Gaza’s Broken Politics

Whatever fragile political system existed in Gaza has collapsed, along with the institutions that once gave public life its structure. Hamas, weakened militarily and decapitated by the assassinations of its leaders, faces isolation abroad and a diminished mandate at home. The Palestinian Authority, long discredited in the West Bank, has been absent in Gaza. Leftist factions survive as symbols rather than as real organizations. Independent political figures are scattered or silenced. After two years of war, Gaza has no functioning political body with the authority or legitimacy to shape what comes next.

President Donald Trump’s Gaza plan is being sold as the answer. Announced by Trump at the White House in late September, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his side, the twenty-point framework promises to end the war, restart aid, and stand up a transitional authority to run Gaza. It creates a “temporary International Stabilization Force,” an apolitical technocratic Palestinian committee under a new international “Board of Peace,” chaired by Trump himself. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair would help oversee the transition. The body will aim to manage Gaza’s redevelopment through modern, “efficient” governance, to attract foreign investment. The plan’s clauses include an exchange of hostages for prisoners and detainees, amnesty for Hamas members who disarm, safe passage for the members who choose to leave, a surge of humanitarian deliveries, and a multi-stage withdrawal of the Israel Defense Forces tied to “security benchmarks”—including Hamas’s demilitarization and border-control arrangements, all verified by independent observers. The document also notes that civilians will be allowed to leave but “no one will be forced out” of Gaza, a shift from Netanyahu’s earlier talk of “voluntary” emigration and Trump’s “Riviera” proposal “to rebuild and energize Gaza.”

Strip away the framing, and the design is clear. Gaza is to be managed from the outside, without a locally elected government. The P.A. is told to make reforms—anti-corruption and fiscal-transparency measures, increased judicial independence, a path to elections—before it can even be considered for a role in Gaza’s governance. Hamas is removed from political life by decree. Core questions—borders, sovereignty, refugees—are deferred. In this architecture, Gaza becomes a security-first regime, where aid, reconstruction, and “transition” are subordinated to Israeli security metrics under the oversight of the U.S. and its partners. Palestinians are offered administration without authority. The occupation is dressed in managerial language. The danger is that this “temporary” system becomes permanent, sustained by donors, monitors, and memoranda.

As of this writing, the first phase of the deal has moved ahead. Hamas has released the remaining living hostages, and Israel freed some two thousand Palestinian prisoners and detainees. Aid convoys are scaling up, and Israel said that it has partially withdrawn troops from parts of Gaza. What remains unclear are the enforcement mechanisms and the timelines. Who commands the proposed “stabilization force,” and under what rules of engagement will it operate? Where will I.D.F. units be positioned during the transition? What binding guarantees—if any—protect Palestinians against an open-ended military return? Negotiators say that these questions are still being debated, paragraph by paragraph. A parallel diplomatic track is also opening. On Monday, Trump co-chaired the Sharm El-Sheikh summit, a meeting in Egypt focussed on postwar governance, with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the P.A., was in attendance. Benjamin Netanyahu was not. The meeting was aimed at rallying broader backing for the plan and locking down its operational details.

Hamas had little room to maneuver in the latest round of talks. Many Arab governments endorsed Trump’s Gaza plan before the organization had even received a formal copy of it, boxing the group into a defensive posture. Netanyahu, meanwhile, used the moment to reaffirm his rejection of a Palestinian state.

Still, ending the war always required that Hamas agree to a deal—perhaps an ugly one, certainly an imperfect one, but one that would bring a stop to the killing. There were earlier windows during the war when a deal might have opened space for hard bargaining that could have won real gains for Gazans. Instead, Gazan leadership fell into refusals and delays without any coherent strategy. Each rejection narrowed the horizon until what Gazans face now is a comprehensive package imposed from the outside. This is the price of political failure. Leaders treated negotiations as a stage for factional gain rather than as a matter of national survival. Now the choices are brutally tight: partial occupation under terms the people can still contest, or a broader occupation that comes with more widespread displacement. Palestinian negotiators owed the people some kind of plan. It was necessary to get aid flowing and to spare lives. Anyone who gambled with that blood for the sake of symbolic triumph would have been accountable for the cost.

The plan now opens a narrow opportunity—if Palestinians can turn its vague text into leverage. On paper, it pledges an I.D.F. withdrawal and sketches a “credible pathway” to self-determination and, eventually, statehood. Much of the machinery is still unspecified, but that uncertainty can be converted into demands: a public U.S. commitment on statehood, a dated and enforceable timetable for full withdrawal, a U.N. Security Council resolution that hardens the guarantees with penalties for violations, and third-party monitoring. Whatever form the final deal takes, it will serve as a hinge into a new political order in Gaza. Now that the bombardment has stopped, it has left a political vacuum in the territory. The question is, what will rush to fill it?

There has never been a genuine internal reckoning with Palestinian political failures. The Oslo Accords—brokered by the U.S. and signed in the mid-nineties, after secret negotiations—were framed as the last great compromise. In practice, they created the Palestinian Authority as an interim administrator of Palestine, and postponed the conflict’s major questions to a later date that has yet to arrive. Palestinians were shifted from leading a liberation project to managing enclaves, while Israel retained control over their land, movement, and the map itself. Before Oslo, the first intifada had generated momentum for international recognition of Palestinian statehood. Oslo dismantled that momentum. It was meant to be a bridge to peace, but it became the final blow. It provided no way to implement U.N. Resolution 194 on the right of return for exiled or displaced Palestinians, and produced no method of insuring equality for some two million Palestinians inside Israel, whose struggle was written off as an internal matter. Every inch of Palestinian land remains under Israeli military control in one form or another. The labels changed, but the structure did not.

Hamas won elections in Gaza in 2006. What followed were boycotts and sanctions from the international community; a power struggle with Fatah, the party that controls the P.A., that exploded into a street war in 2007; and, ultimately, a geographic divorce. Hamas was left governing Gaza, and the P.A. was confined to the West Bank. Israel then tightened a land-sea-air blockade of the territory, which made normal governance impossible and turned every budget line into a permit request. Hamas never allowed further elections. Over successive wars and siege years, Hamas’s authority hardened until it ran a kind of bunker state: an exiled political bureau abroad, a Gazan command increasingly dominated by the organization’s military wing, and a public living under limited movement, rationed goods, and permanent emergency.