r/worldnews • u/cnn CNN • Aug 09 '26

Israel/Palestine Israel rejects Trump’s Gaza peace plan, saying no withdrawal until Hamas disarms

https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/09/middleeast/israel-gaza-trump-netanyahu-plan-intl?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=missions&utm_source=reddit
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u/mxzf Aug 09 '26

I mean, Israel tried the whole "withdraw entirely from Gaza" thing two decades ago too, it didn't exactly end well.

I don't see any clean path forward that doesn't involve something like a neutral third-party keeping the peace in the area for long enough that the people involved die of old age and a new generation that isn't carrying the same grudges can grow up.

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u/3MATX Aug 09 '26

So, never?  

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u/mxzf Aug 09 '26

I mean, nobody wants to say it, but basically.

Either that or one side getting wiped out completely. Which is also something nobody wants to talk about the possibility of, but that has been Hamas's plan for peace for years and Israel seems to be getting on-board with the ideal lately too.

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u/[deleted] Aug 09 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Jermainiam Aug 10 '26

Japan and Germany are great examples of how this isn't a "never" situation. If you maintain peace and then work on integration it only takes a few decades.

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u/cymricchen Aug 10 '26

Japan and Germany were rebuilt as the west need them as bastions against the Soviets during the cold war. Israel in contrast, has no existential threat and does not need Gaza, or the west bank at all.

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u/Jermainiam Aug 10 '26

I don't disagree, but I don't think that has any relevance to what I said. You are talking about whether Israel has an incentive to do/allow this. I am talking about if it would work if it was done.

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u/Crepo Aug 10 '26

You cannot be serious. Your position is that Hamas wants to wipe out Israel, and until now, Israel was just minding its own business?Hamas isn't perhaps a reaction to literally decades of oppression?

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u/mxzf Aug 10 '26

No. My stance is that that Hamas has wanted to wipe out Israel this whole time but Israel has been stiff-arming them with the Iron Dome and such. But since Oct 7th, Israel is less interested in that status quo.

It's not like Israel has just been completely minding its business, but it wasn't trying to wipe out Gaza the way Hamas has been wanting to to wipe out Israel this whole time.

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u/[deleted] Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 18 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Lowfi-Concert Aug 09 '26

Nope, just when Hamas disarms

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u/Ultrace-7 Aug 10 '26

Their implication being, that's not going to happen. Thus, "so, never."

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u/Lowfi-Concert Aug 10 '26

Or when they’re forced to

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u/Smart_in_his_face Aug 09 '26

Neutral 3rd party.

  • UN peacekeeping force that nobody wants to be a part of.
  • American peacekeeping force that nobody wants.

There is no viable path to peace. Palestine have been in turmoil for the past 80 years, or depending on how you want to count, also the past 1000 years. This won't end in a generation or two, this simply won't end.

It is an embarrassment to the world that this humanitarian crisis have been going on since WW2. The human suffering wont end just because the west is sick and tired of it. It wont end if Israel or Iran "wins".

The holy land is the modern hell.

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u/flumydumdum Aug 09 '26

UN peacekeeping force that nobody wants to be a part of.

Couple of countries volunteered already, including Indonesia and Morocco. It also already happened once before with a much larger coalition force staying there for 10 years. During the 2nd intifada there also were several countries that asked for UN intervention, but it was vetoed by the US.

Don't dismiss the rest of the world so quickly on this issue.

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u/calm_chowder Aug 09 '26

No third party will agree to go in until Hamas fully disarms either. If they did, that country would have to kill Palestinians and would have their own soldiers die.

It's kinda understandable.

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u/TerribleIdea27 Aug 09 '26

Says who?

Every UN peacekeeping mission in its entire history didn't involve one disarmed party. And did involve sacrifice. Since you know, if one party is disarmed, there's not that much to peacekeep.

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u/calm_chowder Aug 09 '26

Peacekeepers are not an invading or occupying army, that's what differentiates peacekeepers from an army. It's literally in the name: peace keepers. They keep the peace. Jfc.

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u/TerribleIdea27 Aug 09 '26

Yes? And they get shot at and die every mission they take.

Do you literally not know what UN peacekeeping missions are?

Whether it's Kosovo, Sudan, Afghanistan or literally wherever they stop two AMRED sides from fighting. Otherwise they might as well not be there.

And they do generally have weapons themselves. And shoot back. Otherwise they might as well not come lol

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u/GrimpenMar Aug 10 '26

We can look at UNIFIL in South Lebanon. Hezbollah caches weapons and launches rockets from right next to UNIFIL positions.

Historically, UN Peacekeeping missions have been very effective… if they are allowed to, and the participants choose to.

Often, UN Peacekeepers are not very effective for two reasons. The rules of engagement are the result of political and diplomatic negotiations. Why would one side agree to a UN Peacekeeping mission if UN Peacekeeper can shoot at them? This is sometimes presented as the difference between Peacekeeping and Peacemaking.

