KEY TAKEAWAYS
- No.
- The Trump–Netanyahu framework, presented on 29 September 2025, aims to end the Gaza genocide through humanitarian relief, Israeli withdrawal, and technocratic reconstruction.
- It proposes an immediate ceasefire, hostage exchange, Hamas demilitarisation, and an internationally supervised technocratic administration for Gaza.
- The plan lacks Palestinian involvement, undermining its legitimacy and feasibility for implementation.
- External drafting, primarily by Israel, and limited Palestinian input weaken trust and institutional leverage.
- The governance model, with an international “Board of Peace,” risks creating a neo-colonial structure, side-lining Palestinian self-governance.
- Security arrangements favour Israel, with rapid hostage release and Hamas disarmament, while Israeli withdrawal remains vague and staged.
- The short 72-hour hostage exchange window and indeterminate Israeli withdrawal increase risks of operational failure.
- Reconstruction is tied to international donor mechanisms, potentially creating dependency and limiting Palestinian agency.
- Legal concerns include insufficient safeguards for Palestinian rights, risking deepened dispossession and impunity.
- The plan’s focus on Gaza alone ignores broader Palestinian issues like refugee rights, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
- A viable settlement requires Palestinian ownership, legal protections, reciprocal security, and transparent reconstruction.
When U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented a twenty-point framework on 29 September 2025 to terminate the Gaza genocide (as it is being unequivocally termed by nearly every international legal body possessing the authority to do so), the document was pitched as a compact of immediate humanitarian relief, a staged Israeli withdrawal, and a blueprint for the technocratic reconstruction of the Strip. The paper proposes an immediate cessation of hostilities if both parties accept, a coordinated hostage exchange with a short verification window, the demilitarisation of Hamas, and the placement of Gaza under a transitional, internationally supervised technocratic administration.
The draft President Trump discussed with representatives of Arab and Muslim countries was significantly revised by PM Netanyahu before publication, much to the dismay of Arab and Muslim interlocutors. Yet following near-universal backing, it was provisionally accepted by Hamas, which in turn proposed revisions. Irrespective of the fate of its current provisional acceptance and of the possibility of an attempt to actually implement it, however, is this a feasible plan that could deliver peace?
Ownership and legitimacy
The mechanics of the proposal reveal, on close inspection, a series of design choices that undermine its ability to stabilise the ground or to produce a durable political settlement. The first and most elemental problem is one of ownership. The plan was formulated and presented by external principals, with Israeli drafting influence acknowledged in multiple accounts, and with Palestinian participation at best peripheral.
That absence of genuine Palestinian involvement matters not as an abstract norm but as a practical precondition for implementation, because political settlements imposed from above command neither the trust nor the institutional leverage necessary to police compliance, adjudicate disputes, or absorb spoilers. Contemporary reporting makes clear that neither the Palestinian Authority nor Hamas were party to the drafting, and that Hamas was presented with a tight ultimatum to accept or face renewed force. The group’s subsequent, conditional response underscores how a paper agreement without robust Palestinian buy-in becomes a brittle instrument.
Governance architecture and neo-colonial risks
Closely connected to the deficit of local legitimacy is the plan’s governance architecture. It envisages a temporary Palestinian technocratic executive, supervised by an international “Board of Peace,” with named international personalities publicly associated with the supervisory structure. That architecture is not a neutral managerial fix; it is a form of external trusteeship that concentrates the levers of reconstruction, security, and public administration outside accountable Palestinian institutions.
The choice to vest oversight in an international board, and to invite figures with long public profiles in the region, was defended by proponents as a means to secure donor confidence and operational capacity. Critics, and a range of analysts, see in that same choice the hallmarks of what they call a neo-colonial settlement, because it substitutes external direction for collective Palestinian self-government and ties recovery to the discretion of non-Palestinian actors.
Reporting on the plan’s supervisory mechanism and on the return of familiar international intermediaries provides the public record for that critique. It is crucial to observe that Palestinians who would be more deeply involved in the management of Gaza at a later stage under the Trump- and Tony Blair-headed “Board of Peace” would in practice answer to the international board, not to Palestinians—an element that is a staple of the colonial structure.
Security sequencing and asymmetries
Security sequencing is the linchpin of the proposal, and it is here that the asymmetries become most consequential. The plan conditions the immediate cessation of hostilities on, among other things, the rapid release of remaining hostages within a short, seventy-two-hour time window and the progressive disarmament of Hamas.
At the same time, the Israeli withdrawal is framed as staged, with security perimeters and a continuing perimeter presence envisaged until as yet unspecified benchmarks are met. This means that disarmament is expected from the side that has been physically contained within the Strip, while decisive coercive presence and control over the perimeter and entry points remain effectively in Israel’s hands for an indeterminate interval.
The combination of an abbreviated timetable for hostage exchange, the technical difficulty of verification on the ground, and the indeterminate nature of the withdrawal makes the plan highly vulnerable to operational failure, mutual recriminations, and the very kind of security gap that spoilers exploit. It is eminently conceivable that, after the first seventy-two hours of implementation, Israel could “take the hostages and run” in the direction of re-occupying Gaza and bringing the genocide to completion. It should be remembered that this would not be the first ceasefire to be broken in 2025; the agreement that was in force from January 19 to March 18 and led to eight rounds of exchanges of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners was unilaterally terminated by Israel earlier this year.
