Regardless of how many points are in Trump’s plan, the main point is that one can never trust US “peace plans” in general, and Trump in particular.
They only bring more violence, not peace. From Vietnam to Colombia, we all know that.
The country that continues to supply military material and more to fuel this genocide cannot be congratulated on its effort to end the war in Gaza. His phony 20-point plan is just a plan of normalization of genocide, apartheid, annexation and ethnic cleansing.
Welcoming the ceasefire and aid trickling in again to Gaza does not imply Palestinians and people across the world must accept this US-Israeli, blatantly illegal, colonial and coercive plan for the future of Palestinians in Gaza.
Palestinians have already had experience with Trump’s plans – which is basically further colonialism with racist visions of our homeland – in his previous term. Trump has “recognized” Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, illegally relocated the US embassy to Jerusalem, and signed a proclamation recognizing the occupied Golan Heights as part of Israel. In 2020, Trump gave the green light to Israel to annex the West Bank. In 2025, the annexation is rapidly accelerating. The reality is that Israel already exerts de facto control over the West Bank.
In July, Israeli lawmakers voted 71-to-13 in favour of a motion in the Knesset calling for the annexation of the West Bank while Israel’s minister responsible over the illegal settlement project in the West Bank announced that Israel is annexing 82% of the occupied West Bank.
Israel’s E1 settlement plan, which will pave more ways for the annexation of the occupied West Bank, has already been approved on September 11. The Israeli government’s settlement expansion plan occurs alongside the military’s sustained campaign of raids and mass detention on West Bank cities and refugee camps. E1 project is no longer a hypothetical plan but an unfolding measure. The expansion will isolate occupied East Jerusalem and cut off Bethlehem and Ramallah in the West Bank from one another, fragmenting and separating Palestinian cities into what have been compared to “Bantustans”, the Black-only ghettos in apartheid South Africa.
On October 7, 2025, Israeli forces carried out a series of raids across the Ramallah and el-Bireh governorates, raiding several neighbourhoods, detaining Palestinians, closing shops and blocking movement between communities. In Hebron, Israeli forces arrested one Palestinian from the Tel Rumeida neighbourhood and imposed a curfew on several areas east of the city. They have also raided the Bedouin village of Balqa, north of Jericho. Through these attacks Israel demonstrates how the 20-point plan will look once implemented on the ground. Gaza was only the model for the occupied West Bank to follow.
Israel has openly announced as much. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for destroying the Palestinian cities of Jenin and Nablus in the West Bank as happened in Jabalia in northern Gaza, which was reduced to rubble during the genocide. Israel is applying many of the tactics tested in its genocide in Gaza to seize and control territory across the occupied West Bank during its military attacks.
The Trump Gaza plan structures an arrangement whereby Palestinian political entities must disarm, submit to Western governance led by the US, carry out reform according to Israel, and surrender all right to redress historical injustices.
Trump’s efforts are a triple win solution for Israel’s criminal actions and plans, while Palestinian rights and lives, as well as international law are simply brushed aside. It cements submission and genocidal conditions in Gaza. It turbo powers the annexation and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. Finally, it presents normalization with Israel by Arab and Muslim states somehow as a precondition for a ceasefire that mitigates the ferocity of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. A past pledge by Netanyahu to annex Jewish settlements and the Jordan Valley was scrapped in 2020 in favour of normalising ties with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in the so-called Abraham Accords brokered by Trump in his first term in office. Now this plan offers collaborating Arab and Muslim states a way to normalize relations at the very moment when Israel is itself admitting it is a “global pariah”.