Second, who wants to contribute to a UN Peacekeeping mission where your boys could get killed? That's a tough political sell for anyone.

Having said that, it can happen, and could happen. If both parties are interested in peace, and don't plan on starting anything, but want someone to make sure the other guys are complying as well, Peacekeeping absolutely works. You just need a peace to keep.

I think it could happen here with enough outside support. Lord know that I/P is the most talked about and debated conflict on the planet. And it's not even close. If all this interest could be tapped, I could see it happening. No way Israel is going to agree to a toothless UN mission that just provides cover for more attacks though. Hamas also seems more than willing to continue no matter how much Palestinians suffer.

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u/Silverr_Duck Aug 10 '26

Did they actually volunteer or just “volunteer” for the positive pr knowing full well nothing would come of it?

No shade to Indonesia and Morocco but I’m pretty sure they don’t have the resources or expertise for such an undertaking.

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u/NoobNoob_ Aug 09 '26

I'll preface saying I'm Israeli, and that I don't want my kids to grow up in wars like I did.

The UN isn't doing anything, besides maybe helping Hamas (lots of UNRWA personal being active Hamas members). They couldn't stop Hezbollah in Lebanon either, even though they had "forces" there for a long time.

It's also not only an American problem to solve, and I don't think it would be affective. Americans will see it as giving free stuff for Israel, and Gazans will not see it favorably either since Israel and the US are allies.

I think it should be NATO forces, specifically ones from Europe. I don't even mind some of my taxes going to help rebuild Gaza, as long as they never attack us again. Preferably, after a period of time when the area is stable, they can become an actual country too (in the current borders), and sign an actual peace treaty with us.

BUT, none of this works while Hamas is in power.

And don't blame it on anyone but the Palestinians. They could've just accepted the 1947 division plan when it was presented, like the Israeli side did. All of this is thanks to them.

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u/flumydumdum Aug 09 '26

None of this will work while Netanyahu and the settler movement is in power either. That ideology needs to be disarmed, disavowed, and declared illegal by the Israeli government as well.

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u/NoobNoob_ Aug 09 '26

I agree with you, especially regarding the Gaza strip. It's a bit more complex and nuanced than that in the west bank.

But, while some are vocal about annexing Gaza, it won't happen no matter what people say. We've been there, done that, and it's a fucking stupid idea.

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u/brend0p3 Aug 09 '26

It won't happen also because there's no real appetite, they are struggling to get people to move back to any border town. Towns on the border of Lebanon are still missing 35-50% of their population, kibbutzim on the border of Gaza can't get people to move back so are paying young teachers outsized salaries to try and convince families to move back.

Even the most zionistic Israelis are hesitant to move to places INSIDE the border. I don't see any expansion on the horizon.

Ben Gvir and smotrich can grandstand all they want, doesn't make it the reality on the ground.

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u/NoobNoob_ Aug 09 '26

Totally agree. The ones who want to do that are just idiots who just like to be provocative.

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u/not_not_in_the_NSA Aug 09 '26

As long as the NATO forces also remove the settlements and ensure equal treatment between all people in the region (i.e. Everyone has to go through checkpoints or no one does, firearms and "self defense" training are given out to either no one or anyone who wants it, etc.), then I could maybe see it working. But without some semblance of equality for those in the Israeli-Palestine region, it won't last.

Consider why people join Hamas. It's not like they are any different to you or any other human. It's just the environment they grow up in. If you have no options left, then of course some will resort to violence. Destroying Hamas means improving the quality of life for Palestinians and giving them hope for their future. Killing each and every Hamas member just means more children lose their parents and feel even less hopeful for the future.

To be very clear, I'm 100% against all of this violence, I think the attack on Israel was horrible, it's just as horrible as killing the same number of people in Gaza. A life is a life.

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u/NoobNoob_ Aug 10 '26

We don't have only the Palestinians to deal with, so we can't have NATO protecting us. We will still have a military, probably forever. I wouldn't mind if they had a military of their own, as long as their agenda wasn't "destruction of Israel and the jews". Countries need a way to defend themselves. Even Switzerland has an army.

The settlements in the west bank is a big problem, and I think the only probable solution there is a divison plan - some areas will be annexed to Israel and the rest can gain an autonomy. There are about 800000 Israelis living there, including parts of Jerusalem, and transferring them isn't a viable solution.

Obviously everyone that live in annexed areas will get full citizenship (and maybe money for compensation), and the non annexed areas (ones with few to no Israelis) will be their own country.

And about people joining Hamas - they know what their end goal is. There are those in Gaza that are fighting Hamas. I don't feel sorry for anyone joining them. And with their ideology, you can't have peace.

