Everyone is planning Gaza’s future. But the governance crisis is now
Palestinians inspect the site of an Israeli strike on a police station in Gaza City’s Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, J31 January 2026
Mahmoud Mushtaha writes in +972 on 11 August 2026:
My phone rings most days from a number in Gaza. I have learned to answer it standing up, my body bracing to move before I even know what I’m about to hear.
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Then I hang up and open the news. The headlines speak of reconstruction conferences, recovery strategies, and the institutions that will supposedly govern Gaza “the day after.” The vocabulary is polished: stabilization, rebuilding, recovery, even a “Gaza Riviera.” The world is already discussing what Gaza should become while Palestinians are still contending with what it has become.
For more than 2 million Palestinians, many still living in tents, there has been no clean transition from a genocidal war to recovery. Daily life remains organized around displacement, finding food, and staying alive. This is a society still being dismantled, brick by brick, institution by institution, habit by habit — just more slowly, and with less of an audience.
And when I listen to what families in Gaza are asking for, food and water are only part of it. Increasingly, and in a lower voice, I hear another set of questions: Who is actually in control? Who can protect us if something happens? What if an armed group comes to the neighborhood? Who do we call if someone steals from us, threatens us, or takes advantage of us? When will there be a government we can actually turn to?