From Gaza War to Peace
Ousting Hamas is not enough: New reality of Gaza must change
By GERSHON BASKIN JANUARY 7, 2026 13:56
The new reality of Gaza has to change. It is not enough for Hamas to no longer control Gaza.
I write this article as someone who has consistently and unequivocally advocated for Palestinian rights for freedom, self-determination, and national dignity. I am aware that some of what I am writing will not find favor with perhaps many of my Palestinian friends, colleagues, and partners (and perhaps some of my Israeli friends as well). The message I am delivering comes after deep and often antagonistic conversations with some of the top decision-makers in the United States.
This article is an attempt to deal with the realpolitik of the current days with a strong desire for an outcome that will move us all forward to genuine peace based on the self-determination of the two peoples sharing the land between the river and the sea.
The military defeat of Hamas has occurred, even if not yet completed. The current ability of Hamas to continue to impose its will on the majority of the population of Gaza is solely the result of the power vacuum that was created with the official end of the war, without a pre-prepared solution of alternative Palestinian governance in Gaza. That should have been accomplished many months ago as a partnership between the Palestinian Authority and Arab countries interested in seeing a free and peaceful Palestine. But it was not.
The alternative Palestinian governance for Gaza is on its way and as we enter phase two of the end-of-war deal, the various levels of the new reality will soon appear. Some of it is already happening. I have tried to advocate for the new reality to also include a situation in which Israel does not have the right to determine who or what enters or leaves Gaza. I am afraid that I did not succeed in convincing the powers that be in favor of my position.
Israel will continue to have a voice in the future of Gaza. That is because the primary decision-maker will be the United States and the Trump administration. The Board of Peace headed by President Donald Trump will apparently convene for the first time toward the end of this month. The BoP will be a group of 10 or more heads of state with interests in the region – probably including the heads of state of some of the Arab countries but apparently not including the prime minister of Israel.
Under the Board of Peace will be an executive committee including senior members such as Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, Tony Blair, and others with similar profiles. The executive committee will serve as the direct liaison and director of the Palestinian technocrat governing committee responsible for the day-to-day affairs of Gaza. Former UN official and Bulgarian politician Nikolay Evtimov Mladenov will serve as the coordinator of the executive committee to the Palestinian governing committee.
To the best of my knowledge, the members of the Palestinian technocratic committee have been selected. They have been vetted in a long process by the United States with the Arab countries weighing in heavily to appoint their own people, including attempted intervention by the most senior Palestinian officials from the Palestinian Authority. At the end of the day, apparently, the Americans had the last and final word.
From what I understand, the vetted members of the Palestinian technocratic governing committee are all serious, loyal, nationalist Palestinians who have demonstrated clearly for years their contempt for Hamas.
I have tried to advocate with the powers that be to also include a position for a senior Palestinian official, respected by the Palestinian people, and Israelis, to provide political agency for the Palestinians at the level of the executive committee who would also serve as a liaison between the Palestinian committee and the Israeli people and government.
Surrounding all these levels of new governance will also be the International Stabilization Force. All of these layers will ensure the disarmament of Hamas, but that will not happen overnight. The decommissioning of Hamas weapons will take considerable time.
Will the lives of Palestinians in Gaza be improved?
The most important test of the success of this process will be the degree to which the lives of more than two million Palestinians in Gaza are significantly and quickly improved. Politics and political positions of the new governing committee are far less important to the Gazans than the ability of this committee to organize life, provide basic needs, rebuild the economy, and be engaged in a speedy process of reconstruction.
From the point of view of the United States, with strong Israeli prodding, the success of the process will also be measured by the extent to which the new reality in Gaza changes Gazan society regarding its willingness to live in peace next to the State of Israel.
Gazan society has been deeply and negatively influenced by nearly two decades of Hamas rule and control. Although Hamas never imposed Sharia (Islamic law) as the law of the land, Hamas’s rule had deep sociological and cognitive impacts on the society. This included the inculcation of hate toward Israel, which was not hard to generate because of the harsh reality of life in Gaza. Much of the mindset of Gazans was shaped through 18 years of blockade and repeated Israeli military offenses, usually provoked by Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad attacks against Israel’s civilian population.
The new reality of Gaza has to change. It is not enough for Hamas to no longer control Gaza. Change must be seen in daily life. Change must also be seen in the classroom. I have no doubt that there will be immediate changes in all the Gazan textbooks.
Textbooks in Gaza (and in the West Bank) need to educate toward a proud Palestinian national identity, that addresses culture, literature, Arabic language, science, mathematics, economics, English, computer science, and all that is needed to help build a modern and successful Palestinian society willing to live in peace next to Israel.
