On September 29, as Israel rained U.S.-made bombs on Gaza City, Trump introduced his 20-point “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict,” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his side.
In the next breath and over the next days, Trump repeatedly threatened "All hell, like no one has ever seen before, will break out against Hamas” if it didn’t quickly accept his plan.
This is after two years of hell being brought down on the over two million Palestinian people in Gaza: mass slaughter and genocide, forced starvation, children blown apart, an entire infrastructure destroyed with the population fully displaced. In the last two years, 66,288 people have been killed by Israel, including over 20,000 children, with another 169,165 injured. But these numbers are vast undercounts with untold bodies still buried under the rubble that blankets Gaza.
Israeli attacks have continued across Gaza, killing dozens of Palestinians.
On October 3, Hamas did agree to Trump’s demand that all remaining Israeli hostages be released quickly and together.1 Trump then told Israel it “must immediately stop the bombing of Gaza, so that we can get the Hostages out safely and quickly.” Israel claimed it would comply and then proceeded to kill at least 70 Palestinians in one day, injuring 227 more. Israel bombed a whole family in Northern Gaza, including seven children between two months and eight years old, bombed a displacement camp in al-Mawasi (one of the so-called "humanitarian zones,"), killed over 15 people seeking aid and bombed a refugee camp in central Gaza.
The Palestinian People Desperately Need a Plan for Peace and a Better Future… but Trump’s Is Not It!
The Palestinian people have now suffered decades of U.S.-backed Israeli occupation. And now two years of all-out genocide: relentless death, destruction and displacement. Families have been ripped apart, torn from their homes, slaughtered and starved en masse. Huge swaths of Gaza have been razed to the ground, reduced to barren desert. In the last two years, one child has been killed every hour in Gaza!
So yes, the people of Gaza and the Palestinian people overall desperately need a real peace plan—one that ends these violent U.S.-Israeli atrocities and paves the way for the liberation and brighter future they so rightly need and deserve!
But Trump’s is NOT THAT PLAN!
What Trump Promises… and the Reality
Trump’s plan promises an end to Israel’s assault, a flood of humanitarian aid, the rebuilding of Gaza’s infrastructure, a better life for Palestinians in Gaza, and guarantees that Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza and that no Palestinians will be forced to leave the territory.
But what do these promises actually amount to?
“If both sides agree to this proposal, the war will immediately end.”
That’s how Trump’s proposal begins. But the reality is that Israel’s murderous military now occupies over 75 percent of Gaza. It will only gradually pull back as a U.S.-led “International Stabilization Force” is built up and the U.S. and Israel give the OK. Then the Israeli army will be deployed indefinitely in a "buffer zone" all around Gaza.
This leaves mile-wide loopholes to stay as an occupying force, to restrict the land belonging to the Palestinians in Gaza and to use any pretense as a reason to restart the genocide.
Daniel Levy, a British-Israeli analyst and former peace negotiator who has been very outspoken against the U.S./Israeli genocide in Gaza said: "There is no plan in the sense of something sufficiently substantive and detailed that could be implemented—no granularity around the specifics of timelines and maps. That is by design. It allows Israel to blame the other side when either a deal is not reached or when Netanyahu decides to desist from implementing and resumes the genocide assault.”
Far from guaranteeing “peace,” Israel’s slaughter could resume any time the U.S. or Israel decide. Trump’s plan says “aerial and artillery bombardment, will be suspended”—not permanently ended. When he announced his plan, he warned: “Israel would have my full backing to finish the job of destroying the threat of Hamas” if they didn’t submit to his demands. Recall that Israel unilaterally broke the January 19 ceasefire and escalated its genocide, even though Hamas was adhering to it. And now Trump’s plan demands that Palestinians be disarmed—not Israel, and not the Trump regime which has supplied Israel with over $12 billion in weapons of death and destruction!
A “Board of Peace” Headed by War Criminals Donald Trump and Tony Blair
Who will govern Gaza under Trump’s plan? Not the Palestinian people!
“Gaza will be governed under the temporary transitional governance of a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee,” the plan states, “with oversight and supervision by a new international transitional body, the ‘Board of Peace,’ which will be headed and chaired by President Donald J. Trump, with other members and heads of State to be announced, including Former Prime Minister Tony Blair.”
Donald Trump and Tony Blair in charge of a "Board of Peace" in Gaza would be laughable if it weren't so deadly.