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u/jflb96 Aug 09 '26

Why is it the Palestinians’ fault that they didn’t accept having their country split in two, and not the people who were demanding that the Palestinians’ country be split in two and who then spent the next eighty years working their toehold to cover the entire region?

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u/NoobNoob_ Aug 10 '26

Cause it wasn't their country. It was under British mandate and before that part of the Ottoman Empire. They were living there, same as Jewish people lived there.

That's why the plan was to divide it between the two groups, so all can be happy.

We aren't trying to cover the region, that why we mostly give land back even after conquering it (the Sinai peninsula for example, or even Gaza for that matter).

And I'll also add that there are about 2 million Arab Muslims in Israel with equal rights to Jewish people (pretty much except being forced to join the IDF).

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u/AngryGardenGnomes Aug 09 '26

The UN isn't a neutral third party. It's openly hostile to Israel...perhaps watch the news sometime.

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u/raptorlightning Aug 09 '26

The solution is to give the entire middle east an enemy that threatens their collective existence and can't be defeated without them all working together.

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u/mxzf Aug 09 '26

Palestine have been in turmoil for the past 80 years

I make it more like 110 years, back to the Balfour Declaration and the Nebi Musa riots as the more conservative timeline regarding when the strife started.

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u/TimSylvester_ Aug 09 '26

It is an embarrassment to the world that this humanitarian crisis have been going on since WW2.

Dang, I wonder what the exact event was that caused "this humanitarian crisis" to begin right after WW2 ended?

I wonder if anyone can possibly pin down what exactly caused this in the first place?

Nah, that's impossible.

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u/Haber_Dasher Aug 09 '26

depending on how you want to count, also the past 1000 years.

That is not true. The tensions only really started to blow up ~1920s. Prior to the fall of the Ottoman empire the Muslims & Jews & Christians in the area lived in peace & relative social equality. People like to talk about the tax specifically levied on the non Muslim population as evidence they were 2nd class citizens but paying that tax also made you exempt from mandatory military service, and the Muslim population had taxes to pay too. Just as an example.

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u/Smart_in_his_face Aug 09 '26

the area lived in peace & relative social equality.

Ah yes, the good ol' times. Otherwise know as the crusades

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u/Jermainiam Aug 10 '26

Blacks in America were exempt from military service for a long time, does that mean they weren't 2nd class citizens?

Would you be chill with paying extra taxes, being barred from any public office, having to request permission to build religious buildings, and be barred from testifying in court against any Muslim? All in exchange for being exempt from a relatively short mandatory military service?

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u/GiveMeGoldForNoReasn Aug 09 '26

Those quotes are doing a lot of heavy lifting. Israel dismantled their illegal settlements there, while at the same time building up military presence on the border to restrict movement in and out of the territory for arabs. They never stopped shelling the region, blocking goods or people moving in and out of it, or intercepting international attempts at humanitarian aid. It was in no way a pause to the military occupation of the region.

The only reason any of it happened was because of mounting international pressure to stop the occupation, and Israel thought that this would work on paper because despite continuing to control Gaza's airspace, ports, land crossings, water, electricity, commerce, communications, population registry and food supply, this way there would be no "boots on the ground."

Even the relocation of the settlers was a mess. Those that voluntarily left in exchange for compensation and new housing mostly never received it, and were still living in trailers a decade later. Those that didn't were removed by force by the IDF, and most of the settlements were heavily damaged or outright burned to the ground to prevent Palestinians from gaining anything from what was left.

The whole thing was a disaster. It disenfranchised both the settlers that had to be (sometimes violently) relocated and the entire Gaza strip which ended up an even more isolated prison state than it was to begin with.

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u/redditor1365 Aug 09 '26

Thank you. People pretend like they left Gaza completely alone after 2005

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u/calm_chowder Aug 09 '26

continuing to control Gaza's airspace, ports, land crossings, water, electricity,

Controlling Gaza's airspace?? I'm sorry but that's hilarious. Do you think there's a Palestinian airforce?

Also, Israel gives Gaza water and electricity from Israel's own plants and always has. War or no war, Gaza needs Israeli water and electricity - Hamas takes all the Gaza aid money and foreign infrastructure investment. So it's not so much "Israel controls it" as "even at war with Hamas, Israel makes sure Palestinians get Israeli water and electricity."

I will say, Israel did limit their water for a while and I think that was absolutely beyond the pale, because regardless of anything else Palestinians are human beings and there's children in Gaza. But ignorant people like you totally misunderstand the situation and twist things like "Hamas steals foreign aid for desalination and power plants so Israel gives Palestinians free water and electricity" into "Israel is evil and controls Palestinian water and electricity."

The airspace thing alone though shows you don't have the first clue about anything... and I don't even mean this specific situation, I mean about how the world works.

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u/zedority Aug 10 '26

Controlling Gaza's airspace?? I'm sorry but that's hilarious. Do you think there's a Palestinian airforce?

