Mr. Connor: We are reminded every day that the United States and Israel have no intention of abandoning the genocide in Gaza. Peace may slow for the time being, but starvation, shootings, bombings and murders by Israeli-backed gangs continue. The following article explains how the real goal behind the so-called ceasefire is to take the heat off Israel, quell the growing global movement against the genocide, and keep Gaza 2035 on schedule. Rather than let President Trump fail, they argue, now is the time to ramp up the pressure on Israel and its enablers.
Written by Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J.S. Davis. Benjamin is the co-founder of CODEPINK for Peace and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of Iran Islamic Republic of Iran. Davis is an independent journalist, CODEPINK researcher, and author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Disaster of Iraq.
On October 4, 2025, in an interview with Axios, President Trump emphasized that one of the main goals behind the Gaza plan is to restore Israel’s international standing. “Mr. Bibi has done very well, and Israel has lost a lot of support around the world,” Trump said. “Now I’m going to get all my support back.”
Under President Trump’s plan, the hypothetical ceasefire went into effect on October 10. But Israel withdrew from less than half of the Gaza Strip and killed at least 93 people in the next two weeks, after killing at least the same number of people per day for the previous two years. Israel has only allowed 15% of the humanitarian aid called for in the planned entry into Gaza, and the critical Rafah border from Egypt to Gaza remains closed. For two million people in Gaza, the daily struggle for life and death to find food, water and shelter continues unabated.
While a reduction in the scale of Israel’s daily mass killings is obviously welcome, this is not a real ceasefire. Like previous Israeli ceasefires in Gaza, as well as in Lebanon, this is a unilateral ceasefire that Israel routinely violates at will with impunity.
Mahmoud Hamuz/AFP/Getty Images
This is just the first part of President Trump’s plan for Gaza, and other parts, such as the disarmament of Hamas, which provides Gaza’s sole government and police force, have not yet been agreed upon. They now have the additional task of protecting the population from Israeli-backed criminal organizations and death squads, some of which have ties to ISIS. ISIS preys on Israeli-occupied territories, stealing aid, assassinating local leaders, and terrorizing the population.
Hamas clearly has no intention of disarming under these circumstances, having previously said it would only hand over weapons if Palestine established an internationally recognized government with its own army. Meanwhile, Israel has not agreed to other parts of Trump’s plan, such as withdrawing from the remainder of the Gaza Strip, or any plans for the future of Palestine.
In the United States, some may believe that Trump’s plan has solved the Palestinian crisis, as corrupt politicians and corporate media take American and Israeli lies at face value or repeat them as statements of fact. Although the rest of the world is not so naive or so easily manipulated, many other governments also benefit from oligarchies that profit from trade, investment, and arms deals with Israel. This is despite the fact that the citizens of these countries are shocked by Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and the impunity sponsored by the United States.
President Trump’s Gaza plan, like much of his foreign policy, cynically exploits the greed and fear of political leaders and oligarchic patrons. He acknowledges that Israel has “lost much support around the world” and offers a shortcut back to “business as usual” for governments eager to preserve and even expand beneficial relationships despite Israel’s continued atrocities and blatant disregard for international law.
During his first term, President Trump brokered the Abraham Accords, a normalization agreement between Israel and Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Sudan that included mutual recognition and expanded trade. He now has his sights set on the big prize: Saudi Arabia.
However, Arab-Israeli relations have long been contentious. In the 1949 vote on Israel’s membership in the United Nations General Assembly, all Arab and Muslim countries, except Turkiye (abstaining), voted against recognition of the state of Israel. Thirty-two Arab and Muslim-majority countries, including some of its closest neighbors, still do not recognize Israel or have diplomatic relations with it.
Despite decades of hostility, Mr. Trump persuaded Israel and some of these countries to support the Gaza plan by promising future benefits from normalization and trade. However, there remains a large gap between Israel and these Arab and Islamic countries regarding Palestine. They insist they will not recognize Israel unless it recognizes Palestine, which has full sovereignty over East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
However, the cornerstone of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud party is a plan to annex and form a Greater Israel, all of occupied Palestine “between the sea and Jordan.” Then, on October 22, during Vice President Vance’s visit to Israel, the Knesset voted in favor of annexing the West Bank.
President Trump announced the Gaza plan at the end of the annual high-level meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where many world leaders called for greater international action against Israel. The New York Declaration, voted in favor by 142 countries, is the result of a conference in July led by France and Saudi Arabia, which pledged “concrete, time-bound, concerted action” to implement the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) 2024 ruling that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is illegal and must end “as soon as possible.”
