In an article published in January in Foreign Affairs, two researchers analyze the extreme volatility of the current global order, arguing that in the age of personalist politics key foreign policy decisions—especially those involving great powers and nuclear-armed states—depend largely on the whims and obsessions of individual leaders, rather than on stable institutions or long-term strategies. In this new global order, instability is the norm, because decisions no longer correspond to long-term strategic expectations and interests, but are the result of impulsive choices unconstrained by institutional considerations and commitments. This dynamic is illustrated by what is not happening in Gaza, which has officially entered the ‘phase two’ of the twenty-point peace plan launched by US President Donald Trump—a plan that was supposed to ensure the Strip’s demilitarization, a technocratic government, and the long-awaited beginning of reconstruction.
The technocratic government, also known as the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, appointed in January and composed of highly regarded Palestinian technocrats—some of them close to the Palestinian Authority (PA)—was supposed to oversee the restoration of essential public services, the rebuilding of civil institutions, and the resumption of daily life in the Strip. Its mandate, however, was only interim in nature, running until December 2027, the deadline set by UN Security Council Peace Resolution 2803 for the Board of Peace’s mandate. Yet two months after it was due to take effect, the technocratic government still has no visible presence on the ground—only a series of meetings in Cairo to show for itself. Several committee members are opposed by Israel, which has refused to grant them entry permits into the Strip on the grounds that they are too close to the PA, and the Rafah crossing has been closed since February 28th, the date hostilities with Iran began.
Of the $17 billion promised for reconstruction—$10 billion of which was to come from US coffers and $7 billion from the Gulf Cooperation Council member states, all of which are currently drawn into the war with Iran—not a trace has yet materialized. There are growing fears that the Gulf donors, the plan’s true potential driving force, may now be less inclined to invest in the Strip, given the lack of reliability the Trump administration has shown in contributing to regional stability.
As for the Gaza International Stabilization Force (ISF), which was tasked with “disarming” Hamas—albeit with its cooperation and limited to heavy weapons such as rocket launchers, mortars, and rockets—not even the minimum threshold of 25,000 troops needed to make its deployment meaningful has been reached (by comparison, 50,000 were deployed in Kosovo). Of those pledged, 8,000 had been promised by Indonesia, which has since withdrawn its commitment following the outbreak of the war with Iran, arguing that the stabilization of the Gaza Strip no longer figures among regional priorities—nor, for that matter, among Indonesia’s domestic ones, given the strong opposition from the country’s ulema associations at home. The other potential ISF contributor countries—Morocco, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, and Albania—have yet to confirm the number of troops they intend to send, and their contributions are expected to be more symbolic than substantive. The only forces with both the political will and the capacity to fill this role would be the approximately 20,000 Palestinian soldiers trained by the United States, Jordan, and Egypt, whom Israel, however, refuses to allow into the Strip.
Caught between Israeli vetoes and the personalism of Trump’s political style—centered on the mediation of key figures close to the president, such as Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, as well as Trump himself, who were first pulled away by the Iranian nuclear negotiations and are now “distracted” by the ongoing war—the Gaza peace plan remains dead in the water.
Since the ban on journalists entering the Strip remains in force, it is impossible to directly verify developments on the ground. Various local sources indicate, however, that the war has ended only partially, and only for those Gazans living in the north, in the Gaza City governorate—not for those residing in the areas of Khan Younis and Rafah, where the Strip narrows and Palestinians are in daily contact with the “yellow line” arbitrarily drawn by the Israeli army, which has seized 53 percent of their territory indefinitely. Since the ceasefire, 77 Palestinians have been killed for having “crossed” that imaginary and shifting line, marked only at certain points by large painted concrete blocks that are moved and repositioned multiple times a day.
Accounts coming out of the Strip also consistently report that Hamas, the only operational actor on the ground, is rebuilding its governance network, appointing mayors in various municipalities and restoring order through its own police forces. If the proclaimed objective of Operation “Iron Swords” was the total defeat of Hamas, and the more pragmatic, less trumpeted goal was to prevent the flow of humanitarian aid from once again being managed by the organization to enrich itself, rebuild its leadership, and thus rearm, both appear, as of today, to have fallen short. In the absence of other viable political actors, and given that politics abhors a vacuum, Hamas remains the only organization capable of ensuring a minimum of public order and the distribution of humanitarian aid in the Strip. What it cannot ensure—particularly given the broader regional deterioration of the so-called “Axis of Resistance”—is the reconstruction of Gaza and the military recapture of the 53 percent of territory still held by Israel, which risks becoming yet another permanently occupied land.
