What Went Wrong
Eight months ago, the world was told the war on Gaza was over. A ceasefire. A hostage exchange. A twenty-point plan, endorsed by the UN Security Council, backed by a new international body with a grand name: the Board of Peace. Officials queued up to call it historic. For people who have spent two years burying their children in scraps of cloth because there was nothing else, “historic” felt, for a moment, like it might mean something.
It hasn’t.
The plan on paper
The framework that became Security Council Resolution 2803 promised a lot: an end to hostilities, the return of every hostage, a surge in humanitarian aid, and a phased path toward Palestinian self-governance in Gaza under international supervision. The living hostages came home within days. That part worked, because it was the part the guarantors actually wanted to work.
Everything harder than that has stalled.
The plan on the ground
Since the ceasefire was declared, Israeli strikes inside Gaza have killed more than a thousand Palestinians. Six people were killed in a single week this month alone: a drone strike on a displacement camp, gunfire elsewhere in the Strip while the word “ceasefire” sat in quotation marks in every report describing it. Israeli forces now control roughly 80 percent of the territory, expanding steadily beyond the line the truce was supposed to fix in place. Families near that line are being pushed from their homes again, in what is meant to be peace.
Ninety percent of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure lies in ruins. Hospitals, water systems, schools, mosques and churches are gone or unusable. The famine that a tightened blockade produced hasn’t been undone by a piece of paper signed in Washington. Aid still moves at the pace the occupying power allows it to move.
And the political horizon the plan promised Palestinian governance, a route to statehood, a say for Palestinians in their own future has quietly narrowed to something else entirely. One version on offer involves “alternative safe communities”: walled compounds under Israeli military control, each holding twenty to twenty-five thousand people, administered rather than governed. Another version, unveiled with a straight face by a property developer, imagined Gaza’s ruins rebuilt as seaside resorts and skyscrapers, a real-estate pitch delivered over a mass grave. Neither is self-determination. Both were drawn up without the people whose lives they claim to plan.
Meanwhile in the West Bank, settler violence keeps climbing and the Palestinian Authority grows weaker by the month, sidelined and discredited in the eyes of the people it’s supposed to represent.
So what went wrong?
Not one thing. The same thing that has gone wrong for decades: a peace process built to manage the appearance of a conflict rather than resolve its cause. Disarmament is demanded of the side under siege before occupation is lifted from the side doing the besieging. Reconstruction is promised, then re-imagined as real estate. Self-governance is offered, then redefined as supervised containment. A body called the “Board of Peace” is chaired by the same government that has spent two years arming one side of the war it claims to be ending.
This is not a plan that failed by accident. It is a plan that was never built to deliver what it promised because delivering it would have meant treating Palestinians as a people with a right to determine their own future, not a population to be managed until the cameras move on.
What doesn’t go wrong
What has never wavered, through every ceasefire and every collapse of one, is Palestinian sumud steadfastness. People who have lost everything and are still refusing to leave. Journalists are still filming. Doctors are still operating without anaesthetic. Families still naming their newborns after the ones they buried, so the name carries on.
Solidarity from the outside doesn’t get to be passive while that continues. It means saying plainly, in public, what went wrong and who kept it that way and it means not letting the word “ceasefire” launder what is still, by any honest reading of the last eight months, an occupation tightening its grip under a different name.
The plan on paper was never the point. The plan on the ground is the one Palestinians are still living through. That is where solidarity has to meet them.
— Palestine Forum of New Zealand