Trump and Kushner’s plans for Gaza are bound to fail. Here is why.

By Sultan Barakat

Professor in public policy at Hamad Bin Khalifa University,.

Published On 25 Jan 202625 Jan 2026

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By any measure, Gaza’s devastation demands urgent and serious reconstruction. Homes, hospitals, schools, farms, cultural heritage, and basic infrastructure lie in ruins. Entire neighbourhoods have been erased. The humanitarian need is undeniable. But urgency should never become an excuse for illusion, spectacle, or political shortcuts.

The contrast between rhetoric and reality could not be sharper. While United States President Donald Trump and a group of world leaders gathered in Davos, Switzerland, to sign the charter of the so-called Board of Peace and unveil glossy reconstruction plans, the killing in Gaza continued.

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Since the ceasefire came into effect on October 10, no fewer than 480 Palestinians have been killed. Four of them were killed on the very day the charter was signed by 19 ministers and state representatives, many of whom were less interested in the issue of Gaza and much more in being seen alongside Trump.

Against that backdrop, the board’s carefully staged optimism feels like performance rather than transformation. It resembles a sandpit where those signing up get to build sandcastles with Trump that will wash away with the first real wave.

The proposals may look impressive and sound hopeful, but structurally, they are hollow. They sidestep the real drivers of the conflict, marginalise Palestinian agency, privilege Israeli military priorities over civilian recovery, and align uncomfortably with longstanding efforts to maintain the occupation, displace Palestinians, and deny the right of return for the population uprooted in 1948 and 1967.

Gaza is not a real estate prospectus

The glossy vision of presidential adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner treats Gaza not as a traumatised society emerging from catastrophic violence, but as a blank investment canvas for luxury housing, commercial zones, data hubs, beachfront promenades, and aspirational gross domestic product (GDP) targets.

It reads less like a recovery plan and more like a real-estate prospectus. Development language replaces political reality. Sleek presentations replace rights. Markets replace justice.

But Gaza is not a failed start-up looking for venture capital. It is home to more than two million Palestinians who have endured siege, displacement, repeated wars, and chronic insecurity for decades. Reconstruction cannot succeed if it is detached from their lived experiences or if it treats Gaza primarily as an economic asset open to speculative investment, including by extreme Zionists, rather than as a human community struggling to preserve its identity and social fabric.

For many families, even modest homes in Gaza’s formal refugee camps represented a fragile bridge worth holding on to as a step towards an eventual return to places from which they were forced to flee, in what is today known as Israel.

These homes were valued not for their comfort or market worth, but for the social networks they sustained and their symbolic links to continuity, memory, and political claims. Palestinians are therefore unlikely to be swayed by offers of glitzy towers, luxurious villas, or promises of a “market economy” under siege. Their experience over the past decades has taught them that no level of material improvement can substitute for deeper aspirations tied to dignity, rootedness, and the right of return.

A future designed without Palestinians

A glaring flaw of Trump’s plan is the systematic exclusion of Palestinians themselves from shaping the vision of their future. These plans are unveiled in elite conference halls, not debated with the people whose neighbourhoods have been flattened.

Without Palestinian ownership, legitimacy collapses. Experience from Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere has shown repeatedly that reconstruction imposed from the outside — however well branded — reproduces the very power imbalances that fuel instability in the first place.

Equally troubling is the plan’s deliberate avoidance of addressing the root causes of Gaza’s suffering: occupation, blockade, and military control. You cannot rebuild sustainably while continuing to preserve and fund the machinery that repeatedly destroys what is built.

No amount of concrete, branding, or foreign investment can substitute for political resolution. A territory that remains militarily besieged, economically sealed, and politically subjugated will never achieve durable recovery.

Prosperity cannot flourish inside a cage. The European Union learned this lesson the hard way through multiple reconstruction cycles it funded in Gaza, which may help explain why none of its members rushed to join the board, despite being able to afford the permanent membership fee and despite the political incentives of cultivating a more cordial relationship with Trump in light of the war in Ukraine and his threats on Greenland.

Aiding Israel’s military control through spatial redesign

There is also a serious risk that the proposed physical design of Gaza would entrench Israeli military strategy rather than restore Palestinian life. The plans envision buffer zones, segmented districts, and so-called “green spaces and corridors” that would break up the territory internally.

