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My detailed analysis of the current situation in the Gaza Strip, after Nickolay Mladenov, the “High Representative of Gaza” in Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace”, insisted that no reconstruction will take place in Gaza without the complete disarmament of Hamas, even though Hamas never agreed to that, and even though the humanitarian situation in Gaza, as controlled by Israel, remains dire. I draw extensively on interviews by Drop Site News with senior Hamas officials, and an article in Haaretz by the head of an Israeli NGO supporting the Palestinians, pointing out the complicity of the west in the ongoing humanitarian disaster.

962 days since Israel’s genocide in Gaza began, and 227 days since a ceasefire took effect through the implementation of the first phase of Donald Trump’s “Peace Plan”, Nickolay Mladenov, the Bulgarian former UN official who is now the “High Representative of Gaza” in Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace”, has alarmed those seeking a balance between Israel’s obligations under the ceasefire deal and an acceptable response by Hamas by telling the UN Security Council on May 21 that Hamas was the “principal obstacle” to the continued implementation of the next phase of the “Peace Plan” because “it refused to accept verified decommissioning, relinquish coercive control and allow a genuine civilian transition.”

Mladenov’s speech to the UN followed what Drop Site News, on May 22, described as a “15-point roadmap” that he delivered to Hamas in April, which “amounted to an ultimatum: If the Palestinian resistance does not surrender its weapons, no meaningful reconstruction will be permitted in Gaza and Israeli forces will not withdraw.” In his report to the UN Security Council, Mladenov described the total disarmament of Hamas and other resistance groups as “the single factor that unlocks every other element of the plan.”

As Drop Site News proceeded to explain, however, “disarmament was categorically not a part of the phase one deal signed by Hamas and Israel in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt in October 2025.” As they added, “Despite repeated claims by US and Israeli officials that Hamas agreed to all of Trump’s terms, [they] and other Palestinian factions did not sign an agreement beyond a ceasefire, exchange of captives, and an initial framework for the redeployment or withdrawal of Israeli forces from some parts of Gaza.” The limited deal, they added, “also included the opening of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt and the resumption of deliveries of life essentials and equipment to clear rubble and begin early reconstruction efforts.”

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56 years ago, 20 million Americans took to the streets to mark the first Earth Day, to promote support for environmental protections, and, as it was described in a full-page promotional advert in the New York Times, to “start to reclaim the environment we have wrecked”, via “a commitment to make life better, not just bigger and faster”, and to “provide real rather than rhetorical solutions.”

In large letters, the ad proclaimed, boldly, “A disease has infected our country. It has brought smog to Yosemite, dumped garbage in the Hudson, sprayed DDT in our food, and left our cities in decay. Its carrier is man.”

The name, and the promotional messages, came via the legendary advertising copywriter Julian Koenig, whose campaign for Volkswagen, “Think Small,” was later cited by Advertising Age as the “greatest advertising campaign of the 20th century.”

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Anyone paying attention knows that, since October 7, 2023, when the State of Israel began carpet-bombing the Gaza Strip on a scale so grotesque that it can only realistically be compared to the impact of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, all sense of proportionality in warfare has been eviscerated, and has been normalized to such an extent that Israel, and its lapdog the US, are now engaged in similarly disproportionate attacks on Iran, and with Israel also extending its depravity to Lebanon.

While some of this blatant violation of international humanitarian law can be traced to Israel’s relentless contempt for any attempts to restrain its military actions, dating back decades, the truly shocking and soul-shredding intensification of its military actions over the last 29 months, in which the US has finally moved from being Israel’s main backer to being a fully-fledged partner, has primarily been facilitated through both countries’ embrace of military targeting powered by AI (artificial intelligence), which has both promised and delivered military targets on a scale that is hundreds or thousands of times faster than what was previously possible, although, crucially, with little or no human oversight to address profound problems with the accuracy of the targeting.

To provide some necessary background, proportionality in warfare seeks to minimize the loss of civilian life during military operations, and its key definition comes from the 1977 Additional Protocol to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which sought to apply rules governing warfare in the aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War. The Additional Protocol specifically addressed the protection of civilians, and, in Article 51, established protections against indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations, providing two particular examples of attacks that “are to be considered as indiscriminate”, which have subsequently provided a benchmark for assessments of proportionality.

