By Fadlullah Wilmot || 3 October 2025
On September 29, 2025, President Donald Trump and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of his ethno-supremacist colonial settler state unveiled a 20-point peace plan for Gaza at the White House. Marketed as a historic breakthrough, the plan calls for a ceasefire, phased Israeli withdrawal, hostage exchanges, and Gaza governance by a “technocratic” Palestinian committee overseen by an international “Board of Peace” chaired by Trump and war criminal former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Yet this proposed “peace” serves as a veil masking coercion, erasure, and recolonisation—designed to exclude genuine Palestinian agency and entrench external domination. It would also mean effectively annexing nearly a third of the occupied West Bank.
The plan explicitly excludes Hamas from governance and denies Palestinians agency. It ignores the fact that Hamas’s repeated ceasefire and peace offers were consistently rejected by Israel. Even the Palestinian Authority (PA) that is rejected by most people in Gaza and acted as a tool of Israeli oppression is sidelined until it undertakes “reforms” with no clear timeline before any involvement in governance. Palestinians are thus reduced to spectators of a future shaped by occupiers and foreign powers. Trump’s joint appearance with Netanyahu revealed the clear power imbalance: Netanyahu’s endorsement was not a concession to end Palestinian suffering, but an assertion of Israeli military and political dominance backed by the United States.
Demanding “full demilitarisation” effectively disarms Palestinians of their internationally recognized right to resist occupation. Amnesty is offered only to individuals who disarm voluntarily, with no protection guaranteed for others and there is no guarantee that even they might not be assassinated in future. One needs to remember that even peaceful demonstrations, like the Great March of Return, were met with lethal Israeli force rightly classified as war crimes and crimes against humanity. There is no accountability for the two-year genocidal attack on a defenceless population and the crimes against humanity in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
The plan stipulates Gaza’s governance under a technocratic Palestinian committee—composed of Palestinians and international experts, overseen by a so-called international “Board of Peace,” led by Trump and Blair. The Palestinian committee has no sovereignty; Israel will maintain tight control of Gaza’s borders, airspace, and movement as it has as an occupier for past two decades. Moreover, the plan excludes Hamas and other factions from governance. The “Board of Peace” and international monitoring will enforce occupation under a facade of administrative governance.
This so-called peace. deal is a coercive ultimatum as it depends on Palestinians accepting terms overwhelmingly favouring Israeli security interests. Hostage release is presented as a carrot, while refusal risks resumed bombardment. Netanyahu’s threat to “finish the job” with Trump’s approval makes clear this plan is war by other means—offering neither justice nor freedom.
Plans to impose “security zones” and restrict movement, confining Palestinians to shrinking enclaves, amounts to ethnic cleansing under diplomatic cover disguised as ‘security.’ Many Arab states have tacitly enabled or even cooperated with Israel increasing Palestinian geopolitical isolation and facilitating dispossession.
This is not a plan for benevolent reconstruction. The promises to rebuild Gaza’s roads, ports, and economy masks a design for dependency and surveillance. Gaza risks becoming a privatized, fenced-off colony—economically and politically controlled by international and Israeli actors rather than a sovereign Palestinian entity.
The plan gives security for the occupiers but perpetual insecurity for Palestinians by prioritising Israeli strategic and security goals that undermine Palestinian safety and sovereignty. The PA’s historic dysfunction and its complicity with Israel as with that of some Arab governments deepen Palestinian isolation amid shifting regional power dynamics.
This framework contravenes clear provisions of international law. It violates Palestinians’ right to self-determination, it breaches the Fourth Geneva Convention’s protections of occupied populations, and erodes accountability for war crimes committed throughout the conflict. Its implementation would amount to systemic subjugation via imposed technocracy. The international community faces an urgent legal and moral imperative: it must unequivocally reject this plan and demand a peace process rooted in genuine Palestinian rights, agency, and justice.
This is no peace plan. It is coercion and erasure dressed in diplomacy, destined to prolong Gaza’s suffering through renewed occupation and silencing of the Palestinian right to self-determination. Hamas and the Palestinians may lack the power to reject this deal outright as they ought to, but the international community has the authority — and the responsibility — to refuse complicity. If allowed to proceed, this plan will be chronicled in history as a betrayal of a people.
History will bear witness to their heroic resilience and agony and the total failure of the international system. The people of Gaza and Palestine demand and deserve justice and a real path to freedom and self-determination.
Haji Fadlullah Wilmot is a Director at the Islamic Renaissance Front. He formerly served at universities in Indonesia, Malaysia and Australia but after the tsunami in Aceh became involved in the humanitarian and development sector. He has worked in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Solomon Islands, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Jordan, Lebanon, Kenya, Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq. As a volunteer with the Australian Muslim Advocacy Network he is now monitoring anti Muslim hate speech in the electronic as well as social media that is exploding in response to right wing posts about what is happening in Gaza and also works with organisations supporting Muslim converts.
