How Trump’s Gaza Plan Is Enabling Another Israeli Land Grab

https://jewishcurrents.org/how-trumps-gaza-plan-is-enabling-another-israeli-land-grab?

By codifying Israel’s demands, the new “peace process” guarantees that Palestinian territory will keep shrinking.

by Anne Irfan.       8 December 2025       Jewish Currents

Israel drops leaflets warning Palestinians to stay away from the “yellow line” in Khan Younis, October 20th. Jehad Alshrafi/AP

ON NOVEMBER 18TH, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) passed Resolution 2803, formally endorsing President Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza’s future. First released as the basis for the ceasefire deal of October, the plan establishes a handful of core structures: first, a “yellow line” which demarcates the parts of Gaza where the Israeli army will retain an on-the-ground presence; second, an International Stabilization Force (ISF) that will serve as a “long-term internal security solution,” overseen by a “Board of Peace” headed by Trump himself; third, “a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee” staffed by Palestinian and international experts tasked with managing Gaza’s “transitional governance”; and finally, a “Trump economic development plan to rebuild and energize Gaza.” 

Extending the hyperbole of his claims to have ended “3,000 years” of war in the Middle East, Trump welcomed the UNSC approval of his plan as “a moment of true historic proportion” that will “lead to further Peace all over the World.” Despite the rhetoric, however, Resolution 2803 doesn’t signal a break with the past. On the contrary, it represents continuity with decades of supposedly international—in practice, Western and Israeli—plans for Palestine. These plans, exemplified by the League of Nations mandate, the UN Partition Plan, and the Oslo Accords, have reworked political geography, governance, and aid structures to shrink Palestinian territory. They have done so by introducing new, moveable “borders” like the yellow line as a way to progressively reduce how much land is allocated to the Palestinian people and their would-be state. They have created bodies like Trump’s ISF and his “apolitical Palestinian committee” to contain Palestinian nationalism and resistance while enabling further Israeli impunity. And they have carried out these moves not with any input from the Palestinian people, but rather by entrenching neo-colonial dynamics (as evident in the involvement of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair as a key member of Trump’s Board of Peace). 

Ultimately, such plans have enabled Israel to grab progressively more Palestinian land while entrenching obstacles to Palestinian sovereignty. The consequences of the Trump plan are likely to fall along the same lines—resulting in anything from a full ghettoization of the Palestinians in portions of the Strip to the total liquidation of the Palestinian presence in Gaza. 

WESTERN-LED PROPOSALS have enabled Zionist land grabs in Palestine for nearly a century. Before 1948, Palestine was governed by a British regime that took its mandate from the League of Nations—a body then dominated by Britain and France. Then, in 1947, the UN put forward its infamous Partition Plan, recommending that 55% of Palestine be allocated to a Jewish state at a time when Jews made up around a third of the country’s population. The plan was rejected by Palestinians but accepted by the Jewish Agency (the main Zionist leadership and parastate operation in Mandatory Palestine), which recognized it as a good deal and a basis for possible later expansion. 

In the end, the Partition Plan never came to pass; only Zionist expansion did. Zionist militias, and then the newly formed Israeli national army, used military means to establish their new state on 78% of Palestine—significantly more than the 55% allocated under the UN Plan. To do so, they carried out the Nakba, the deliberate expulsion and displacement of at least 750,000 Palestinians into neighboring Arab states and the two parts of Palestine not claimed by Israel in 1948: the West Bank and Gaza Strip. As a result, Palestine was de facto partitioned, but with no independent Palestinian state established. After Israel began its lasting occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, it implemented a one-state reality whereby the Israeli state controlled the entirety of historic Palestine and imposed a hierarchy of different regimes for Palestinians and Israelis.

The Gaza Strip as we know it today has been formed by this history of shrinkage. Under the British Mandate, Palestine’s Southern District—sometimes known informally as the “Gaza District,” after its biggest city— was the largest administrative area in territorial terms. But during the Nakba, Zionist militias and the Israeli army seized most of it, reducing the region to an area of 214 square miles. The 1949 Egyptian–Israeli agreementdemarcated this newly-formed Gaza “Strip” by establishing an armistice line around it that became known as the Green Line. The following year, a weakened Egyptian government agreed to an addendum that shrank the newly formed Gaza Strip by a further 20%, leaving it as a tiny territory of 141 square miles—less than 1.5% of historic Palestine. Israel proceeded to police the Green Line as an international border despite its formal status as a temporary armistice boundary. 

