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Israel and the incoming Trump administration are being urged by Arab states to avoid a dangerous political vacuum in Gaza and allow the Palestinian Authority (PA), in conjunction with the UN Palestinian relief agency Unrwa, to oversee the territory’s recovery.
The future governance of Gaza is due to be discussed at the start of negotiations on the second stage of the deal 16 days after a ceasefire begins. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has refused to broach the subject since the war began, regarding any discussions on the “day after” as likely to open destabilising internal political divisions inside his coalition.
The Israeli government is also due to end all cooperation with Unrwa on 30 January, raising questions over how the planned post-ceasefire surge in aid could be distributed within Gaza.
Arab states, with the support of most European powers, insist there is no alternative organisation with the breadth and organisation of Unrwa that is capable of overseeing the urgent distribution of food and supplies.
The outgoing Biden administration’s view of how Gaza could be administered was finally aired this week in a farewell speech from the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, a delay that has left Arab states frustrated.
Blinken said the goal is to “allow Israel to fully withdraw from Gaza, prevent Hamas from pulling back in and provide for Gaza’s governance, security and reconstruction” and outlined a plan centred on a UN-mandated interim administration consisting of “Palestinians from Gaza and representatives from the PA” to run key services such as banking, water, energy and health that would hand over to a fully reformed PA administration as soon as feasible.
He also proposed “an interim security mission … of partner nation security forces and vetted Palestinian personnel” to create a secure environment for humanitarian and reconstruction efforts and to ensure border security to prevent smuggling, which could allow Hamas to rebuild its military capacity.
Blinken set out no timetable or details of how consultations to appoint PA representatives would be conducted, and in a speech in Norway on Wednesday, Mohammad Mustafa, the prime minister of the PA, which since a split with Hamas in 2007 has been confined to the West Bank, rejected all interim arrangements. He said “any attempt to consolidate the separation between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, or to create transitional entities, will be rejected”.
Blinken added: “Gaza after all this pain needs a responsible and capable government to heal the wounds of the Gaza people under one state, one government, one law and one system.”
Blinken’s plan for a security mission may also need a single Palestinian government. Without identifying the likely Arab participants, he said some had expressed their willingness to contribute troops and police, but only if it is agreed that Gaza and the West Bank “are reunified under a reformed PA as part of a pathway to an independent Palestinian state”. The Israeli Knesset is currently opposed to a Palestinian state, however, meaning such a precondition for a security force is absent.
In his speech, Mustafa mapped out a plan for Gaza that he insisted the PA was ready to start implementing immediately. Talks in Cairo in November between Hamas and the PA, however, failed to agree on the composition of a joint Hamas-PA committee to run Gaza.
But Arab diplomats believe that Hamas is willing to take a back seat if the PA is given authority to run Gaza, but will start to come back if something it regards as closer to colonial rule is attempted. They also acknowledge that the PA is deeply unpopular in the West Bank.
Hugh Lovatt of the European Council on Foreign Relations also warned a PA takeover of Gaza “will be complicated by the PA’s deepening domestic unpopularity, rising financial fragility and growing authoritarianism” and that Hamas, while battered, “continues to hold a veto over Gaza’s future”.
Despite differences with aspects of the Blinken plan, Arab diplomats hope the Trump team will pick up its themes and not “overthink things”, leading to delays. A key goal of an interim security force, for example, would be to separate the Palestinians from the Israelis, prevent the establishment of an Israeli-occupied buffer zone inside Gaza and prevent infiltration and new cross-border attacks.
So far, Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Mike Waltz, has simply said: “Gaza has to be fully demilitarised. Hamas has to be destroyed to the point that it cannot reconstitute itself, and Israel has every right to protect itself.”
Fears that Israel will act on its commitment to end all cooperation with Unrwa, with the support of the Trump team, is one of the most urgent issues given the planned increase in aid from Sunday once the ceasefire starts.
As many as 500 aid trucks are due to enter Gaza a day, but parts of Gaza are lawless.
Robert Satloff, the director of the influential Washington Institute thinktank, has proposed that if other UN agencies such as the World Food Programme or Unicef refuse to take on Unrwa’s current tasks they should be threatened with a 40% loss of US funding.
Many in the US say Unrwa is infiltrated by Hamas supporters and has an ideological role as an advocate for Palestinian refugees. The Knesset passed bills to in effect end Unrwa’s work in the Palestinian territories over Israeli allegations that Unrwa staff in Gaza were involved in the 7 October Hamas attacks. The UN launched an investigation into the Israeli claims and fired nine Unrwa staff as a result.
Several years before, the first Trump administration suspended US funding for Unrwa in 2018, saying the organisation was irredeemably flawed. Satloff said: “There is no way Trump’s first major initiative in the Middle East will be to twist Israel’s arm to save Unrwa.”
Philippe Lazzarini, the agency’s commissioner general, argued that “Unrwa is not replaceable” and the Badil Resource Center, a Palestinian NGO, has warned that any “day after” plan that excludes the agency and imposes an “international interim administration” will be “just another face for colonisation and ongoing denial of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination”.