It should also include the study of Hebrew and a clear recognition that the Palestinian people share the land with the Israeli Jewish people – both of whom have a legitimate religious and historic connection to the same homeland. I sincerely hope that when this kind of educational system exists in Gaza, and hopefully in the West Bank as well, it will impact the same kind of change happening on the Israeli side.
It seems that the US and the Board of Peace will initiate a new system of how the international community will assist in the process of not only providing humanitarian aid to Gaza but also how Gaza will be rebuilt. From what we have seen over the past two-and-a-half months since the end of the war, international aid organizations that are perceived as being anti-Israel will no longer be able to function in Gaza. That has already happened.
I believe that a lot of aid and reconstruction projects will be directed to the private sector and away from international nongovernment organizations. My understanding is that Israel will still have a say in who is accredited to work in Gaza. This opens the door to organizations and private sector ventures that are advocates of Palestinian-Israeli peace to have a positive role in the reconstruction of Gaza. Looking forward, it seems that Gaza will be a test case for the United States and allies of the US plans for the future of the West Bank as well.
I am sure that if this version of the future was presented to international lawyers and international human rights organizations, they would immediately knock it down and criticize it, claiming that the only rule of law that must be applied in Gaza is the rule of international law and international humanitarian law.
They would be correct in their argument from their focused point of view. For them, the point of view presented in this article would be illegitimate and out of bounds – because what the United States is seeking is the fastest path to genuine Israeli-Palestinian peace based on full mutual recognition of the legitimacy of both national movements, the fulfillment of the right of self-determination for the Palestinian people and the Israeli people, and the beginning of the sanctification of life and not death in the conflict between these two peoples for the past one hundred years.
The American vision for Gaza and for Palestine shifts the focus from human rights and Israel-bashing to trying to shape a Palestinian political vision that includes Israel as a partner in peace. If there will be success in this mission, it will also impact Israeli public opinion on Palestine and on peace.
The writer is the Middle East director of the International Communities Organization and co-head of the Alliance for Two States.
Your article, “Ousting Hamas is not enough: New reality of Gaza must change,” presents itself as a hard-headed engagement with realpolitik, yet the framework you advance ultimately substitutes Palestinian self-determination with externally managed compliance. While you emphasise your long-standing advocacy for Palestinian rights, the political architecture you outline relocates sovereignty away from Palestinians and into a US-led supervisory system in which Palestinians are administered rather than empowered.
Your argument rests heavily on the assertion that the military defeat of Hamas has effectively occurred and that what remains is a sociological and administrative problem. This conflates military degradation with political erasure. Hamas’s endurance, whatever one’s assessment of its politics or methods, has been shaped less by ideological indoctrination than by material conditions produced by blockade, fragmentation, and the systematic absence of a credible, representative Palestinian national alternative. Treating Hamas primarily as a pathology to be cured through technocratic governance and curriculum reform misdiagnoses the problem and risks reproducing it in new form.
More troubling is the near-total displacement of Palestinian political agency in your proposed “new reality.” The technocratic governing committee you describe is vetted by Washington, shaped by Arab state interests, and insulated from popular accountability. The Palestinian Authority appears not as a body to be democratically renewed, but as an inconvenience to be managed or bypassed. This reflects a recurring international impulse to depoliticise Palestinian leadership rather than confront the reasons it has been systematically weakened.
Your discussion of the US-led “Board of Peace,” convened under Donald Trump, raises further concerns. A structure dominated by figures associated with transactional diplomacy and immunity from international legal constraints cannot credibly serve as the custodian of Palestinian national rights. The explicit sidelining of international humanitarian and human rights law is not a pragmatic necessity, but a political choice, one that risks entrenching impunity while presenting it as progress.
The educational reforms you propose, including textbook revisions and the introduction of Hebrew studies, are framed as confidence-building measures. Yet education cannot substitute for freedom, nor can curricula compensate for continued external control over borders, movement, economy, and reconstruction. To measure success primarily by the extent to which Gazan society becomes more “willing to live in peace” with Israel, while leaving Israel’s decisive power over Gaza largely intact, reverses cause and effect and places the burden of reconciliation on the occupied rather than the occupier.
If Gaza is to experience a genuinely new reality, it cannot be one in which sovereignty is indefinitely postponed in favour of managerial stability. Peace built on supervision rather than consent, and on expediency rather than law, will remain fragile and contested. Without restoring Palestinian political agency, grounding reconstruction in international legality, and ending the structures of external domination, the model you describe risks becoming not a pathway to peace, but a more sophisticated form of containment.
I entered the comment area to write that the future you outline is not an end of the occupation. It does not bring Gazans freedom, although it may bring them more food. But it leave an occupation by the U.S. that is in partnership with Israel with Israel still have a decisive veto to what goes on in Gaza.
I was going to go on but I see that Tawfiq Al-Ghussein said most of what I wanted to say, so I simply endores Tawfiq’s comment.