imposed. It must emerge from within.”

Saja al-Hana, a law student and political researcher in Gaza, sees three plausible tracks for Gaza’s postwar transition. The first, “a limited success”, would allow enough stability for reconstruction to start and elections to be prepared. The second is failure: an interim authority that can’t meet basic needs, “triggering popular and factional resistance” and pulling Gaza back into a downward spiral of violence. The third, and perhaps the most dangerous, in her eyes, would be “a ’transitional’ phase that hardens into a long-term occupation—international management that delays our right to decide our own fate.” When a transition begins, Hana argued, it will be a double test: whether Palestinians can protect sovereignty and self-determination whilst rebuilding, and whether an international system that speaks of justice can resist imposing complete control. “The right to speak for Gaza belongs to Gazans,” she said. “Any project that bypasses them only reproduces the trusteeship we’ve already lived through.”

Reconstruction that restores roads but not representation will only re-create dependency. The next phase of Gaza’s life must be shaped by those who have lived through its collapse. If the world tries to govern Gaza from abroad, Palestinians must insist on governing themselves from within. The rubble is already being cleared for a new administration. The question is whether Palestinians can transform the ruins of a political order into the foundation of another that belongs to them.

In December 2023, an Israeli air strike destroyed my home in Gaza, and it collapsed on top of me and my family. I fled to Egypt in 2024, and have been living in exile since. I have lost family members in Gaza. I have lost friends and colleagues. Even so, I count myself amongst those who have lost the least. I am not asking for pity, or charity, or anything in return. None of us is. The world will not make it up to us, and we are not waiting for it to try. What matters now is a restoration of Gaza’s political life. In my lifetime, Palestinian political participation has been almost nonexistent. Older generations in Gaza have voted once or twice, but I have never had the chance to take part in any political exercise. Most young people have had no say in who leads them or how policy is made in Gaza or in the West Bank. The only thing we ask for now is the right to chart our own political future on our own terms.

There is no faster poison than despair declared permanent. For Palestinians, refugee camps have hardened into towns, and checkpoints into landmarks. The ration boxes meant to feed the hungry have become a generation’s economy. We grew up knowing walls better than schools. We were instructed to believe that ruins were homes, breadlines were governance, and silent misery was “calm”. Fear has been institutionalised—budgeted, distributed, sold as peace. Submission was repackaged as maturity. The cruellest occupation is not of land but of the imagination.

We as Palestinians are often congratulated for our resilience. It has become the badge pinned on us—the costume of the noble victim. Our ability to breathe under rubble is praised as a virtue, when it’s actually an indictment of the world that put us there. If it does not lead to freedom, resilience delivers only another day of captivity. Survival is the most meagre inheritance. To call us resilient is to praise the caged bird whilst ignoring the cage’s latch. Surviving destruction is not the same as defeating it. There’s cruelty in this praise. It tells the world to marvel at our strength whilst ignoring the cost paid in blood and hunger. Our pain is romanticised, and our survival treated as the whole story—when it is only the beginning.

Mohammed R. Mhawish