This kind of spatial engineering would facilitate surveillance, control, and rapid military access. Urban planning would become security architecture. Civilian geography would turn into militarised space. What is sold as modernisation would constitute a sophisticated system of containment, just like the illegal settlement networks and road systems in the occupied West Bank.

The emphasis on reclaiming land from the sea using rubble may repeat the problems of Beirut’s reconstruction after the civil war, where newly reclaimed areas attracted disproportionate investment because they were free of unresolved ownership claims, ultimately allowing elites to appropriate the city’s waterfront and pull it away from public use.

The demographic implications of the plan are equally profound. Shifting Gaza’s population centre southward — closer to Egypt and further from Israel’s settlements — would quietly alter the political and social centre of gravity of Palestinian life.

It may ease Israeli security anxieties, but it would do so at the expense of Palestinian continuity, identity, and territorial coherence. Population engineering under the banner of reconstruction raises serious ethical concerns and risks externalising Gaza’s long-term humanitarian burden onto neighbouring states. This may also help explain Egypt’s absence from the signing ceremony and its decision to limit participation to its intelligence leadership.

No amount of political theatre can replace freedom

The Board of Peace itself also deserves careful scrutiny. Its branding suggests neutrality and collective stewardship, yet its political framing remains highly personalised around Trump, with little clarity about how it is meant to operate in practice.

This is not the kind of multilateral peacebuilding mechanism envisaged by United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803 of November 2025; it is political theatre. Peace mechanisms anchored in personalities rather than institutions and international law rarely survive political change.

At the heart of all this lies a familiar but dangerous assumption: that economic growth can substitute for political rights. History teaches the opposite. People do not resist simply because they are poor; they resist because they lack dignity, security, freedom of expression, and self-determination. No master plan can bypass these realities. No skyline can compensate for political exclusion.

This does not mean Gaza must wait for the perfect peace before rebuilding. Recovery must proceed urgently. But rebuilding must empower Palestinians rather than redesign their constraints. It must dismantle systems of control, not embed them into concrete and zoning maps. It must confront the political roots of destruction rather than cosmetically repackage its aftermath.

Until those foundations exist, the Board of Peace and Kushner’s vision risk becoming exactly what they resemble — a form of sandcastle diplomacy: impressive to the global public, comforting to elites, and destined to wash away when the first serious wave of political reality arrives.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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• Sultan BarakatProfessor in public policy at Hamad Bin Khalifa University,Sultan Barakat is professor in public policy at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, honourary professor at the University of York, and member of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute ICMD Expert Reference Group.

There is no ceasefire, no aid, no Hamas disarmament, IDF withdrawal or stabilization force. Just a lot of talk about Trump-run panels with little buy-in.

1. regions middle east
2. gaza

Paul R. Pillar

Jan 19, 2026

The Trump administration’s announcements about the Gaza Strip would lead one to believe that implementation of President Trump’s 20-point peace plan, later largely incorporated into a United Nations Security Council resolution, is progressing quite smoothly.

As such, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff announced this month on social media the “launch of Phase Two” of the plan, “moving from ceasefire to demilitarization, technocratic governance, and reconstruction.” But examination of even just a couple of Witkoff’s assertions in his announcement shows that “smooth” or even “implementation” are bitter overstatements.

Witkoff said that Phase One has “maintained the ceasefire.” No, it has not. Israel has continued daily attacks against the Gaza Strip ever since the ceasefire was supposed to go into effect last October. As usual with unobserved ceasefires, both sides accuse the other of violations. The casualty count, however, reveals which side lethal violations are coming from. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, Israeli attacks since the start of the supposed ceasefire have killed at least 451 Palestinians and injured 1,251. As was true of Israeli attacks during the previous three years, many of the victims have been civilians. On the other side, the Israeli military states that three of its soldiers were killed in combat during the first few days of the ceasefire in October 2025.

Witkoff also said that “Phase One delivered historic humanitarian aid” to Gaza. What he did not say is that continued Israeli rejections of requests to deliver aid to the Strip have made the flow of aid much less than what was agreed to and far less than what is needed. As of mid-January, 24,611 aid trucks have entered Gaza since the ceasefire agreement—fewer than half of the 57,000 that Israel should have allowed in under the agreed allocation.

Phase Two thus is being announced without anything close to full implementation of Phase One.