President Trump’s initiative temporarily heightened and alienated calls for more action at the United Nations. However, on October 22, the ICJ issued a new judgment, strongly condemning Israel’s use of famine as a means of war in the Gaza Strip, and ruled that as an occupying power, Israel must ensure that its people’s “basic needs” are met, including food, water, fuel, shelter, and medicine. The court also ruled that Israel must allow UN personnel working for UNRWA to operate in Gaza after Israel failed to provide the court with evidence of claims that the UN personnel were members of Hamas or took part in the October 2023 attack on Israel.
In response to the ICJ’s decision, Norway announced that it would submit a resolution to the UN General Assembly to enforce the court’s directives, including ensuring that the full amount of aid to Gaza is reached. Humanitarians hope the resolution, which will be submitted to an emergency special session of the General Assembly under the “Unite for Peace” option, will deliver on the “concrete, time-bound, concerted action” the UN promised in July. These could include sanctions such as an arms embargo and targeted trade and investment measures, which should take effect within days if Israel continues to block aid.
President Trump clearly intended to end America’s complicity in Israel’s crimes and begin a new phase of normalizing the occupation and rebuilding Israel’s diplomacy. But even before the ICJ condemned Israel’s starvation policies, people around the world were already rallying to urge governments not to leave Israel unchecked.
Momentum for accountability continues to grow in Europe. As the British Parliament debates new pension laws, an amendment has been introduced that would strip local government pension funds from companies complicit in Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine. Many local councils in the UK have already passed separate by-laws to do this, but the changes to the Pensions Act will force all councils to divest the $16 billion that pension funds still have invested in these companies.
In September, the European Union announced plans to suspend a 25-year-old free trade agreement with Israel and impose sanctions on Israel’s militant ministers and settler leaders. On October 20, they “paused” these measures in response to President Trump’s plan, but EU leaders immediately faced strong opposition to the decision.
More than 400 former senior diplomats and government officials signed a statement saying the EU must take decisive action against “spoilers and extremists” who threaten “the establishment of a future Palestinian state” and pointing out that Trump’s plan only vaguely addresses that goal. International lawyers advised EU leaders that EU policy must comply with a 2024 ICJ ruling that the Israeli occupation is illegal and must end as soon as possible.
European countries including Belgium, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Spain have already banned imports from illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine, and Ireland is currently considering a similar trade ban in its Occupied Territories Bill, with a final vote expected by January. The original bill only affects trade in goods, but activists want the ban to include trade in services, while powerful business interests, including American tech companies with European headquarters in Ireland, are lobbying for the bill to be repealed completely. It should help that Ireland’s newly elected president, Catherine Connolly, is a strong supporter of Palestine.
In stark contrast to much of the world still grappling with the contradictions between President Trump’s Gaza plan and Israel’s continued illegal occupation, U.S. officials are already turning the page, moving to strengthen and expand the military alliance between Washington and Israel.
The partnership is a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the two governments, renewed every 10 years and typically negotiated in 2026 before the previous MOU expires in 2028.
A bipartisan bill (S.554) already exists in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to begin this process, entitled the U.S.-Israel Defense Partnership Act of 2025, which authorizes joint projects with Israel in categories such as “countering unmanned systems…, anti-tunneling cooperation…(and) military stockpile authority.”
Conspicuously absent from this policy review is any discussion of US complicity in the destruction of Gaza. This debate should be raised first and set the terms for a serious reconsideration of the US-Israel alliance.
On October 20, Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Human Rights, released a new report entitled ‘Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime’. A summary of her report follows:
“The ongoing genocide in Gaza is a mass crime, supported by the complicity of influential third states that have enabled Israel’s years of systematic violations of international law. Framed by colonial narratives that dehumanize the humanity of the Palestinian people, this livestreamed atrocity has been facilitated by third states’ direct support, material aid, diplomatic protection, and, in some cases, active participation. It has exposed unprecedented rifts. It is a betrayal of the trust between peoples and their governments on which the world’s peace and security depend. The world is now on the brink of collapse and hope for renewal of the international rule of law. Renewal is only possible if complicity is confronted, accountability is met, and justice is upheld.”
We call on all members of the Senate and House Foreign Affairs Committees to read the United Nations report and invite United Nations experts to testify at hearings on U.S. complicity and participation in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Palestine.
Moving forward with consideration of a new memorandum of understanding or arms transfers with Israel without first conducting such a serious and objective policy review will only perpetuate the endless wars that all leaders, including President Trump, continue to say they want to end.
