The Israeli right’s ‘time of miracles’ is over. The Palestinians are going nowhere.
An aerial view of destroyed residential buildings in the Tel Al-Sultan neighborhood following the withdrawal of the Israeli army during a ceasefire, Rafah, southern Gaza, 19 January 2025
Meron Rapoport writes in +972 on 2 October 2025:
We should know better than to take any so-called peace proposal presented by U.S. President Donald Trump along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at face value. But as the world awaits Hamas’ response to Trump’s 20-point plan for ending the war in Gaza, published in conjunction with the pair’s White House press conference on Monday, it is possible to begin drawing some early conclusions about what this all means for Israel and the Palestinians.
Before any discussion of who “won” or “lost” over the past two years, however, we must not forget the simple fact that if this agreement is implemented to the letter, the genocide will end, the razing of Gaza will stop, humanitarian aid will flow in preventing further starvation, all of the remaining Israeli hostages will be released along with thousands of Palestinians held with and without charge in Israeli prisons, and Israeli soldiers will no longer be killed in service of a senseless and criminal war.
There is plenty that is confusing and contradictory in both Trump’s speech and the written proposal, while some of the countries that initially endorsed the text are already distancing themselves from it following last-minute alterations by Netanyahu. But the fundamentals are much the same as they have been throughout the ceasefire negotiations going all the way back to October 2023: the release of the Israeli hostages in exchange for an end to the war and the release of Palestinian prisoners, a phased Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the relinquishing of power by Hamas, and the entry of a multinational security force with the involvement of several Arab states.
After an estimated 100,000 Palestinian deaths and the flattening of most of Gaza’s cities, any talk of “victory” for Hamas would be plainly absurd. But this proposal is no victory for Israel either — certainly not for Netanyahu and his partners in government, whose ambitions of cleansing Gaza of its Palestinian population have long been clear.
Not even a week had passed since the Hamas-led attacks of October 7 when Israel’s (somewhat impotent) Intelligence Ministry, led by Gila Gamliel of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, published an official plan calling for the “evacuation” of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents. The army began implementing a policy of destroying entire neighborhoods to prevent the return of the displaced not long after, and this became its primary mode of operation starting with the so-called “Generals’ Plan” in late 2024.
The result is that Rafah and much of Khan Younis in the south along with Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahiya, and now parts of Gaza City in the north no longer exist, having been entirely razed to the ground and their populations squeezed into an area comprising just 13 percent of the Strip’s land.