Trump is a fascist who has backed Israel’s bloodthirsty genocide to the hilt, illegally bombed Iran, and threatened countries around the world. He’s a predatory imperialist madman.
His plans don't call for a Palestinian plan for rebuilding Gaza. It calls for “A Trump economic development plan.” The Trump cabal has already made clear their intention to exploit and profit from Gaza (as well as insert the U.S. even more directly into the Middle East).2 3 As revcom.us wrote about one of his earlier plans for Gaza:
It promises Gaza—where Israel has razed whole cities to the ground and destroyed 90 percent of the homes—can “transform into a Mediterranean hub for manufacturing, trade, data, and tourism, benefiting from its strategic location, access to markets ... resources, and a young workforce all supported by Israeli tech and [Persian Gulf oil states’] investments.” It envisions investor-financed “mega-projects.... There would supposedly be high-tech (“smart”) industrial zones and data centers for U.S. and Israeli companies.… The prospectus promises substantial—obscene would be a better word—returns for investors: nearly four times their initial investment and yearly revenue of $4.5 billion within a decade.
This glimmering imperialist dream would literally be built on soil soaked in blood and terror of the Palestinian people, universities and hospitals demolished, homes and farms destroyed, skyscrapers built on the broken bones of children and poets. (Imperialist Vampires Float Plan to Feast on Gaza and Profit from Genocide. Damning Indictment of a Predatory, Blood-Soaked System, revcom.us, September 8, 2025)
Tony Blair is also an imperialist war criminal. He was Britain’s Prime Minister from 1997 to 2007 and was a major champion of George W. Bush’s illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq. This invasion was based on the big lie that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, which led to nearly one million Iraqi deaths. Blair is a staunch Zionist who has worked very closely with Israel.
Trump has drawn on Blair’s own plan for Gaza, and features a leadership board “made up of billionaires and businesspeople at the top, while highly vetted ‘neutral’ Palestinian administrators would sit at the bottom.” One of his choices, billionaire Marc Rowan, runs a company described by CNN as “a behemoth in private equity, an industry notorious for its cutthroat, profit-at-all-costs standards.” Rowan has helped lead the charge to suppress pro-Palestinian speech and activism, often in the name of “combating anti-Semitism.”
Trump’s plan claims “Gaza will be redeveloped for the benefit of the people of Gaza…” This is a lie. This is a plan to fully subjugate Gaza to the economic interests of U.S. capitalism-imperialism, profiting off genocide and strengthening the U.S. grip on the Middle East!
“Gaza will be a de-radicalized terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbors”
Trump’s plan includes no recognition of Palestinian rights—to self-determination, to govern themselves, or their basic humanity.4 It declares neither Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, nor any other political faction will “have any role in the governance of Gaza.”
The Palestinian Authority (the PA) is the Palestinian government in the West Bank, and it used to run Gaza before Hamas was elected into power. The PA has proved itself to be a puppet government, assisting in the subjugation of the Palestinian people. But even their meager resistance has proved too much for Israel and the Trump plan says they can only play a role in governing the Palestinians once they've "completed its reform program."
Netanyahu expanded on this, saying that the PA "could have no role whatsoever in Gaza without undergoing a radical and genuine transformation. And that means ending pay to slay, changing the poisonous textbooks that teach hatred to Jews, to Palestinian children, stopping incitement in the media, ending lawfare against Israel at the ICC [International Criminal Court], the ICJ [International Court of Justice], recognizing the Jewish state and many, many other reforms.”
In other words: Palestinians cannot tell the truth about the history of Israel's theft of land, they cannot raise funds to support Palestinian political prisoners (of which there are thousands unjustly held in Israeli prisons without due process), and they cannot seek legal redress from the United Nations or international courts for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israel against the Palestinian people!
Gaza is to be totally “demilitarized,” with no right to self-defense. “Palestinian self-determination and statehood” are mentioned, but only as vague possibilities in the distant future.
After Trump's plan was released, Netanyahu completely contradicted this. He was asked if he agreed to a Palestinian state, and answered: "Absolutely not. It's not written into the agreement, but there is one thing we did say. That we would strongly oppose a Palestinian state. President Trump also said it. He said he understands it."
(These are elements of Trump’s plan that Hamas has not agreed to, which could end up preventing a deal.)
“No one will be forced to leave Gaza, and those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return.”
