According to President Donald Trump, it was “one of the greatest endorsements in the history of the United Nations,” a “moment of truly historic dimension” that “would lead to greater peace around the world.” But the seriousness of the U.N. Security Council’s approval of the U.S. plan for Gaza on Tuesday raised new questions about how it will actually work.
More importantly, it is unclear whether those at the heart of this conflict – the Palestinians and Israelis themselves – actually support its end goals.
Hamas, which still controls about half of the Gaza Strip, categorically rejected the resolution and said it deprives Palestinians of their own freedom to act, allowing Trump to freely rule the Gaza Strip for the next two years. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed its passage, but previously said he rejected talk of “self-determination and Palestinian statehood” – which his far-right allies disavow.
On a practical level, the proposal would require the creation of several previously non-existent bodies, including the Trump-led “Peace Council” and the International Stabilization Force, or ISF, whose troops could be recruited from Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and as far away as Indonesia.
That said, it was a rare moment of geopolitical unity.
Trump’s team gained support from Arab states by inserting language hinting at a future Palestinian state, and Russia and China abstained from the vote rather than using their vetoes to torpedo the proposal outright.
In fact, it went 13-0.
Summing up the mood on Tuesday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres hailed the vote as “an important step” but warned that it was “essential now to translate diplomatic momentum into concrete and urgent action on the ground”, his office said in a statement.
It’s a sentiment shared by many observers.
Frank Lowenstein, former special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations under President Barack Obama, told NBC News that passing the resolution was “essential” to Trump’s proposal.
“There was no way the Trump plan could work without a UN Security Council resolution,” he said. Not only will this bring “credibility, legitimacy and clear support from the international community,” but it will “provide an opportunity to begin to create a new reality, to begin to move the process forward in a way that will give people hope.”
He warned, however, that the adoption of the resolution was “far from enough”, mainly because the UN has no enforcement mechanism and the ISF was immediately rejected by Hamas.
The resolution states that “the parties” to the conflict “have accepted” it. But it is not clear that this is the case.
The main Palestinian government body, the Palestinian Authority, said in a statement Tuesday that it welcomed the resolution and expressed its “full readiness to cooperate” with the United States and its supporters.
But Hamas, author of the attack on October 7, 2023, declared that the agreement did not meet the “political and humanitarian demands and rights” of the Palestinian people.
The Palestinian militant political group, designated a terrorist organization by the United States and which would be disarmed under the deal, said in a statement that its mandate for the ISF to use force “deprives it of its neutrality and makes it a party to the conflict in favor of occupation.”
NBC News has reached out to the White House for a response to these criticisms.
Netanyahu praised Trump and “his tireless and dedicated team,” saying he believed the plan “will lead to peace and prosperity as it insists on the complete demilitarization, disarmament and deradicalization of Gaza.”
But just a day earlier, Israel’s prime minister had firmly rejected the resolution’s call for “a path to Palestinian self-determination and eventual statehood,” under pressure from his far-right coalition partners.
Even putting these differences aside, big question marks remain over how the basics of this plan will work in practice.
“There is a real sense of relief that we are moving to diplomacy,” said Nimrod Goren, president of the Mitvim Institute, a progressive Israeli think tank.
“On the other hand, we don’t really know where all this is going,” he added. “What is the commitment of the leaders, the motivations of those behind this? And can this really move us away from the status quo in which Hamas still controls part of Gaza and Israel controls other parts around it?”
On his Truth Social platform, Trump said members of the Peace Council would be named in the coming weeks – having previously said British Prime Minister Tony Blair would be involved – and that he expected “many more exciting announcements”.
“There are all sorts of new terminologies and mechanisms that don’t exist yet,” Goren said. “So there are a lot of question marks over the basic premises: What is their mandate? How will they be implemented?”
Indonesia, one of the supporters of the US proposal, says it is preparing 20,000 troops to deploy within the ISF. But they are unlikely to move toward Gaza as long as Hamas opposes the deal, according to Lowenstein.
“No one will send troops to be part of the stabilization force that will fight Hamas,” he said.