If Trump’s peace plan fails to move forward—whatever criticisms one may level at it—the two million Palestinians of the Strip are destined to remain suspended in a limbo between a precarious cessation of hostilities and the constant threat of a return to war. Even if Israel were to drop its objections to the technocratic administrative committee for Gaza, it is hard to see how the latter could function in the absence of a military force, given the stark divide between the occupied zone (held by the IDF) and the “free” zone (under Hamas control), and without the political backing of the Israeli government.
Ultimately, Trump’s twenty-point peace plan—owing to the inaction of the United Nations, now reduced to humanitarian aid delivery agencies and stripped of their function as a legal and political authority—has stalled at “phase one,” never truly making the transition to the reconstruction phase. For that phase to have been launched, it would have required multilevel cooperation among all the countries of the region, which the United States has not only failed to activate—initially due to Israeli vetoes over Qatar and Turkey—but has now definitively jeopardized with the outbreak of the war with Iran. The two conflicts, in Gaza and in Iran, are connected by more than one thread: the Arab states of the Gulf, the primary targets of Iranian strikes, have not taken kindly to Trump’s decision to go to war despite their objections and the risk of obvious reprisals to which the American administration has exposed them. It is therefore to be expected that, in the immediate post-war period, they will be less willing to be drawn into Trump’s unilateral plans and more wary of Washington’s true intentions—which appear excessively beholden to the strategic priorities of its regional ally, Israel. The entire peace architecture of the Gaza Plan also rests on the political will of the parties to cooperate with one another toward the construction of an autonomous Palestinian political space—a scenario that is impossible to achieve for as long as Benjamin Netanyahu remains in power.
One should harbor no illusions: the goal of the current Israeli government is to capitalize on the war in Gaza by effectively annexing 53 percent of the Strip as territorial compensation for the blood and treasure expended over two years of war since October 7th, justifying itself behind Hamas’s failure to disarm. The paradox is that Hamas, too, can live with a scenario in which its authority extends only over a truncated and diminished territory—stripped of many of the vital agricultural resources it had before October 2023—but in which it can continue to exercise its authority and its role as a symbol of “resistance” at the national level and within the diaspora. The new status quo can thus accommodate both of the entrenched actors who have been locked in confrontation over Gaza for twenty years — everyone, that is, except the Palestinian people.
The people of Gaza would thus be abandoned to conditions of inhuman poverty and precariousness: 80 percent of infrastructure was razed to the ground, only 14 of the Strip’s 36 hospitals are still functioning, and 172,000 have been wounded—42,000 of whom have been permanently disabled and have no access to medical care. 496 of 564 schools have been destroyed, along with every university. Until February 28th, an average of 600 trucks per day were entering Gaza—out of the 800 the UN estimates as necessary—a flow that has since been halted entirely; barely enough, even then, to keep the population alive, let alone enable any economic recovery. All of this compounds the structural devastation—80 percent of buildings destroyed — as well as a mounting environmental toll: contaminated wells, brackish or untreated water due to the destruction of desalination plants, and solid waste piling up across urban areas and refugee camps in the absence of any collection service or functioning landfills. Add to this an unemployment rate of 68 percent and a poverty rate that has surged to 80 percent. Taken together, these are conditions that heighten the risk of both disease and radicalization—and to which, at present, no one seems particularly concerned with finding an answer.
Perhaps Gaza is indeed a laboratory for this new personalized global order—one not grounded in rules or international law—that Trump intends to inaugurate as the defining paradigm of the twenty-first century. As of today, however, its consequences appear more than troubling: the logic of the “law of the strongest” has imposed the dominance of an Israel now in the grip of religious messianism, embodied by a genocidal far right that speaks the diplomatic language of no country in the region, projecting an aggressive and boundless expansionism at the expense not only of the Palestinians, but of all its neighbors—Syria and Lebanon alike. The response to all of this will not be long in coming, and will translate into ever deeper desperation and, on the Palestinian side, armed resistance—a conflict that Hamas and its followers cannot possibly win on the battlefield, but which they will impose as the dominant and all-consuming logic on an entire population.
One is left wondering, and rightly so, why the other Western, Arab, and third-party foreign ministries even exist. They appear to have no proposals, no willingness, and no meaningful capacity to counterbalance the inertia and incoherence of American policy, allowing fertile ground to be laid for a new wave of uncontrolled violence in the near future—of which we will all be victims: in Europe, through terrorist attacks and refugee flows; in the Middle East, through a succession of new and bloody conflicts that are still only on the horizon.
Cover photo: A Palestinian boy searches for recyclable material at a landfill against the backdrop of destroyed buildings in Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip on January 25, 2026. Since October 10, a fragile US-sponsored truce in Gaza has largely halted the fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas, but both sides have alleged frequent violations. (Photo by Bashar Taleb / AFP)
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