Mapping the Future of Gaza: Choices, Challenges, and the Path to Lasting Peace

Three years ago, families in southern Israel woke to a nightmare. Parents held safe-room doors shut while their children hid behind them. Young people fleeing a music festival were hunted across open fields. In the Hamas-led attack, about 1,200 people were massacred and 251 taken hostage into Gaza. October 7 changed Israel profoundly, shattering assumptions about security and leaving wounds that remain open to this day. No serious observer should expect Israelis to think about the future as though that day never happened. The war that followed brought devastation to Gaza on a scale that will shape Palestinian society for years, with tens of thousands of Palestinians losing their lives while children grew up knowing displacement, hunger, and fear.

Having spent much of my professional life working on this conflict, I have become wary of anniversaries. They encourage remembrance but rarely reflection. Every year we repeat familiar arguments, revisit familiar grievances, and reaffirm familiar loyalties, leaving unresolved the very questions that produced the tragedy in the first place. Yet one truth remains difficult to escape: grief has no nationality. A mother in Nir Oz and a mother in Khan Younis may never meet, and they may hold radically different views about this conflict and its causes, but neither needs a lesson in loss. The question before Israelis, Palestinians, and the wider region is whether enough has been learnt to prevent a continuation of the cycle of pain and suffering.

A year ago, the parties accepted a framework intended to move Gaza away from full-scale war, establishing a path towards demilitarisation, deradicalisation, transitional Palestinian governance, Israeli withdrawal, and reconstruction. However, turning those commitments into realities remains the hardest part. Today, there are essentially three possible futures for Gaza: returning to the familiar and painful cycle of violence, remaining suspended in a state of permanent uncertainty with humanitarian assistance replacing governance, or embarking on the difficult third path of verified decommissioning of weapons, deradicalisation, accountable Palestinian civilian governance, phased Israeli withdrawal, and reconstruction.

The future of Gaza must ultimately be determined by accountable Palestinian civilian institutions, not competing armed factions. Under US President Donald Trump’s Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict, security must be exercised through lawful structures that answer to a civilian transitional authority. To Israelis, withdrawal without durable security and governance arrangements inside Gaza was insufficient, and security arrangements must be verified and enforced. To Palestinians and Arabs across the region, the destruction of Gaza has generated understandable anger, but societies become stronger when institutions function and accountable governance provides services rather than concentrating decisions about war and peace in the hands of armed groups.

Implementing President Trump’s comprehensive plan, endorsed by UN Security Council resolution 2803, will require political courage and sustained commitment long after international attention moves elsewhere. While the dead deserve remembrance, the living deserve a future, and there is no neutral ground between preserving the conditions that repeatedly produce war or beginning to build the conditions for peace.