By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies
NEW YORK | 27 October 2025 (IDN) — On 4 October 2025, in an interview with Axios, President Trump stressed that one of the main goals behind his Gaza plan was to restore Israel’s international standing. “Bibi took it very far and Israel lost a lot of support in the world,” Trump said. “Now I am gonna get all that support back.”
Under Trump’s plan, a supposed ceasefire took effect on 10 October. But Israel only withdrew from less than half of the Gaza Strip and killed at least 93 people in the next two weeks, after killing at least that many per day for the previous two years. Israel has only allowed 15% of the humanitarian aid called for in the plan to enter Gaza, and has kept the critical Rafah crossing from Egypt into Gaza closed. The daily life-and-death struggle to find food, water and shelter carries on unabated for two million people in Gaza.
While the reduction in the daily scale of Israel’s mass murder is obviously welcome, this is not a real ceasefire. Like previous Israeli ceasefires in Gaza, as in Lebanon, this is a one-sided ceasefire that Israel violates at will, daily, with no accountability.
This is only the first part of Trump’s plan for Gaza, and there is still no agreement on the other parts, such as the disarmament of Hamas, who provide the only government and police force in Gaza. They now have the added job of protecting their people from Israel-backed criminal gangs and death squads, some with links to ISIS, who prey on them from the Israeli-occupied areas, stealing aid supplies, assassinating local leaders and terrorising the population.
Hamas is obviously not going to disarm under these conditions, and previously said it would only surrender its weapons once Palestine has an internationally recognised government with its own armed forces. On the other side, Israel has not agreed to other parts of Trump’s plan, such as its withdrawal from the rest of Gaza, nor to any plan for the future of Palestine.
In the United States, where corrupt politicians and corporate media take U.S. and Israeli lies at face value or even repeat them as statements of fact, some may believe that Trump’s plan has resolved the crisis in Palestine. The rest of the world is not so naive or easy to manipulate. Still, many other governments are also beholden to oligarchies that profit from trade, investment and arms deals with Israel, even as the public in those same countries reels in shock at Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians and U.S.-backed impunity for its crimes.
A shortcut back to “business as usual”
Trump’s Gaza plan, like much of his foreign policy, cynically exploits the greed and fear of political leaders and their oligarch patrons. Admitting that Israel has “lost a lot of support in the world,” he offers a shortcut back to “business as usual” for governments eager to protect—and even expand—profitable ties despite Israel’s ongoing atrocities and open contempt for international law.
In his first term, Trump brokered the “Abraham Accords,” normalisation deals between Israel and Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco, and Sudan that included mutual recognition and expanded trade. He now has his eye on the big prize: Saudi Arabia.
But Arab-Israeli relations have long been contested. In the 1949 UN General Assembly vote on Israel’s admission, all Arab and Muslim countries except Turkiye (which abstained) voted against recognising the state of Israel. Thirty-two predominantly Arab and Muslim countries, including some of its closest neighbours, still either don’t recognise Israel or have no diplomatic relations with it.
Despite decades of hostility, Trump persuaded Israel and some of these countries to support his Gaza plan with the promise of future benefits from normalisation and trade. But there is still a gaping chasm between Israel and these Arab and Muslim countries over Palestine. They say they will not recognise Israel unless Israel recognises Palestine, with full sovereignty over East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
But the foundational basis of Netanyahu’s Likud Party is its plan for a Greater Israel, to be formed by annexing all of occupied Palestine “between the sea and the Jordan.” And on 22 October, during Vice President Vance’s visit to Israel, the Knesset voted in favour of annexing the West Bank.
Trump unveiled his Gaza plan at the very end of the UN General Assembly’s annual high-level meeting in New York, where many world leaders spoke out for much more decisive international action against Israel. The New York Declaration, which 142 countries voted for, was the result of a conference in July led by France and Saudi Arabia that promised “concrete, timebound, coordinated action” to enforce a ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2024 that the Israeli occupation of Palestine is illegal and must be ended “as quickly as possible.”
ICJ’s new ruling
Trump’s initiative temporarily upstaged and marginalised calls for further action at the UN. But on 22 October, the ICJ issued a new ruling strongly condemning Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza, and ruling that, as an occupying power, Israel must ensure that the “basic needs” of the population are met, including food, water, fuel, shelter and medicine. The Court also ruled that Israel must permit UN staff working for UNRWA to do their work in Gaza, after Israel provided no evidence to the Court for its claim that UN staff were members of Hamas or took part in its October 2023 incursion into Israel.