It didn’t stop there. After Israel began its long-term occupation of Gaza in 1967, it reduced the territory accessible to Palestinians even more—first by establishing illegal settlements and military installations, and then by imposing “buffer zones” and “security perimeters.” The Oslo process shrank the Strip even further, as Israel established a “security perimeter” stretching over half a mile into Gaza, with the military enforcing “special security measures” to prevent Palestinians from entering. 

Israel’s encroachment into Palestinian territory has continued into the 21st century. Upon completing its unilateral evacuation of 8,500 settlers from Gaza in 2005, Israel enacted a restricted “buffer zone” reaching almost a mile into the Strip. Any Palestinian found in it could be shot on sight. And after imposing a full blockade on Gaza in 2007, supported by its Egyptian allies, Israel periodically expanded its buffer zone, confining Palestinians to an ever-smaller stretch of land. The deadly logic of the “buffer zone” culminated in the mass fatalities of the 2018 Great March of Return, when Israeli forces killed at least 234 Palestinians and wounded more than 33,000 who had moved “too close” to the fence enclosing the Strip. Those decades of land grabs may now reach their apogee with the newest plan for Gaza, which continues to implement what many Palestinians call the deliberate process of ongoing Nakba. 

CONSIDERING THE TRUMP PLAN within this historical trajectory, we can identify four prongs to the strategy of dispossession. The yellow line itself is the first. Under the terms of the ceasefire, Israeli forces were required to “withdraw to the agreed upon line,” a directive that quietly allowed the Israeli army to retain direct control of at least 58% of Gaza. The fortification, in other words, shrinks the Palestinian portion of Gaza to less than half of the Strip—no more than 64 square miles, or one-fifth of New York City. This is history echoing once more: During the 1948 Nakba, more than 200,000 Palestinian refugees fled southwest, ending up confined to the Gaza Strip. During the genocide of 2023-25, Israeli forces have carried out the same process within the Gaza Strip itself, violently displacing nearly two millionPalestinians and enclosing them on the western side of the yellow line. 

And that’s not likely to be the end of yellow-line fueled dispossession. After Palestinians pointed out that the yellow line’s location was unclear, Israel announced on October 20th that it had started laying down yellow concrete blocks on the ground to “create tactical clarity.” But far from removing ambiguity, the physical blocks have only increased it, as Israel has kept moving them further inside Gaza. There have also been repeated news accounts of Israeli forces launching ground invasions to carry out attacks across the yellow line, breaching the ceasefire condition that “Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza.”

Just as when Israel repeatedly violated the terms of Oslo in the 1990s—delaying its military evacuation from Gaza City, for example, and later invading supposedly PA-controlled territory—it has faced no consequences for its ongoing breaches. In fact, far from demanding that Israel comply with the agreement, evidence is mounting that the White House is quietly colluding with behind-the-scenes plans for Israel’s permanent occupation and even annexation of Gaza. The same week that the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2803, the US pushed forward with proposals to permanently partition the Gaza Strip—turning the yellow line from a temporary military buffer into a possible future border. Meanwhile, Israeli politicians and right-wing activists continue to advocate for the permanent expulsion of Gaza’s Palestinians, with overwhelming support from the Jewish Israeli public—82% in one recent poll.

The ISF forms the second prong of Trump land grabs, one that also harks back to the Oslo Accords. Touted in the ’90s as a peaceful resolution to decades of violence, and publicly framed in the discourse of a “two-state solution,” Oslo—like the Trump plan today—centered mainly on the Israelis’ primary concern: their own national security. After the Palestinian Authority (PA) was established in 1994 under the auspices of Oslo, almost half of its employees were hired to perform a security function. They were tasked not with protecting the security of the Palestinian people, but rather with suppressing any activity deemed a threat to Israeli interests—including nonviolent civil resistance to the occupation. As a result, the PA quickly gained a reputation among Palestinians as a pawn of the Israeli military. 