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On February 18, in the apocalyptic wasteland of the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian survivors of Israel’s ongoing 28-month genocide celebrated the start of Ramadan with astonishing ingenuity, crafting decorations from the recycled detritus of destruction, powering and stringing up lights, and holding communal meals drawing on the increase of food deliveries since the ceasefire that began four months ago.

This is in spite of the fact that Israel has persistently refused to honor the requirements for the delivery of 600 trucks of humanitarian aid a day under the ceasefire deal, which began on October 10, and which was trumpeted by the US as Donald Trump’s “Peace Plan”, even though most of the hard work had been done by negotiators from Qatar, Egypt and Turkey, working with Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff.

Much of what has been begrudgingly allowed into Gaza by Israel consists of commercial goods that are unaffordable for the majority of the population, who have been made homeless, are reduced to living in tents with few of their possessions left, and have little or no money.

While the Palestinians’ spirit contrasts buoyantly with the grimness of their surroundings, it cannot disguise that they continue to live in a landscape that is brutally shattered, to an extent that is almost beyond comprehension, and that no salvation is on the horizon. Voices from within Gaza emphasize that the majority of the displaced population haven’t been attending these communal meals, and numerous photos show much more wretched scenes, of families struggling to put together even the most basic meals in landscapes of utter destruction.

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If just one photo captures the callous, ghoulish, cruel and heartless opportunism of those who see the world only through a lens of business opportunities and maximum profit-making for themselves and their cronies, it’s the photo above, an AI-generated vision of what was pitched to the world on January 22 as “New Gaza”, a futuristic high-rise coastal tourist resort on the shoreline of the Gaza Strip.

The image is from a PowerPoint presentation by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, and a prominent real estate investor, at the official launch of Trump’s “Board of Peace”, which took place at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland.

Other slides in the presentation showed “New Rafah”, a brand-new city featuring 100,000+ “Permanent Housing Units”, and plans for the eventual expansion of this “new city” model across the whole of the Gaza Strip, with these new residential areas flanked by industrial complexes featuring “data centers” and “advanced manufacturing.”

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In the Gaza Strip, the remaining Palestinian population, who have survived two years and three months of the most diabolically well-publicized and even relentlessly celebrated genocide in history, which is still ongoing, albeit at a slower pace than before, are squeezed into just 42% of their homeland — 60 square miles in total, less than the size of Washington, D.C.

The rest, the other 58%, has been occupied by Israeli forces since a ceasefire was declared on October 10, when they withdrew to an arbitrary “Yellow Line” that was meant to be temporary, a phase in a staged withdrawal from the whole of the Gaza Strip, but which is regarded by the occupiers as a new and permanent border with Israel.

Under the terms of the ceasefire deal, which was mainly negotiated by Qatar, Egypt and the US, although Donald Trump, predictably, made it all about himself, even staging a “Peace Summit” in Egypt to which world leaders were invited to fawn over him, Israel was prevailed upon to stop its relentless bombing raids, and its ongoing and merciless ground invasion of Gaza City, in return for the immediate release of all the surviving Israeli hostages seized on October 7, 2023.

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Over two days last week, the United Nations, formed in 1945, with its primary motive being “to maintain international peace and security”, sadly demonstrated all of the weaknesses that have prevented it from fulfilling that core aim of its Charter over the last 80 years.

On November 18, the UN General Assembly, which represents all 193 member states of the UN, overwhelmingly passed a worthy resolution affirming “the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination”, including “the right to their independent State of Palestine.”

The resolution was introduced by Armenia, China, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Norway, the Russian Federation and Viet Nam, with Egypt’s contribution undertaken on behalf of the 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

164 countries voted in favor of the resolution, with just 7 votes against (including the US and Israel), and nine abstentions.

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Reflecting on Donald Trump’s tiny mind, in which he has the attention span of a toddler, and is only interested in simplistic outcomes that he can use to bolster his own delusional self-image as an extraordinary victor and savior, the peace deal for Gaza that he announced three weeks ago, including the ceasefire that began on October 10, is the most startling example of his solipsistic view of reality, and his inability to think deeply, or with any nuance, about any given topic for longer than it takes to draw in breath and exhale.