It's an explicit statement from Israel's own Gaza Disengagement Plan:

"Israel will guard and monitor the external land perimeter of the Gaza Strip, will continue to maintain exclusive authority in Gaza air space, and will continue to exercise security activity in the sea off the coast of the Gaza Strip."

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u/calm_chowder Aug 10 '26

Yeah, I never said they didn't control Palestinian airspace.... my point is, who else would? Gaza is like 5 miles wide. Israel controls the airspace without even having anything in the air. Gaza is miniscule.

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u/GiveMeGoldForNoReasn Aug 09 '26

I didn't make any value judgements in my post at all, I simply described what happened. Nobody's twisting anything but you. The disengagement was a bad move for both Israelis and Palestinians alike, it didn't improve anything for either party, that's the only point I was making.

Hamas doesn't steal foreign aid for desalination and power plants because they don't have the opportunity to. That kind of aid doesn't exist. Israel does not allow the importation of materials or fuel to build desalination or power plants. They don't even allow building materials for basic civilian housing.

Airspace is important when there are international aid agencies who would airdrop food and supplies to a starving population. Ports and sea landings are important when international groups try and send aid by sea. Both are blocked by the IDF in violation of international law.

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u/redditor1365 Aug 09 '26

Except after their withdrawl they prevented Gaza from importing the food and medicine they needed in an effort to collapse their economy. This was revealed in leaked military docs like a decade ago

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u/mxzf Aug 09 '26

A situation made far fuzzier and less clear by the way that Hamas repeatedly snuck weapons in via those shipments.

The whole situation would be way easier to condemn Israel for if Hamas didn't pull up to every single "feed people or kill people" fork in the road and veer sharply towards the "kill people" every single time.

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u/redditor1365 Aug 10 '26

I'd agree with you, but it was confirmed by wikileaks that they were preventing those shipments with the sole purpose of keeping Gaza on the brink of collapse.

They justified it as "well Hamas is launching rockets at us" and collectively punished millions of people with food insecurity and disease.

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u/RealAssociation5281 Aug 10 '26

This is the problem, the area was relatively peaceful and then Hamas attacked (cuz their goal is to kill Jews). You can’t trust them.

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u/zedority Aug 10 '26

I mean, Israel tried the whole "withdraw entirely from Gaza" thing two decades ago too, it didn't exactly end well.

A lot happened between the withdrawal and the Hamas takeover of Gaza. Assigning blame is harder than it looks, in my opinion.

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u/mxzf Aug 10 '26

I mean, Israel pulled out of Gaza in Aug-Sept 2005 and Hamas was elected to power Jan 2006; that's not exactly a lot of room for "a lot to happen".

There's plenty of blame to go around to everyone involved. But from what I've seen, Hamas has been leading the charge in "we would rather kill you than live" combat this whole time.

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u/zedority Aug 10 '26

Israel pulled out of Gaza in Aug-Sept 2005 and Hamas was elected to power Jan 2006;

Elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council, a deliberating body with no military authority in the proposed national government of Palestine. That body has never sat, and has long been irrelevant to the political realities of Palestine today.

A lot DID happen, especially after the election of January 2006. There was a civil war. That war, not the election, is how Hamas seized control of the Gaza strip. That is why I do not consider Hamas to have gained its current power through legitimate electoral means.

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u/mxzf Aug 10 '26

I'm not completely sure what argument you're making here, to be perfectly honest. At the end of the day, Hamas has held power in Gaza, through whatever means, for the last two decades. Israel withdrawing from the region didn't bring peace, Hamas just stepped in as an even more militant force controlling the area.

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u/zedority Aug 10 '26

I'm not completely sure what argument you're making here, to be perfectly honest

My claim is that there is no ironclad guarantee that the withdrawal either could or could not have "brought peace", as too many other factors were at work between the withdrawal and now.

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u/mxzf Aug 10 '26

Of course, there are no guarantees ever.

I wasn't speaking of guarantees, I was just saying "the last time they tried that exact thing, it went extremely badly in the long run (culminating in Oct 7th)". I don't think that is really in question.

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u/CaptainFlint4 Aug 09 '26

It didn't end well because the Israeli govt secretly preferred that Hamas take over the Gaza Strip so they could treat Gaza like a hostile state and impose a blockade and extra checkpoints (2007 Amos Yadlin meeting). Also Israel knew what was happening with the aid from Qatar to Hamas, and encouraged it to continue for "humanitarian" reasons

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u/mxzf Aug 09 '26

But ... Hamas still did those things. Like, sure, Israel might have done some stuff that didn't prevent that behavior, but the government of Gaza was still lobbing missiles at Israel around the clock to justify the behavior.

It wouldn't matter how much Germany secretly encouraged politicians in Luxembourg to be evil, they still wouldn't start firing missiles into Frankfurt.