In the wake of the ICJ decision, Norway said it would introduce a resolution in the UN General Assembly to enforce the Court’s directives, including ensuring the full amount of aid reaches Gaza. Humanitarian advocates hope that this resolution will be introduced in an Emergency Special Session under the “Uniting For Peace” option, enabling the UN to deliver the “concrete, timebound, coordinated action” it promised in July—potentially including sanctions such as an arms embargo and targeted trade and investment measures that should take effect within days if Israel continues to block aid.
Trump plainly intended his plan to close the book on Israel’s crimes—and on U.S. complicity—and to inaugurate a new phase: normalisation of the occupation and Israel’s diplomatic rehabilitation. Yet even before the ICJ condemned Israel’s starvation policy, people worldwide were already mobilising, urging their governments not to let Israel off the hook.
In Europe, momentum for accountability continues to build. As the British parliament debates a new pensions law, an amendment has been submitted to divest local government pension funds from companies that are complicit in the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine. Many local councils in the U.K. have already passed individual ordinances to do this, but the amendment to the pensions law would require all of them to divest their pension funds of the $16 billion they still hold in those firms.
In September, the European Union (EU) announced plans to suspend its 25-year-old free trade agreement with Israel and impose sanctions on extremist Cabinet cabinet members and settler leaders. On 20 October, it “paused” these steps in response to Trump’s plan, but EU leaders immediately faced strong pushback on that decision.
Over 400 former senior diplomats and officials signed a statement that the EU must take robust action “against spoilers and extremists” who would jeopardise “the establishment of a future Palestinian state,” noting that Trump’s plan only vaguely addressed that goal. International lawyers advised EU leaders that EU policy must comply with the 2024 ICJ ruling that the Israeli occupation is illegal and must be ended as quickly as possible.
Individual European countries, including Belgium, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Spain, already ban imports from illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine, and Ireland is currently debating a similar trade ban in its Occupied Territories Bill, which should get a final vote by January. The original bill would only affect trade in goods. Still, activists want trade in services included in the ban, while powerful business interests, including U.S. tech firms with European headquarters in Ireland, are lobbying to kill the bill altogether. 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, which is still grappling with the contradictions of Trump’s Gaza plan and Israel’s ongoing unlawful occupation, U.S. officials are already trying to turn the page—moving to fortify and expand Washington’s military alliance with Israel.
This alliance is renewed and updated every 10 years through a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the two governments, which is usually negotiated in 2026, before the previous MOU expires in 2028.
UN Special Rapporteur’s new report on “Gaza Genocide”
There’s already a bipartisan bill in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (S.554) to initiate this process, titled “United States-Israel Defence Partnership Act of 2025,” authorising joint projects with Israel under categories like “countering unmanned systems… anti-tunnel cooperation…(and) war reserves stockpile authority.”
Conspicuously absent from this policy review is any debate over U.S. complicity in Gaza’s destruction—a discussion that should come first and set the terms for any serious re-examination of the U.S.–Israel alliance.
On 20 October, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights, released a new report titled “Gaza Genocide: a Collective Crime.” Here is the summary of her report:
“The ongoing genocide in Gaza is a collective crime, sustained by the complicity of influential Third States that have enabled longstanding systemic violations of international law by Israel. Framed by colonial narratives that dehumanise the Palestinians, this live-streamed atrocity has been facilitated through Third States’ direct support, material aid, diplomatic protection and, in some cases, active participation. It has exposed an unprecedented chasm between people and their governments, betraying the trust on which global peace and security rest. The world now stands on a knife-edge between the collapse of the international rule of law and hope for renewal. Renewal is only possible if complicity is confronted, responsibilities are met, and justice is upheld.”
We urge all members of the Senate and House Foreign Relations Committees to read the UN report and to invite UN experts to testify at hearings on U.S. complicity and participation in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Palestine.
To move ahead with consideration of a new MOU or any arms transfers with Israel without first conducting such a serious and objective policy review would only serve to perpetuate the endless wars that all our leaders, including President Trump, keep telling us they want to end.
Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, now in a revised, updated 2nd edition. Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. <Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. [IDN-InDepthNews]
Image credit: Hosnysalah, Palestinian photographer currently living in the Gaza Strip. Source: Pixabay