It is unreservedly commendable that the negotiations to end Israel’s two-year-long genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip have, for the last 20 days, prevented Israel from resuming, on a permanent basis, its merciless enthusiasm for the relentless aerial bombardment of Gaza, although it has broken the terms of the ceasefire deal on numerous occasions, requiring the intervention of US baby-sitters to keep it from breaking down, and, yesterday, embarked on its most violent violation yet, killing over a hundred Palestinians, including at least 46 children, and injuring over 250 more, in numerous air strikes.

Before these attacks, Gaza’s Media Office assessed that Israel had committed 80 violations since the ceasefire began, killing 97 Palestinians and injuring 230. Those totals now stand at more than 200 killed, and 500 wounded. The average daily death toll may be less than it was before the ceasefire began, when between 60 and a hundred Palestinians were being killed every day in direct attacks, but it is a sign of Israel’s arrogance, its sense of impunity and its complete contempt for the value of any Palestinian lives that it has killed and injured so many, claiming to adhere to the ceasefire deal while switching it on and off at will, without any repercussions.

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On the same day that the Israeli Knesset gave “preliminary approval to a bill to impose Israeli sovereignty on the occupied West Bank”, as Al Jazeera described it, accurately calling it “a move tantamount to annexation of the Palestinian territory, which would be a blatant violation of international law”, over 3,300 km away, in the Hague, the International Court of Justice delivered a blistering condemnation of Israel’s existing failures to “fulfil its obligations under international humanitarian law” as the occupying Power in the Occupied Palestinian Territory; namely, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, first occupied in 1967.

In an advisory opinion relating to the “Obligations of Israel in relation to the Presence and Activities of the United Nations, Other International Organizations and Third States in and in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory”, the Court’s eleven judges unanimously ruled that the State of Israel was required “to ensure that the population of the Occupied Palestinian Territory has the essential supplies of daily life, including food, water, clothing, bedding, shelter, fuel, medical supplies and services” — from all of which, despite persistent and risible protestations to the contrary by senior Israeli officials, the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip have been horrendously deprived, though various “sieges” on all essential supplies, for most of the last two years.

The Court also ruled, by ten votes to one, that Israel was required “to agree to and facilitate by all means at its disposal relief schemes on behalf of the population of the Occupied Palestinian Territory so long as that population is inadequately supplied, as has been the case in the Gaza Strip, including relief provided by the United Nations and its entities, in particular the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East [UNRWA], other international organizations and third States, and not to impede such relief.”

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UPDATE October 23: For anyone interested in hearing me talk about Donald Trump’s “Peace Plan” for Gaza, what it means and what the future may hold, please check out my latest podcast with Andy Bungay, recorded on Sunday October 19, in which, over 50 minutes, we discussed this and other topical issues; in particular, the rise of the far-right, and the lamentable role played in its promotion by social media.

What kind of peace deal is this, when those it affects — the Palestinians subjected to illegal occupation by Israel for the last 58 years — are not supposed to have any say in their future?

Although those of us who don’t subscribe to the all-consuming genocidal death cult that Israel has become over the last two years are overwhelmingly relieved that the non-stop bombing and destruction of the Gaza Strip has stopped as a result of the recently-agreed ceasefire, we refuse to endorse the back-slapping celebrations of those who undertook and facilitated the genocide, their ongoing efforts to sideline the Palestinians themselves in negotiations about Gaza’s future, and the failure of the international community to recognize that, right now, what is most important is the urgent delivery not only of humanitarian aid on an unprecedented scale, but also of significant amounts of ground-clearing and reconstruction equipment, to avert what, otherwise, will be a cataclysmic humanitarian catastrophe already set in place by Israel.

For all but seven weeks of the last two years, the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip have been subjected to a policy of genocidal extermination by the State of Israel that has been so sickening in its depravity that decent people around the world — in their billions — have become so thoroughly disgusted by its actions that they will never again sleep easily or know anything resembling joy until the Palestinians secure their own independent state, and until Israel’s leaders — including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, past and present defense ministers Yoav Gallant and Israel Katz, president Isaac Herzog and far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir — are held accountable for their monstrous genocidal crimes.

For these billions of people worldwide, including the entire Muslim world and roughly two-thirds of the populations of the countries of the west, there can also be no peace until the leaders of those western countries who have supported and enabled the genocide — the same people hypocritically celebrating yesterday at Donald Trump’s “peace summit” in Egypt, and hoping to whitewash both Israel’s monstrous crimes and their own complicity in those crimes — are also held accountable.

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