This contradicts Israel’s calls and actions to force all Palestinians from Gaza. This provision and others5 likely reflect the fear, on the part of reactionary U.S. allies in the region, that Israel openly seizing Gaza and evicting all 2.2 million Palestinians could unleash a political volcano of mass protest in the region, and around the world, threatening their rule. (It may also reflect the fact that no countries have reportedly agreed to take in Palestinian refugees.)
The reality is also that Israel’s U.S.-enabled genocide is already very, very far along. Most of Gaza’s infrastructure, culture, communities, and institutions have already been destroyed and its major cities razed to the ground. There is no university left standing in Gaza, the farmland has been poisoned by relentless bombing, hundreds of medical workers and journalists have been systematically killed. Unexploded missiles litter the entire Gaza strip. And there are thousands of orphans, people without limbs, people damaged by forced starvation... and much more.
Most people in Gaza have been forced to live in squalid tents, squeezed into some 13 percent of Gaza’s land. In this situation, many may still feel forced to leave. And note: the word “housing” and “shelter” don’t even appear in Trump’s plan, despite the fact that Israel has damaged or destroyed some 90 percent of it.
The U.S. and Israel—Overall Unity and Some Clear Differences
We don't know all the backdoor negotiations that have gone into Netanyahu agreeing to Trump's plan. Some commentators have argued that Trump "strong-armed" Netanyahu into accepting this. And there are real differences between Trump and Netanyahu over how to handle the situation in Gaza.
Trump wants this peace deal both for his own stature as a "peace-maker" but also as a way to move the region’s various Arab states more closely into the U.S. orbit, something which can't be done against the backdrop of open genocide in Gaza.
Netanyahu and Israel’s fascists want to fully clear out Gaza of all Palestinian people. Accepting Trump’s plan will, for now, prevent them from doing so (even as there are giant loopholes in the agreement that Israel may try to seize upon).
Even so, Israel remains crucial to the U.S. in the region and globally—as a political and military outpost for the system of U.S. capitalism-imperialism in the strategically important region of the Middle East. Trump said himself, "Israel is not going anywhere. They’re going to coexist with other people and countries in the region, from Syria to Lebanon to Saudi Arabia. The promise of a new Middle East is so clearly within our reach.”
What Is the Path for the Liberation of the Palestinian People?
Listen to and watch this message, Revolution #48, from Bob Avakian
The history of the past 78 years of Israeli atrocities, oppression, and occupation, and now of two years of all-out genocide scream out the need for the full liberation of the Palestinian people.
How could that come about? The revolutionary leader and author of the new communism Bob Avakian spells it out in his social media message REVOLUTION #48:
For all those who are determined to stand and act consistently against injustice and oppression, it is necessary to fully break with any illusions that you can do so while still supporting Israel, since “the right of Israel to defend itself”—and indeed its right to exist as a Zionist state—has always meant, and will always mean, terrible oppression and atrocities brought down on the Palestinian people, which is now being carried to horrific genocidal dimensions.
As I have emphasized in these messages:
The answer is definitely not to “kill off all the Jews in Israel” or “drive them into the sea.” The answer is the abolition of the state of Israel, and in its place the creation of a revolutionary state in which the government and the laws do not promote any religion and do not favor one people over another, and instead there is equality between Jews and Palestinians.
The answer is also definitely not the “two-state solution” being promoted by the Biden administration. Such a “two-state solution” would really amount to nothing more than a powerful state of Israel continuing to occupy land stolen from the Palestinian people, while the so-called “Palestinian state” created with this “solution” would be a bitter joke—a puppet state—merely a patchwork of separated small territories, surrounded and dominated by Israel, with the Palestinian people still subjected to terrible oppression and deprivation.
The answer is that the fight against the state of Israel must be waged on a revolutionary basis, with the goal of putting an end to all oppressive relations and all inequality among people based on race and nationality, sex and gender, and all relations in which one part of society exploits others. And the urgent need is for a revolutionary force to emerge to lead the struggle on that basis.
As difficult as it may be to achieve this solution, it cannot be dismissed by declaring it “unrealistic.” How “realistic” is it to think that the profound contradictions involved can be positively resolved in any other way? And, right now, how “realistic” is it to think that anyone can take a principled, firm and consistent stand against injustice and atrocity while continuing to support the state of Israel, or its “right to exist” as a Zionist state?—which is the only way the state of Israel can exist!
All people of conscience should be fighting to demand an end to the U.S./Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people and an end to the seige on Gaza. And while we do so, lifting our sights to fight for a future worthy of the Palestinian people who have survived hell on earth, for the children who have continued to dance and play amidst the nightmare.