On 8 October, two years and one day after Hamas’s savage incursion into Israel that triggered Israel’s hyper-destructive onslaught on Gaza, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio passed a note to President Trump in the middle of a press conference, then whispered to him to say he could announce that a ceasefire had been agreed.

So began the implementation of the 20-point Gaza peace plan that Trump had announced at the White House on 29 September. Discussion followed between Israel, Hamas and other interested parties – the USA, Egypt, Qatar, Turkey and doubtless many others via standard diplomatic channels. On 3 October, after Trump set a 5 October deadline for Hamas to accept the plan or suffer “all hell”, Hamas agreed to release the remaining hostages it had held for two years, including the bodies of the dead, and repeated what it had said before, that Gaza could be run by a technocratic administration as Trump’s peace plan envisaged. As multiple news outlets reported, this was a partial acceptance – a “yes but” rather than full-blown consent. While Trump threatened Hamas with “complete obliteration” if it refused to fit in with his plan, the Israeli bombardment of Gaza continued, and negotiators met in Sharm el-Shaikh, Egypt, to get the peace plan on the road.

Two weeks after Rubio whispered in his President’s ear, how is the plan doing? I gave my view of it before there was any action, aiming to assess it as a plan, in its own terms, asking not whether it was right or wrong, fair or unfair, but would it work? It is what you could call a negotiations perspective, a technical assessment. In the same vein, two weeks in, how does it look now?

Structure of the peace plan

The way the Gaza peace plan is presented is pretty straightforward. The first two clauses are clipped statements of the overall aim. Clauses 3 to 8 are mostly about the immediate tasks of achieving the ceasefire, returning the Israeli hostages held by Hamas in exchange for release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, and ensuring the delivery of humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza. Clause 9 is about establishing a new authority in Gaza and clauses 10 to 20 lay out the longer-term approach on peacebuilding and development.

The deepest problems lie in that longer term but there are plenty of obstacles in the short term that can prevent the process getting off the ground. Since we are just two weeks into the effort to implement the plan, my analysis below focusses on the short-term tasks. First, though, a more general point.

Brevity and speed

As I said in my earlier post, the plan is a plan, not a treaty. It is just 1100 words long. By way of context, the Colombian peace treaty agreed in November 2016 to end the war between the state and the FARC insurgents is 323 pages long. It consists of six parts that were negotiated separately before being agreed as a whole. That process had started more than four years earlier, launched by an agreement to seek peace that was signed in August 2012.

It is inevitable that the 1100-word Gaza peace plan leaves a whole lot to be sorted out afterwards. The difficulty is that in the Colombian case and others, the detail was sorted out before final agreement and before implementation began, whereas in Gaza, the detail has to be fixed after implementation has begun. That is far more challenging.

The four years that the Colombian negotiations took is not unusual. In the case of Guatemala, there was an agreement in 1990 between government and URNG rebels, several interim agreements in the years thereafter, until full agreement (in seven separately agreed parts) was finalised in the last week of 1996. In the UK, the Northern Ireland negotiations took three years and eight months if you count from the IRA ceasefire in August 1994 or four years and four months if you start with the Downing Street declaration in December 1993. It is typical for negotiations to take years. There are examples of high octane, whirlwind processes, such as in November 1995 when the conflict parties and negotiators met for just three weeks at the US Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio and reached agreement on ending the war in Bosnia and Hercegovina. Those are the exceptions. And the US approach under Trump gives the impression that even that is way too long and slow.

It is in many ways impressive that Trump pushes so hard for immediate results and gets them. But that is not the end of the story. Just as brevity leaves many things to be sorted out along the way, so does speed. And that means that as different actors sign up to implement the plan (or to support it from the sidelines), there is not always going to be a shared clarity on what everyone is signing up to. That can raise problems in the long term, and awareness of them looming there often means they raise their unresolved heads to complicate the short-term

Ceasefire

Step 1 is always the ceasefire. As I said in my previous post, it is the starting point for peace and also where the potential complications begin. In this plan unfortunately, I thought the ceasefire clause and process “seem not to have been properly thought through.”

Events since 9 October when the ceasefire came into effect bear out that judgement. One of the obvious needs if there is a ceasefire is a way to monitor it and encourage or enforce compliance. No arrangement for that seems to have been made. That is a major gap.

Worse, as I also pointed out, while clause 15 of the plan refers to an International Stabilization Force (ISF) as “the long-term security solution”, it has nothing to say about the short-term solution, which is why there is no mechanism for ceasefire compliance and no instrument for maintaining a semblance of law and order until a proper authority is set up.

Reportedly, regional governments that might send troops for the ISF are hesitating. The idea seems straightforward: as the Israel Defence Forces (the IDF) withdraw, the ISF moves in. But when those who may have to carry out the mission sit down and look at it, there is not much that is straightforward.