Reconstruction, dependency, and economic control
Equally important is the manner in which reconstruction and economic renewal are instrumentalised. The proposal links vast reconstruction resources and investment frameworks to the new governance arrangements, proposing donor-managed financing and contractual channels that will, by design, be routed through international mechanisms and vetted local partners.
Reconstruction conditionality is not in itself unusual, but when coupled with the suspension or side-lining of local political agency it becomes a mechanism of political leverage. If the principal currency of normalisation is reconstruction finance, then donor preference and the administrative pathways that channel aid will shape political outcomes as much as any explicit clause in a treaty.
That is why analysts who study post-conflict transitions warn that externally managed reconstruction can produce dependency and can reconfigure sovereignty in practice, even when de jure authority is nominally returned to local actors. Evidence of the plan’s redevelopment ambitions and of competing visions for a post-war Gaza have been widely documented, particularly given that the current plan is a further development of (and more palatable version of) Trump’s earlier “Gaza Riviera” proposals, which did not shy away from proposing the ethnic cleansing (“relocation”) of Palestinians—an element that has been revised in the meantime.
Legal and normative concerns
A further set of objections are legal and normative. Dozens of independent United Nations experts have publicly warned that key elements of an externally imposed settlement risk deepening Palestinian dispossession and entrenching legal insecurity, and human rights organisations have repeatedly cautioned against designs that might normalise impunity or permit forced displacement to be reframed as voluntary population management.
These are not merely rhetorical claims. International humanitarian law is specific about the duties of an occupying power and about protections for property, movement, and political rights. Any settlement that fails to embed enforceable safeguards for those rights, or that leaves accountability mechanisms vague, courts contestation and juridical challenges that in turn undermine durability. The statement of the UN experts and the positions adopted by rights groups frame the legal arguments that must be answered by any credible plan.
The Gaza-only focus
The plan’s narrow geographical focus compounds the problem. Treating Gaza as an isolated theatre for technocratic rescue risks severing the enclave from the wider political entitlements of the Palestinian national project, notably refugee claims, the future of the West Bank, and the status of East Jerusalem.
Since the two-state solution reinvigorated by the New York Declaration and the subsequent UNGA vote includes Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem as parts of the envisioned State of Palestine, a settlement that “resolves” Gaza through external tutelage while leaving the rest of the question unresolved is liable to ossify fragmentation.
History shows that political claims which are permitted to atrophy under the weight of material reconstruction do not disappear peacefully; rather, they reassert themselves either through new forms of political mobilisation or through renewed violence. Several analysts and policy centres have emphasised how the “compartmentalisation” of Palestinian rights is a fundamental shortcoming of the current framework.
When the neighbours watch closely
Regional dynamics further complicate implementation. Arab capitals have signalled a preference for a rapid resolution of the Gaza file, but their support is transactional and often conditioned by domestic and regional calculations.
At the same time, reports of Egyptian defensive preparations along the Rafah axis, including substantial troop deployments, evidence the acute sensitivities that would be triggered by any large-scale population movement or by a perception that Gaza is being transformed into a zone under third-party control.
In short, the plan must be read not simply as a technical sequence of steps but as a set of political choices whose regional externalities will shape, and possibly destabilise, local implementation. Reporting on troop movements and on the regional reception of the proposal sets out those external constraints.
Between ceasefire and sovereignty: The measure of peace
Taken together, these structural defects explain why many analysts conclude that the plan, even if immediately accepted and implemented, is unlikely to deliver a durable peace. A viable settlement would need, at minimum, a demonstrable transfer of authority to representative Palestinian institutions, legally binding protections for refugees and property rights, reciprocal and verifiable security arrangements rather than one-sided demilitarisation, transparent reconstruction mechanisms designed to build rather than supplant local administrative capacity, and a regional architecture that anticipates and mitigates the externalities of population movements.
Those are practical, not merely rhetorical, requirements. Without them, the proposed design risks producing a transient ceasefire and a long period of externally administered stasis, which critics rightly characterise as a form of political tutelage.
For anyone serious about preventing renewed bloodshed, the measure of any plan must be whether it enlarges political agency and rights, not whether it temporarily stabilises a front line. Of course, what should be added here is that the overwhelming international support for the two-state solution and Palestinian self-determination and statehood in particular cannot be side-lined and eradicated via a ceasefire agreement.
If policymakers wish to salvage elements of the current framework, they should start by reintroducing Palestinian ownership at every substantive level of the process. That requires time, independent verification, legal guarantees enshrined in binding instruments, and a sequencing that ties the surrender of arms to concrete political results that are irreversible and rights-preserving.
Any alternative that substitutes managerial competence for political consent and majestically re-inserts the colonial paradigm will be less a peace than a pause in which the underlying problems fester until they resume their lethal logic.
* Sotiris Mitralexis holds a doctorate in political science and international relations; he works at University College London as a research fellow.