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By Michelle Burgis-Kasthala
Abstract: This article reads the March 2025 Egyptian peace plan for Gaza within the context of regional politics, international law and Trump’s alternative vision of erasure. It argues that the text continues to treat ‘the Palestinian problem’ through technocratic managerialism as a way to obscure and deny acute political challenges. Ultimately, the article suggests that without confronting the question of political representation of all Palestinians as buttressed by their right to self-determination, the ‘right to peace’ as proposed here will remain elusive, if not – like Palestinians themselves - entirely displaced.
Any casual reader of Egypt’s March 2025 ‘peace’ plan for Gaza would be forgiven for interpreting glossy images of smiling, healthy children living amidst immaculately designed urban spaces as either hopelessly utopian or as some sort of sadistic joke. While Palestinians across the Strip continue to face catastrophic conditions amidst ongoing aerial bombardment, renewed border closures, electricity embargoes, and the prevention of aid supplies, a range of foreign powers have sought to exploit these circumstances for their own ends – whether as ethnic cleansing-come-real-estate-enrichment for Trump, or Egypt’s counter-response that was as swiftly endorsed by most Arab states (but note the UAE’s opposition) as it was rejected by Israel and the US. While no doubt some (popular) Arab support arises from a genuine desire to ameliorate Palestinian suffering, authoritarian, Arab regimes across the region, such as Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, are working far more in pursuit of their own self-preservation.
Egypt’s proposed plan only mentions international law twice in a fleeting fashion. It does recognise the need to include Palestinians in deciding upon their own future, but the text also contains riffs on Trump’s vision, which presumes forced displacement as a prelude to (non-Palestinian) tourism, economic prosperity, and the eradication of Palestinian politics. Given Trump had set the agenda in bold and shocking new tones, it seems that Egypt took inspiration from this while also relying on earlier, highly problematic ‘peace’ efforts. This latest regional initiative thus builds on a long tradition whereby both Arab and non-Arab powers have taken it upon themselves to speak for the Palestinians seemingly in their own best interests. Yet as seventeen months of Arab-regimes bystanding to genocide has attested, rather than reveal evidence of serious commitment to Palestinian self-determination (that had been affirmed in unequivocal terms as a legal right by the UNGA in 1974 and the ICJ in 2004) or to exploit some of the key international legal developments that have emerged to support Palestinian claims over the last year or so, glaring absences from the document indicate that foreign imposition cannot achieve Egypt’s touted ‘right to peace’ for Palestinians in Gaza and beyond. Here I offer an overview of the 106-page report to highlight certain key textual presences and absences that culminate in a particularly powerful contemporary example of seemingly benevolent domination in the guise of development.
Towards a Technocratic Future: Key Components of the Plan
The proposal sets out an ambitious five-year phased reconstruction plan currently priced at USD $53 billion. The territorial expanse of Gaza is reimagined into a symmetrically planned space of interconnecting zones containing housing, transportation hubs, schools, shops, and hospitals, alongside dedicated areas for industry and foreign investment. A UNSC mandated peacekeeping force would oversee this vision. The document maintains the two-state solution as the ultimate goal of reconstruction, suggesting that this now-dated vision continues to hold sway despite seismic regional shifts and the presence of around 700,000 settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The plan only mentions ‘final-status issues’ twice (p.7). This is shorthand for those things simply too difficult to deal with at present, namely, the status of Jerusalem, borders, settlements, and the return of refugees—even though the ICJ July 2024 Advisory Opinion could have supplied robust guidance here. This deferred approach had also informed the Oslo Accords of the mid-1990s. While these agreements had ushered in a limited form of Palestinian self-rule, elections, and a vague framework for eventual statehood—with the benefit of hindsight—we can see how in fact Oslo only further entrenched Israel’s stranglehold over Palestinian liberation. In addition, Ramallah-based rulers in the Palestinian Authority have increasingly favoured technocratic governance that relies heavily on authoritarian and securitising logics that many interpret as Israel subcontracting out various quotidian tasks of its continuing occupation.
Technocratic rule is once again favoured here by Egypt: politics is substituted for securitisation of Palestinians in service of Israel’s interests and liberal economic development. Thus:
For the purpose of managing the upcoming phase, and in accordance with a Palestinian decision, a Gaza Administration Committee will be established to manage Gaza's affairs for a transitional period of six months. This committee is an independent body comprised of technocrats and non-factional figures working under the umbrella of the Palestinian government; its establishment comes within the framework of preparations for the full return of the Palestinian National Authority to Gaza (p.6).
What is not explained here is what ‘a Palestinian decision’ means. Would this entail elections or a referendum? Would Palestinian refugees in the diaspora be included? Is it the decision of the Palestinian National Authority or some other institution? This is the only time that the proposal refers to the Palestinian National Authority, which had been created through the Oslo process. Furthermore, there is no mention of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), which, despite its desperate need for reform, remains the officially recognised government of the state of Palestine at the United Nations. Currently, Hamas is not part of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), but in accepting Egypt’s plan and a concomitant handover of power, the next step could entail Hamas’s entry into the PLO.