Today, similar dynamics are once again at play with the ISF. While the ISF’s membership is unconfirmed as yet, it will reportedly include troops from various Arab and Muslim countries, among them Azerbaijan, Egypt, Indonesia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—though none of them has formally corroborated their participation. According to the White House, the ISF will help train a new Palestinian police force in Gaza and manage internal security affairs, while also playing a lead role in “demilitarizing” Gaza and “securing the borders.” The latter are both elastic Israeli demands with a range of possible meanings—not least because the “borders” in question are unspecified, opening them up to further land grabs. It’s a set-up that virtually guarantees that Palestinian territory will just keep shrinking. Indeed, several Arab and Muslim critics have expressed concerns that their governments’ participation could make them “a stooge of the Israeli state.” 

The arrangements for Palestinian governance, which form the third prong of the dispossession strategy under the Trump plan, again recall Oslo. Proponents of the ’90s agreement touted the PA as a precursor to Palestinian independence. But there was one rather big hitch: Israel never agreed to the creation of a fully sovereign Palestinian state, even when it was run by supposedly “peacenik” prime ministers like Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak. During the Oslo process, Israel agreed to give the PA only limited autonomy (not sovereignty) over just 18% of the West Bank and three-quarters of the Gaza Strip; it also insisted on keeping the illegal settlement blocs that have taken up yet more Palestinian land. As a result, the Oslo process tightly constrained the PA’s powers—allowing it no national army, no sovereign control of borders, and no economic independence. Further, Palestinian self-determination was deferred until “final status negotiations” that never came, while the core issues of the Palestinian struggle—the right of return and the status of Jerusalem—went ignored.

In the 2020s, the current Israeli prime minister has repeatedly made clear his unconditional opposition to a Palestinian state of any size, even as most European governments continue to publicly back the two-state formula as the only possible way forward. As a result, the Trump plan provides for even less Palestinian autonomy than was granted under Oslo. There is no equivalent to the PA in the plan; only a transitional committee overseen by Trump’s Board of Peace. Tellingly, the plan speaks of Palestinian statehood and self-determination as an “aspiration”—not a right—and merely suggests that after development and reform, “conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway” to it.

The fourth and perhaps most overt land-grabbing tool involves neo-colonial forms of reconstruction. Under these plans, the Israeli-controlled “green zone” (east Gaza) would be reconstructed with support from US-backed actors, many of whom see Gaza as little more than a profit-making opportunity. At the end of November, the US State Department confirmed a scheme to establish “alternative safe communities” (ASCs) that would house Palestinians in the green zone. Yet with virtually the entire Palestinian population of Gaza currently confined to the western side of the yellow line—the designated “red zone”—it is unclear how they would be moved to the ASCs, or what this would mean for the red zone’s future. The ASC proposal also shows some alarming continuities with plans floated by the Israeli government in July to establish a “humanitarian city” to intern all Gaza’s Palestinians, which even some internal critics compared to a concentration camp. As they “reconstruct” Gaza on their own terms, the US and Israel look set to continue with such plans, extending the decades-long displacement and confinement of the Palestinian people.

The consequences of the Trump plan have already been deadly. Since the Gaza ceasefire ostensibly came into effect on October 10th, Israel has reportedly violated its terms more than 500 times. It has also openly ignored certain clauses, such as the requirement to open Gaza’s Rafah crossing with Egypt; Prime Minister Netanyahu recently indicated that his government may eventually open it, but only for Palestinians leaving Gaza. This is a direct breach of the agreement, which specifies that Rafah should be opened “in both directions” and that Palestinians outside the Strip should be “free to return.” 

Most disturbingly, during the so-called “ceasefire” of recent weeks, Israeli forces have continued to open fire on Palestinians in Gaza, killing at least 360 people, the majority of them women, children, and the elderly. Many were killed for the “crime” of crossing the yellow line into Israeli-held Gazan territory while seeking to return to the homes and neighborhoods from which Israeli forces displaced them over two years of genocide. Despite its professed commitment to the ceasefire, the Trump administration has failed to condemn, let alone prevent, these repeated violations.

As with previous “international” plans for Palestine—from Oslo to Jared Kushner’s “Deal of the Century”—the Trump plan presents Israeli gains as concessions and Palestinian losses as rewards. The West’s continuing preoccupation with Israeli conceptions of security, combined with outsiders’ shameless pursuit of their own political and financial interests, steadily keeps the focus away from human rights, let alone reparative justice. As Israel uses the cover of yet another “international” agreement to seize more land and establish new facts on the ground, it is all coming—once again—at the expense of the Palestinian people. 

 Anne Irfan is the author of A Short History of the Gaza Strip.