Trump’s peace plan for Gaza looks increasingly wobbly

 As President Trump prepares to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later this month to advance his peace plan for Gaza, on-the-ground developments are reducing the odds that the plan’s all-important Phase II – which would ensure long-term peace and create a brighter future for Gazans – will be successfully implemented.

That’s because with its ceasefire with Israel, Hamas has reasserted control over the half of Gaza from which Israel has withdrawn (and where most Gazans live), imposing its autocratic rule while rebuilding its forces. Though Trump’s plan calls for an international force to disarm Hamas (and its fellow terrorists in Gaza) and deny it a future governing rule, no nation has committed its forces to the task.

The failure to dislodge Hamas would consign long-suffering Gazans to a bleak future of no political freedom and limited economic opportunity, and it would guarantee more bloodshed once Hamas regains the means to once again launch serious attacks on Israel.

Along with the ceasefire, Trump’s 20-part plan included an exchange of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, Israel’s phased withdrawal from Gaza, a defanged Hamas with no future governing role, a demilitarized and terror-free Gaza, an International Stabilization Force (ISF) to train a new Palestinian police force, a technocratic Palestinian committee to govern under the supervision of an international Board of Peace until a reformed Palestinian Authority can take over, more humanitarian aid for Gazans, and economic redevelopment for Gaza.

The challenge to the plan’s success over the long term is rooted in its structure and the timing of its implementation.

Phase I, which revolved around the ceasefire, hostage-prisoner exchange, and Israeli withdrawal, is almost complete. But the process took two months, during which the seeds for problems in Phase II were planted.

“Since Israeli forces withdrew from parts of Gaza in October under a cease-fire agreement,” the New York Times reported in recent days, “Hamas has moved quickly to fill the void.” While running the “central organs” of Gaza’s government, Hamas has put its own police back on the street, publicly executed opponents, operated checkpoints, detained people, imposed fees on some costly items coming into Gaza, and replaced commanders who were killed during its war with Israel.

After two years of war, Hamas retains 20,000 fighters and more than half of its tunnel network, enabling it to hide its fighters and weapons. “Hamas is besieged,” a former official from Israel’s Shin Bet security agency said. “But if it continues controlling parts of Gaza and wants to rebuild its capacities, it will find a way to rebuild them.”

As the group has reasserted itself, its leaders have mocked any notion of discarding its weapons or ceding its power.

“Protecting the enterprise of the resistance and its weapons – this is our people’s right to self-defense,” Khaled Mashaal, a top Hamas official, declared in a keynote address to the Istanbul Pledge to Jerusalem Conference this month. “The resistance and its weapons are the honor and glory of the Islamic nation.”

Mashaal rejected “all forms of guardianship, mandate and re-occupation of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and all of Palestine” – thus rejecting such outside entities as the ISF and Board of Peace to direct Gaza’s future. With the United Nations Security Council endorsing Trump’s plan, Mashaal said that Palestinian “rights” will be restored not “via the Security Council but through the recruitment office.”

The question now is which nations will contribute to the ISF and endorse the use of force to dislodge Hamas and such fellow terrorist organizations as Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) from Gaza.

At the moment, neither any Arab state nor any European government has committed to send troops or use force (though Egypt, Turkey, Indonesia, and Pakistan expressed a “willingness to participate.” Perhaps that’s because Hamas and PIJ have vowed that were an ISF of some kind to try to carry out its mission in Gaza, they would regard it as a “foreign occupying force” that they would fight.

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Complicating matters further, long-time Hamas backers Turkey and Qatar are insisting that Israel withdraw from all of Gaza before Hamas disarms and, even worse, proposing options for Hamas to keep its weapons.

If an armed Hamas remains in Gaza, so too will Israel – as Netanyahu surely will tell Trump – further undermining the peace plan. As Netanyahu and other Israeli officials (such as Defense Minister Israel Katz) have made clear, if the ISF cannot disarm Hamas and demilitarize Gaza, Israel itself will.

Forceful Israeli action would raise the prospect of an all-too-predictable series of events: more war, more civilian death, more global condemnation of Israel, and more public pressure that eventually convinces Jerusalem to accept another ceasefire that neither frees Gazans nor protects Israel.

The international community has the means to prevent such a sickening redux. The question is whether it has the will.