UN Security Council backs Trump’s Gaza peace plan

What happened

The United Nations Security Council Monday voted 13-0 to endorse President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan for peace in Gaza. Russia and China abstained, saying the U.S. resolution did not adequately pave the way for Palestinian self-determination, but they did not veto the plan. Hamas objected, saying the disarmament mandate of the newly authorized international stabilization force “strips it of its neutrality, and turns it into a party to the conflict in favor of the occupation.”

Who said what

The U.S. resolution “enshrines” Trump’s “complete plan in international law,” The Washington Post said. Its “vaguely defined Board of Peace, headed by Trump with membership chosen by him,” will “control virtually every aspect from security and governance to reconstruction of Gaza” through at least 2027.

The board will supervise a “technocratic, apolitical committee of competent Palestinians” to run “day-to-day operations” in Gaza, the resolution said. It will also establish an international force to take over security in the half of the enclave not occupied by Israel, and ensure the “process of demilitarizing the Gaza Strip” and the “permanent decommissioning of weapons from non-state armed groups.”

Israel is instructed to withdraw from Gaza in stages, but the plan “is — in short — a hornet’s nest,” Tim Lister and Nic Robertson said at CNN. “The sequencing will be hard to manage” and disarming Hamas will be “complex.” The “Muslim and Arab countries expected to send soldiers to Gaza — Egypt, Indonesia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates” — said they first needed U.N. Security Council authorization to ensure “their troops would not be viewed by their own populations as occupiers in Gaza,” The New York Times said.

What next?

In a social media post, Trump offered his “congratulations to the World on the incredible Vote” and said it “will go down as one of the biggest approvals in the History of the United Nations” and “lead to further Peace all over the World.” It was a “significant diplomatic victory for Trump’s ambitions to bring peace to the Middle East,” The Wall Street Journal said. But the resolution “still leaves questions about the future of Gaza unanswered, including whether there is a credible path to Palestinian statehood.”

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