THE recently concluded Gaza peace summit, sponsored by US president Donald J Trump before a US-Israel-imposed 20-point Gaza peace plan championed by the fragile peace initiative, was signed by the United States, Egypt, Qatar and Türkiye, with a couple of other world leaders acting as ‘cheerleaders.’ This presents a look of an international consensus. However, this framework, a US-orchestrated gathering resulting in an externally imposed 20-point plan, is structurally doomed to fail in its goal of ensuring lasting peace. Far from eliminating future Israeli atrocity crimes, this approach may inadvertently create the conditions for their recurrence by ignoring the root causes of the conflict, reinforcing power imbalances and mistaking a ceasefire for peace and justice. Most important, they both both fail to address the Palestinian statehood, neither in the summit declaration nor in the peace plan.
The first critical failure lies in the summit’s top-down, transactional nature. A peace plan, especially one composed of 20 detailed points, crafted by the United States and Israel and presented as aÌýfait accompli, lacks the essential ingredient for sustainability — ownership by the people that it is meant to govern. The Palestinian leadership, fractured and under immense duress, is presented with an ultimatum, not a partnership. Israel, accepting the plan under the unwavering patronage of the United States, has the knowledge that its primary ally has formalised the terms it desired.
The whole exercise replicates the failures of past agreements like the Oslo Accords in 1993, which created a Palestinian Authority tasked with managing the occupation without addressing its fundamental injustice. The current 20-point plan, however detailed, risks becoming another such mechanism, a managerial document for a perpetual state of conflict management rather than a transformative road map to justice and lasting peace. When peace is imposed, it is not a resolution but a temporary armistice, resentfully observed and easily shattered. The ‘absence of war’ that it creates is a cold, shaky peace and ripe for exploitation by all sides.
Any credible effort to prevent future atrocities must confront the underlying pathologies of the conflict. The summit and 20-point plan, as suggested by its framing, appears primarily focused on halting immediate hostilities to facilitate exchanging hostages. These are urgent humanitarian goals, but they are not synonymous with peace. The core drivers of violence, the decade-long occupation, the expansion of illegal settlements, the siege of Gaza and the systemic denial of Palestinian self-determination remain unaddressed.
Israeli atrocity crimes, documented by numerous rights organisations and international bodies, do not occur in a vacuum. They are facilitated by a context of impunity and a political-military strategy that views overwhelming force as the primary solution to a political problem. A summit that does not explicitly condition future relations and aid on the dismantlement of the Israeli settlement enterprise, the end of the occupation and adherence to international law is merely applying a bandage to a festering wound. Without dismantling the architecture of control and inequality, the structural violence will continue and the brutal kinetic violence will inevitably return. The plan may contain it temporarily, but it cannot eliminate it because it refuses to treat the cause.
The very composition and sponsorship of the summit reinforce the power asymmetry that lies at the heart of the conflict’s intractability. The United States, as Israel’s primary military, diplomatic and financial backer, has repeatedly shielded it from accountability at the UN Security Council, International Court of Justice and elsewhere. To have this same power act as the ‘honest broker’ in a peace summit is a contradiction in terms. It signals to Israel that its strategic position is unassailable and that its actions, however severe, will not result in tangible consequences.
This guaranteed impunity is the single greatest enabler of future atrocity crimes. When a state is assured that its military and political calculations will not be fundamentally altered by international censure, it has no strategic reason to change its behaviour. The 20-point plan, devoid of robust, independent enforcement mechanisms and consequences for violations, becomes merely a suggested code of conduct. History has showed that without punitive measures, such codes are routinely ignored. The other signatories —Ìý Egypt, Qatar and Türkiye — lack the leverage to counterbalance the US-Israel axis, reducing their role to that of legitimising a process they cannot control.
Finally, the summit’s fundamental error is the conflation of a ceasefire with a comprehensive peace. A ceasefire is a tactical pause, a humanitarian necessity to bury the dead and tend to the wounded. Peace, in contrast, is a political condition built on justice, mutual recognition, and security for all.
A 20-point plan focused on stopping the current round of fighting is almost certainly a mechanism for conflict suspension, not resolution. It may delineate steps for de-escalation, but it will, perhaps, sideline the more profound, thornier issues such as the right of return for Palestinian refugees, the withdrawal of illegal settlers, the status of Jerusalem, the fundamental rights of Palestinians and the Palestine statehood. By failing to create a framework for a just political solution that addresses Palestinian people’s aspirations and guarantees equal rights, the summit ensures that the underlying grievances fester. The resentment born from a peace perceived as unjust and imposed is a potent fuel for the next cycle of violence.
In conclusion, the fragile peace initiative summit, for all its diplomatic pomp, is built on a foundation of sand and the declaration contains a bunch of flowery words. The imposed 20-point plan, crafted within an unbalanced power structure and blind to the root causes of the conflict, cannot and will not eliminate Israel’s future atrocity crimes. It offers the ‘absence of war’ — a temporary, unstable quietism that benefits the powerful — while doing nothing to build the genuine peace that can only be achieved through justice, equality and an end to the oppressive structures that have defined this conflict for generations. True peace is not signed in summit halls by cheerleading heads of states. It is built painstakingly from the ground up, based on accountability and a fundamental rebalancing of power and rights. Without that, this initiative is destined to be another forgotten chapter in a long history of failed diplomacy and preventable suffering.
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Mohammad Abdur Razzak, a retired commodore of the Bangladesh navy, is a security analyst and a research director in the Osmani Centre for Peace and Security Studies.
