On Monday, President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet at Mar-a-Lago in what may be the most consequential moment for the stalled Gaza peace plan. The three-phase scheme went into effect in October, with both Israel and Hamas accepting the initial terms and agreeing to a ceasefire. In mid-November, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution endorsing the plan, which Trump’s Ambassador to the U.N., Mike Waltz, hailed as “charting a new course in the Middle East for Israelis and Palestinians.” The Palestinian Authority’s Vice-President, Hussein al-Sheikh, later met with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and a U.S. representative in Ramallah, and commended the efforts of Trump and mediating governments in “consolidating the ceasefire, facilitating the entry of humanitarian aid, reconstruction, and moving toward the making of peace, security, and stability.” For weeks, though, the plan has been stuck in phase one, despite the White House’s claims that the transition to the next phase is imminent, and Gaza has continued to deteriorate under conditions the ceasefire was meant to end.
It is no surprise that the peace plan has stalled. Each stage is more difficult to implement than the last. Phase one began on October 10th with a ceasefire, prisoner exchanges, and an Israeli withdrawal to what became known as the “yellow line”—a monitored boundary that left Israel in control of more than half of Gaza. The phase was also supposed to include a large increase in humanitarian aid, and to allow Palestinians to begin returning to certain areas. It also conditions reconstruction on Palestinian institutions meeting security benchmarks and treats the demilitarization of Hamas and other armed factions as a precondition for any horizon of Palestinian self-rule. Phase two calls for the disarmament of Hamas, further Israeli withdrawals, and the deployment of an International Stabilization Force (I.S.F.) composed of foreign troops tasked with enforcing the zonal map and maintaining stability. Phase three would complete the Israeli withdrawal and establish longer-term governance arrangements under a Board of Peace—a new institution, chaired by the United States and including Israel, Egypt, and key ally states.
But the plan does more than sequence withdrawals and define phases. It locks in the zonal map created by the war, dividing Gaza into areas of unequal access and control (by defining where Palestinians may live and rebuild, for instance). Hamas, which initially accepted the ceasefire text, now denounces the framework as an effort to turn an emergency pause into a permanent security order. The group refuses to disarm and rejects any international force operating within Gaza to enforce demilitarization, arguing that such measures would favor Israel and violate its right to armed resistance. Israeli officials, meanwhile, have emphasized the need to preserve buffer zones and positions along the Gaza Strip. They’ve insisted on maintaining what they call “operational freedom” to conduct raids whenever they deem necessary.
Palestinians, who were largely excluded from the drafting process, enter the structure only once their institutions—implicitly, a reshaped Palestinian Authority—meet benchmarks set by the Board of Peace, such as transparency, capacity, and good governance. The Authority has not held national elections since 2006, when the vote produced a Hamas victory; it continues to govern parts of the West Bank through security coördination with Israel and a system of patronage that has left it widely distrusted, particularly in Gaza. But a technocratic P.A. answering to Washington’s criteria is not the same as an elected one answering to Palestinians. The peace plan treats reform as a substitute for a political process in which Palestinians themselves have a say.
In Gaza, people are still trying to make sense of the new map, set forth by the first phase of the plan, which divides their home into three color-coded zones. The green zone is a band of territory that hugs much of Gaza’s eastern perimeter and includes other areas seized through months of Israeli ground operations. It’s the only part of the Strip where reconstruction is authorized in the early stages. The plan envisages that foreign contractors will build critical infrastructure and center humanitarian operations there, under the close supervision of the I.S.F. and the Israeli Army, which retains a functional veto over what is rebuilt, and also where and when.
The red zone comprises districts that, together, make up about half of Gaza. There, little or no rebuilding is planned until security demands—such as verified disarmament, stable patrol lines, and cleared supply routes—are met. This area includes the majority of Gaza’s most densely populated neighborhoods. Given the political impasse and Hamas’s refusal to disarm, there’s no realistic path to meeting these conditions anytime soon—which means rebuilding in the red zone is indefinitely stalled. The plan treats this destruction as a given and encodes displacement as an acceptable, even rational, outcome of the war.