The Gaza Peace Plan Doomed to Fail? Key Points You Need to Know
-A skeptical analysis of the new Gaza peace plan argues that while Phase 1 (the hostage swap) succeeded, the next phases—demilitarization and governance—are likely to fail.
President Donald Trump delivers the Commencement address at the graduation ceremony for the University of Alabama, Thursday, May 1, 2025, at Coleman Coliseum in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
-The initial success was a simple transaction. The hard part is disarming Hamas, a condition the group has already rejected.
-The plan is vulnerable to three key “spoilers”: Hamas seeking to retain power, the Israeli far-right working to block a Palestinian state, and Iran seeking to re-arm its proxies. Without strict, daily, and intrusive international enforcement with real consequences, the peace process will likely collapse.
Gaza Peace? Here Comes the Tough Part
The current Israeli–Hamas ceasefire plan is a roadmap, and a fairly simple one at that. It comprises 20 steps that can be divided into three phases: first, hostage–prisoner swaps and cessation of hostilities, then on to disarming Hamas, then reconstructing both the institutions of governance and the physical infrastructure of Gaza.
Phase one is proceeding relatively smoothly, largely because it is a re-run of hostage-prisoner exchanges past. The next two phases, however, will not be so smooth. Indeed, if the past is indeed prologue, the entire peace process is likely to come crashing to a halt long before Phase 2 is complete.
Why Phase One Worked
The opening phase worked because it was both built on prior experience and served both party’s interests. It was, in a word, transactional – a mutually beneficial exchange of 20 living Israeli hostages on the one hand for roughly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and the resumption of aid on the other.
It also worked because the entire process of converting commitments into outcomes was transparent both to the parties themselves and to the mediators, guarantors like the United States, and facilitating agencies like the OCHA.
In the end, the carrots and sticks on both sides just lined up very neatly. Israel wanted the hostages returned and the diplomatic cachet that would come with being seen as helping to advance the peace process; Hamas wanted its prisoners freed and the restoration of aid – without having to look weak or defeated.
And, with both sides having had experience in the past with hostage-for-prisoner swaps, the mechanics of it were relatively easy.
The Hard Part: Demilitarization and Governance
The trouble starts where transactions end. Phase two requires verified demilitarization: audited weapons destruction, tunnel neutralization, persistent inspection, and credible controls on dual-use imports.
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Gaza’s experience with the UN-brokered Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism (GRM) and Israel’s “dual-use” restrictions shows how intricate such regimes become—and how easily they can snarl reconstruction if not designed for both security and throughput. Hamas leaders have publicly rejected disarmament as “out of the question,” which raises the premium on intrusive verification with penalties that bite in real time.
Phase three is on governance. Gaza would be governed during the reconstruction phase by a “vetted technocratic committee” operating under an international “Board of Peace,” with Palestinian statehood remaining as a future promise. But the plan has fundamental legitimacy and capacity issues.
The EU’s planning documents already note as unresolved the questions of an interim authority and the role of the Palestinian Authority, as Brussels moves to win a seat on the board. Coercive control would also remain divided so long as Hamas refuses to disarm—a condition that its leaders have said it would reject—calling into question any notion of a single chain of command.
Donor safeguards that are supposed to prevent diversion (escrow accounts, tranche-based disbursements, and strict controls over dual-use materials) have in the past hamstrung Gaza reconstruction efforts and contributed to complaints of external micromanagement.
Spoilers such as Iran and Hamas have retained veto power via proxies, shadow governance, and coercive patronage networks. The biggest danger is stasis: “temporary” arrangements ossifying into a “permanent interim” that would defer key elements of sovereignty—a monopoly of force, accountable revenue collection, and a functioning judiciary—long considered by state-building research as necessary for a viable Palestinian state.
Stress Tests: Who Spoils and Why
Three spoilers have the means and the motive to slow or reverse that process. Hamas has incentives of organizational survival and a sense of “narrative victory” to achieve. It will strive to maintain underground command, funding, and enforcement structures while masquerading as a service “partner” to the civilian mission.
Hamas’ tools include: hidden payrolls and municipal contracts; stealth taxation at border crossings, smuggling tunnels, and occasional rockets or IEDs designed to test red lines; and the use of threats that discourages genuine civil administration.
The Israeli far right is committed to foreclosing any avenue to Palestinian statehood and to preserving maximum territorial control.
Its tools are mainly political and settler-led: coalition brinksmanship to torpedo concessions; legal and regulatory moves that freeze transfers or block civil policing reforms; outpost expansion and settler violence designed to trigger Israeli security responses; and public campaigns to delegitimize monitors so that verification efforts look like “foreign rule.”
Iran wants to retain deterrence and keep Israel and its partners strategically distracted at acceptable cost. Its weapons are mainly proxy/peripheral: Hezbollah pressure on the northern front, Houthi harassment at sea, militia in Syria/Iraq, plus financing and materiel that may reconstitute Gazan strike power in the seams of any inspection regime.
Different motive, different levers, same result if not blocked: friction and spectacle enough to make a phase-three governance model look unworkable.
What Success Actually Requires
Because the stress tests are built in, success means converting a one-time opening into a self-sustaining corridor of compliance. That, in turn, requires audited destruction of weapons; systematic dismantling of command networks; and borders, customs and payrolls that are hardened against capture. Benchmarks that extend existing monitoring architectures, and to some extent undergird ideas for an internationally-supervised technocratic authority.
Equally important, verification and enforcement mechanisms must be daily and real: inspectors in warehouses, eyes in tunnels, accountants in ministries, escrowed funds tied to verifiable milestones, and clawbacks for nonperformance. When those signals are consistently sent, incentives bend toward compliance; when they fade, fear, patronage and the gun rush back in, as recent ceasefire-strain incidents have already suggested. Add biometric payrolls and third party procurement audits, and the system begins to resist capture rather than merely record it.
The Peace We Can Actually Get
In short, the scope for expectation has to be in proportion to the plan’s mechanics. If ‘peace’ means the end of large-scale Israel–Hamas fighting, it may already have arrived—contingently—and contingency is a part of the definition.
If ‘peace’ means demilitarized Gaza run by an accountable government that can tax, police, and rebuild in the absence of terror’s shadow, then the hinges are verification and exclusion, not sheets of paper. Phase one has delivered because it was constructed to do so. Phases two and three will deliver only if supporters maintain the screws tight, the timelines honest, and the punishment for cheating immediate, through the same coalition leverage that midwifed phase one and is now charged with making oversight bite. The route to sustainable calm is a narrow one. Disciplined enforcement—and patience measured in years, not weeks—is how it remains so.
About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham
Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham. He writes a daily column for National Security Journal.
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