It is unclear then how all of these possible reconfigurations would be managed. Any eventual elections could result in Hamas returning to rule across the Strip as well as the West Bank. Rather than develop a plan to nurture national political capacities (that includes Palestinians from the river to the sea and in the diaspora) and an independent civil society, however, the plan seems incapable of reckoning with these wider political considerations. At most it utters a threat to Israel – that ‘Palestinian resistance activities’ (p.8) will probably continue until the realisation of a Palestinian state. How to work towards such a goal, however, is beyond the bounds of the text. Perhaps straying into such details would muddy the neatness of the blueprint. For example, the report states that:
The objective of the plan is to achieve early recovery and reconstruction of the Gaza Strip with Palestinian hands, alleviating their humanitarian suffering while ensuring their continued presence on their land. The plan aims to rebuild the sector, address the extent of damage and losses at economic, humanitarian, and social levels, and propose investment projects to be implemented by the Palestinian Authority in partnership with pertinent entities…(page 10)
As was the case in the Oslo Accords, then, recourse to the dream of de-politicised development defers grappling with the messiness of what it might mean to think through self-determination during and after foreign rule.
On its face, the document is quite impressive. It is filled with maps, tables, and AI-generated images of beautifully designed buildings and people. It is far easier turning these pages than it is to dwell on Gaza’s actual reality that offers an unparalleled contradistinction through its wholesale destruction. While the text itself acknowledges these realities to some extent, its tidy and perfectly approximated time frames and funding figures skate over the fact that we cannot even yet quantify the human, infrastructural, and ecological damage. The text tries to transform such horrors into a source of inspiration by noting how ‘sites of bloody events’ can become ‘landmarks of remembrance and recovery’ (p. 33). Locations of intensive murder could also serve as particularly attractive – even lucrative? – sites for tourism, given that this is a key pillar informing the Egyptian and Trumpian vision of this ‘Riviera’ on the Mediterranean. Can such a form of ‘dark tourism’ – a phenomenon that is taking off in nearby Syria - empower a people who are not provided with any robust way of ending Israel’s occupation? Was it just a coincidence that the space allocated for cemeteries and for ‘tourist villages’ were both exactly 2.4% of Gaza’s landmass? How can we speak of tourism in a space where people continue to recover the remains of their loved ones? Would 2.4% even be enough for so many graves?
Words Unspoken
While the plan lays out a rather impressive and detailed vision of urban design given how quickly it must have been put together, some of its omissions are deafening. Most acutely, while there is a very vague plan for future governance (not government) and security (Egyptian and Jordanian training of ‘police personnel’ is already underway (p. 6)), neither ‘occupation’ nor ‘Hamas’ appear once in the text. Thus, there is no acknowledgement of the presumptive—if illegal—regime that applies as a result of Israel’s role as the belligerent occupier. There is also a failure to concede the crucial role that Hamas as the only autochthonous governance entity since 2006 will likely continue to play in any transitional stage for Gaza. Perhaps the most glaring absence is ‘genocide’ along with its attendant connotations of legal redress. Any hint at accountability, truth telling, or justice in its broadest sense is evacuated from the text. While a list of causality figures is included, there is no attempt to link these with those ‘international law’ platitudes that open the plan. For instance, the ICJ is not mentioned and neither are key texts such as UNSC Resolution 242 or the Fourth Geneva and Genocide Conventions.
This is despite one recent favourable decision by the International Court of Justice and two further pending matters. The first, an advisory opinion handed down in July 2024, was in response to questions raised by the UNGA about specific violations of human rights law and international humanitarian law by Israel as the occupying power across the entirety of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. Far more significantly, the Court determined that the presence of Israel is illegal per se, as it breaches two peremptory norms of international law: the prohibition of the acquisition of territory by force (conquest), along with the denial of the Palestinian right to self-determination. Second, the UNGA in late 2024 brought another question to the ICJ on the legality of Israel’s banning of UNRWA. The case will be heard soon. Finally, and most well-known, is the contentious case brought by South Africa in December 2023 against Israel under the jurisdictional hook of the Genocide Convention. While the Court has not yet considered the substantive arguments of both states (along with an unprecedented 13 intervening states), it has nonetheless affirmed its jurisdiction to hear the matter as it found a ‘plausible’ risk of genocide occurring in the Gaza Strip.
Conclusion
This peace plan is first and foremost a text that was crafted as a desperate diplomatic bid to avert Gaza’s ethnic cleansing. Thus, the speedy acquiescence of Arab states as well as Hamas and the Palestinian Authority must be read in this light. As a privileged non-Palestinian academic, I cannot presume to speak for ordinary Palestinians, especially those in Gaza. My concerns above are not an endorsement of the Trump ‘alternative.’ Yet in noting these concerns, I want to underscore that the proposal embodies a particularly emaciated blueprint for thinking about Gaza’s ‘day after’ – whenever that day comes. In addition, although it is understandable to focus on Gaza’s fate, there is no attempt to link this to current Israeli policies across the West Bank, even though Israel itself frames activities in Jenin and elsewhere as inspired by its own Gaza tactics (‘Gazafication'). As a plan that abandons any pretence at accountability – in any form – it would seem that international law remains buried under Gaza’s uncleared rubble. Once reconstruction does begin, whether with its people in situ or already-expelled, the question remains: can international law be recuperated while Palestinian self-determination is denied?
Michelle Burgis-Kasthala is a Professor of International Law and Global Governance. She is an expert on international dispute resolution and various forms of accountability across the Middle East.
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