The administration has announced some, though not all, members of the “Board of Peace,” headed by Trump, that is supposed to function as an international board of directors overseeing implementation of the rest of the plan. Recruitment of a full slate of members evidently has been difficult. Hesitation by many governments to participate is perhaps understandable, given the uncertainties about implementation so far and the nature of the overall project as one that Trump has directed in coordination with Israel.

Recruitment will not be made any easier by the administration requiring a $1 billion cash contribution from any government wanting extended membership on the board.

The personnel announcements made so far are sufficient to displease each side in this conflict. The Board of Peace includes, among others, Witkoff, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and former British prime minister Tony Blair. Arab governments and many others in the Muslim world distrust Blair because of his role in the Iraq War and his perceived pro-Israel bias when he was an international envoy addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Israel has been quick to object to the membership of a “Gaza Executive Board,” which the White House also announced and will have a vaguely defined relationship with the other bodies involved in Gaza. This board will include — besides Blair, Kushner, Witkoff, and others — the Turkish foreign minister and a senior Qatari official. The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that the Gaza Executive Board as constituted is “at odds with Israeli policy.” The statement evidently reflects Israel’s sour relations with Türkiye and Qatar, largely because of the relations of those two governments with Hamas.

The Israeli objections will provide Netanyahu’s government with an additional rationale for overturning the whole diplomatic process whenever it chooses to do so. It is not just the government, but also the Israeli opposition that is making an issue of the Executive Board membership. Opposition leader Yair Lapid called the inclusion of Türkiye a “grave diplomatic failure.” Itamar Ben Gvir, the extreme right-winger who is minister of national security, called for the Israeli military “to return to war with tremendous force in the Strip.”

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Meanwhile, some apparent organizational progress has taken place in Cairo, with the first meeting of the National Committee for the Administration of the Gaza Strip (NCAG), a group of 15 Palestinian technocrats who are supposed to function as an interim administration under the supervision of the Board of Peace. The committee met with Bulgarian diplomat Nickolay Mladenov, who has been named “director-general” of the Board of Peace. Members of the NCAG have not been announced apart from the committee’s head, a civil engineer and former deputy minister of transportation in the Palestinian Authority named Ali Shaath.

In his announcement about Phase Two, Witkoff said nothing about the prospective International Stabilization Force (ISF), which is supposed to play a major security role during the interim administration and reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. Recruiting participants in the ISF has been even more difficult than recruiting members of the Board of Peace. Governments do not want their troops to get involved in an active combat situation, as the Israeli attacks continue. They especially do not want to be involved in a mission of disarming Hamas, an objective that Israel was unable to achieve through three years of unrestricted warfare.

Amid frequent mention by Witkoff and others about Hamas needing to live up to its obligations, it is important to remember that Hamas never signed up to Trump’s 20-point plan. What Hamas has agreed to, going back to a framework agreement in 2024, has been a complete ceasefire, release of all hostages in exchange for release of an agreed number of Palestinian prisoners, and return of remains of the deceased, amid an ending of the siege of the Gaza Strip and the beginning of internationally supervised reconstruction of the territory.

Hamas also has made clear it is willing to cede governance of the Gaza Strip to independent Palestinian technocrats. In this regard, Hamas publicly welcomed as an “important positive development” the establishment and initial meeting of NCAG. Hamas also accepts in principle the presence in Gaza of a neutral international peacekeeping force.

As for disarmament, the conditions matter. Hamas has offered to bury its weapons as part of the long-term truce or hudna that it has long offered Israel. But it would completely surrender its weapons only to a genuine Palestinian government.

What Hamas will not do is unilateral disarmament as Israel continues to occupy Palestinian territory and to kill Palestinian citizens. It is unrealistic and unreasonable to expect that, especially in view of the slaughter in Gaza of the past three years.

The technocrats on NCAG have an enormous task, and they face it with major handicaps. Perhaps symbolic of the handicaps is how Shaath, to get to the Cairo meeting from where he has been living in the West Bank, had to travel through Jordan and was detained by Israeli authorities for six hours at the Allenby crossing. A Palestinian official commented that this incident demonstrates an Israel intention to sabotage the committee’s work.