With Trump’s explicit approval, Hamas has mobilised some 7,000 fighters in Gaza. While this may be necessary to prevent a security vacuum and limit the harm that criminal gangs are likely to cause, it allows Hamas to re-establish itself. That, in turn, is likely to alarm and provoke the IDF and, as has already happened, provide the basis for attacks that it will describe as retaliation. It is not surprising if potential ISF contributors are confused as to what their mission will be. They might, for example, ask whether they will have any authority our even influence over the IDF, to which Israel would probably give a fairly dusty answer.

There is also likely to be a problem if, as reported, the US administration backs Israel in deciding which governments contribute to the ISF. That risks denying the ISF the chance to be above the fray, accepted as a neutral arbiter, ceasefire monitor and provider of internal security. At worst, it risks painting the ISF as just another occupation force so it eventually becomes a target for local rage and violence.

This risk of a return to full-scale violence could have been avoided if the ISF were in place straightaway and the ceasefire clause had been properly thought through and the process properly planned. At the same time, Hamas’s ability to mobilize such a force so quickly casts doubt over the likelihood of it simply fading away as the plan demands. And Trump’s approval of an interim role for Hamas may signal to the group that, if it just hangs in there, its presence and role will in the end be pragmatically accepted.

Hostage return

A key condition for Israel agreeing to the ceasefire was the return to Israel and to their families of all hostages still alive and the physical remains of those who had died, whatever the cause, during their imprisonment. The problem I saw with this was the very tight timeline – 72 hours. In the event, the timeline did turn out to be too tight but the Israeli authorities wisely agreed not to press the point so hard that they blew up the nascent peace process.

What I did not realise was that Hamas might not know where all the dead hostages are buried. In fact, Hamas has repeatedly said since December 2023 that it did not have full information about the hostages’ locations. The Israeli government has mocked this, saying “No-one misplaces people they kidnapped.”* It seems, however, that there are divergent views about this within the Israeli government. But whether Hamas is being honest or deceptive, it seems like an extraordinary oversight that it was not clarified in the talks in Sharm el-Shaikh. 

No observer of Israeli politics over the last two years could be in doubt about the visceral quality of the hostage issue in Israel itself. At the moment, it seems as though the Netanyahu government will maintain its pragmatic approach on the issue but we can confidently expect that it will continue to burn in Israel until there is certainty that the physical remains of all dead hostages have been returned. It is not out of the question that this issue will return to haunt the peace process in the coming period.

Humanitarian aid

The delivery of humanitarian aid is covered in two clauses. Clause 8 says the UN and its agencies and the Red Crescent will handle the delivery and distribution of aid. I saw and see no problem in that clause.

However, clause 7, which says how much aid of what kind and when, is a problem. In fact, I called it a mess and I stand by that. The clause is studiedly vague about how much aid is needed and who will decide on it. It also mixes up humanitarian aid and reconstruction of the infrastructure. And it pays no attention to Israel’s persistent use of Gaza’s need for humanitarian aid as an exploitable vulnerability. Predictably, that pattern continues with Israel seeking to trade aid for Hamas’s compliance, refusing to open the Rafah entry point until all physical remains of dead hostages are returned and because of violent incidents in Gaza. This violates international law and undermines the peace plan but, in assessing the peace plan itself, those are secondary issues. The big problem is the damage that failure on aid does to the plan as a whole and therefore to Gaza’s and its people’s prospects for peace.

A problem like this is hard to resolve after it has emerged. It needs to be foreseen, as this one could have been based on Israel’s practice for over 20 months, and handled explicitly in advance. It was not. As a result, despite agreement on a ceasefire, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has barely eased in the last two weeks.

Governance

Clause 9. envisages a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee to govern Gaza, under the supervision of a Board of Peace chaired by Trump. This was agreed by Hamas in its original “yes but” response to the peace plan. It has now been agreed again by other factions as well.

Despite the inherent limitations of a technocratic approach to governance in this kind of situation, it is probably the best of an unattractive set of options. It is not yet clear who will sit on the committee and, given the other problems discussed above, it is not urgent. Launching an avowedly apolitical committee into the chaos that predominates in Gaza today would condemn it to failure and irrelevance within weeks. It would be best to wait with this until the ISF is in position, security is somewhat stabilised and humanitarian aid is flowing.

Overall

A peace plan is like a delicate fabric and a tear in it anywhere weakens other parts. There already are several tears in the fabric of the Gaza peace plan and it is accordingly at risk of failure. Several of these problems could have been foreseen.

Trump’s two key representatives in this process – his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his Middle East peace envoy Steve Witkoff – reportedly describe themselves as “deal guys”.

Yes, well – perhaps not all deals have the same logic. Maybe peace agreements and real estate deals are a bit different.

On the brighter side, peace is always a risky business; peace processes with dire initial prospects have endured and ordinary people have benefitted as a result.

NOTE

* The link is to YT video of a statement by Shosh Bedrosian, spokeswoman for Netanyahu’s office. The quoted words start at 4’40”.