An Arab diplomat observed that a committee of 15 members cannot administer the Gaza Strip without large numbers of civil servants. But Israel is blocking the participation of not only anyone on Hamas’s payroll but also anyone on the Palestinian Authority’s payroll.

In his initial public comments after being named chairman of NCAG, Shaath talked about the huge task of clearing the rubble, which could take three years while overall reconstruction would take about seven years. The situation could become even worse. Israel is continuing to create still more rubble by methodically demolishing buildings in the half of the Gaza Strip that it still occupies.

Neither Trump’s plan nor any other peace plan will be able to bring anything close to peace, security, and prosperity to Gaza as long as Israel is the controlling power on the ground and is determined to oppose anything that looks like Palestinian self-governance.

Paul R. Pillar

Paul R. Pillar is Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Studies of Georgetown University and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is also an Associate Fellow of the Geneva Center for Security Policy.

Arab and Muslim states are being courted to bankroll – and legitimize – a foreign force tasked with dismantling Palestinian resistance under the guise of peacekeeping.

F.M. Shakil, The Cradle, DEC 23, 2025

Photo Credit: The Cradle

As 2026 approaches, Washington is laying the groundwork for yet another intervention – once again wrapped in the familiar language of peacekeeping. Behind closed doors, US officials are pushing for the deployment of an International Stabilization Force (ISF) in Gaza. 

Far from a neutral effort to restore calm, the move signals a calculated escalation in the US-Israeli campaign to crush Palestinian resistance under the pretext of post-war reconstruction.

According to US officials, this second phase of US President Donald Trump’s so-called peace initiative will coincide with the release of hostages and a fragile, US-engineered ceasefire. 

“A tremendous deal of quiet scheming is currently taking place behind the curtain for phase two of the peace deal,” White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt shared with reporters on 11 December, saying, “Our goal is to establish a lasting peace.”

But if past US-brokered arrangements are anything to go by, this “peace” is unlikely to mean justice. Details emerging from the Israeli press suggest the ISF plan is being finalized by military leaders who will meet in Germany to determine the force’s rules of engagement – and which resistance groups must be neutralized.

Disarming resistance, not the occupation

The first cracks in the plan are already visible. Disagreements between Washington and Tel Aviv have surfaced, not over whether to disarm Hamas, but when and how. Tel Aviv insists that all resistance groups must surrender their weapons before the ISF lands in Gaza. Washington, facing regional blowback and a collapsing image as a neutral broker, is attempting a more phased approach.

Dr Ghulam Ali, a researcher and author based in Taiwan, tells The Cradle: 

“How can the US hit the nail on the head while keeping the flow of weapons to Israel steady and unwavering? Reducing Hamas’s influence is unlikely to lead to a sustainable peace. Only applying pressure to Israel will be effective.” 

He contends that the west would ultimately be incapable of restraining Israel’s actions, as it has become increasingly apparent that each western peace initiative has resulted in Israel’s further integration into the region.

Dr James M. Dorsey, a journalist and scholar from Singapore, stated on a recent Radio Islam talk show that Trump is concerned that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is obstructing US diplomatic initiatives to resolve the Gaza conflict.

The divergence came to a head following Israel’s assassination of Hamas commander Raed Saad – a killing that drew rare frustration from the White House, with US officials conveying a “stern private message” to Netanyahu that the move breached the ceasefire framework the Trump administration had helped broker. 

Netanyahu’s hardline refusal to ease military pressure on Gaza and Lebanon has delayed a scheduled meeting between the two leaders until January.

The disarmament debate has also exposed a wider fault line within the Axis of Resistance and its western-aligned adversaries. Qatar, Egypt, and Turkiye – all central to ceasefire negotiations – have resisted US pressure to support a military deployment before Israel halts its violations and allows humanitarian relief.

Netanyahu, however, is pushing to deploy the ISF as a tool to dismantle Hamas entirely. Meanwhile, Washington’s envoy to Syria, Tom Barrack, concedes that disarming Hezbollah is “not reasonable.” 

Buying complicity, not consensus

Arab and Muslim-majority states remain wary. Public opinion across the region strongly favors Palestinian resistance, making direct military involvement in Gaza politically toxic. Yet Washington is betting on transactional diplomacy to sway its allies. 

The UAE, for instance, may finance the ISF without contributing troops – a workaround to avoid domestic backlash while maintaining its alignment with Tel Aviv.

Pakistan’s position is equally ambivalent. While its foreign office denies any formal decision to join the ISF, analysts suggest that Pakistan’s military is likely to comply with US directives. As Imtiaz Gul, a Pakistani defense analyst and executive director of the Center for Research and Security Studies (CRSS), tells The Cradle:

“The primary strategy and goals of the ISF regarding the disarmament of Hamas are to neutralize and ultimately eradicate Hamas, along with other resistance factions. The primary objective is not disarmament but rather the neutralization and eradication of resistance in the region with the support of Israel and its allied Muslim nations.” 

Gul further emphasizes that Netanyahu has consistently characterized Hamas as an existential threat to Israel, affirming that its elimination is vital for the security of Tel Aviv. The main objective of the ISF is the complete elimination of Hamas, a goal that will be explicitly supported by the nations collaborating in the US–Israel joint operation in Gaza.

Peacekeeping or power projection?

Pakistan, Indonesia, Azerbaijan, Turkiye, and Egypt have expressed interest in participating in the proposed stabilization force for Gaza. The mandate of the ISF remains ambiguous; therefore, no country has so far officially announced joining the international force.

Last week, Tahir Andrabi, a spokesperson of the Pakistan foreign office, said that Islamabad has not decided yet whether it will take part in the proposed ISF for Gaza. He said that talks about Gaza are part of greater diplomatic efforts and are not an official proposal. Pakistan supports efforts to stabilize Gaza, but any decisions about foreign involvement will be in line with its policy, he added.

Dr Ali tells The Cradle that he believes that the Pakistani military would make every effort to comply with Washington’s directives:

“The military has the backing of religious factions, and if the US truly had a mind to convince Pakistan to send troops, those same religious factions would be the first to step up and sing the praises of such a move. The army chief, perched on shaky ground, is unable to go against the US.” 

Gul, though optimistic about Pakistan’s joining the ISF interprets Islamabad’s decision to align with the ISF as a mutually beneficial arrangement between the US and Pakistan.

”The US will refrain from intervening in Pakistan’s existing hybrid governance structure in return for Pakistan’s endorsement of US initiatives on Gaza and the possible facilitation of the Abraham Accord,” he asserts.

Pakistan’s dilemma

Asim Munir, Pakistan’s powerful field marshal, who has recently consolidated unprecedented authority to serve as the head of all three branches of the defense apparatus, is expected to meet President Trump in the forthcoming weeks to discuss the deployment in Gaza.

Although the Pakistani Foreign Office denied Munir’s visit to Washington and provided only a vague statement regarding Islamabad’s intention to join the ISF, analysts contend that by banning a radical religious organization and granting lifelong legal immunity, General Munir has signaled the possibility of undertaking more significant actions.

“The military leadership appears to be politically stable, as prominent political entities such as the PPP [Pakistan’s People Party] and PML-N [Pakistan Muslim League (N)] endorse the current regime, while they may provide some concessions to former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan and his senior colleagues in exchange for their silence regarding deployment matters,” Gul reveals. 

He adds that historically, the military establishment has leveraged right-wing pressure groups and political parties in Pakistan, while Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) and its incarcerated leader, Khan, now present minimal opposition due to ongoing administrative and legal obstacles. Furthermore, he said, Pakistan is recognized as the second-largest contributor to UN peacekeeping forces worldwide.

Outsourcing the occupation 

The establishment of the ISF has emerged as a crucial component of peace efforts in West Asia following conflicts in Gaza and southern Lebanon.

The UN Security Council endorsed the creation of the ISF through Resolution 2803 last month, aiming to transition security control from the Israeli army to local authorities. However, the clause concerning disarming entrenched groups like Hamas and Hezbollah requires a complex strategy that integrates military action with political motivations.

The ISF, functioning under US Central Command (CENTCOM), is designed as a global peacekeeping body focused on Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR). Over 70 nations have been invited to participate, with a preference for troops from Arab and Muslim countries to enhance “legitimacy.”

US officials assert that the ISF is authorized to use force if disarmament negotiations fail, which causes many participating Muslim countries to hesitate because of potential backlash from pro-Palestinian constituents.

Dismantling Hamas and preventing the reconstruction of resistance infrastructure present serious challenges – and Hamas remains clear that any disarmament discussion is contingent upon the establishment of a Palestinian state.