Gaza crisis demands a return to political reality

Mourners at the funeral of Palestinians killed overnight in Israeli attacks at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza, yesterday. The stakes for Palestine, the Middle East and indeed Israel itself are too high for further disruptive proposals. ReutersShow less

As efforts to reach a ceasefire in the Gaza war continue, the latest pronouncement from Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz that the country’s military work on a proposal to “concentrate” thousands of the enclave’s remaining Palestinians in a so-called humanitarian city serves only to shine more light on the daily death and destruction taking place in Palestine.

At a time when Palestinians in Gaza are being killed at aid distribution points or bombed from the air, the idea that forcibly displacing them and cornering them could lead to an improvement in their lives is a disturbing one. This plan is just the latest in a series of mendacious and unrealistic proposals for Gaza that waste time and diplomatic energy that could be better spent producing genuine solutions.

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In fact, a similarly incongruous proposal came from Mr Katz in January last year. Presented to 27 EU foreign ministers during a meeting in Brussels to discuss the war, Mr Katz showed the European representatives videos of an artificial island to be built off the Gazan coast. The EU's High Commissioner for Foreign Affairs, Josep Borrell, later told a news briefing that “the minister could have made better use of his time and focus on the security of his country, bearing in mind the high number of deaths in Gaza”.

The stakes for Palestine, the Middle East and the Israeli public are much too high for further timewasting or disruptive proposals that are clearly unworkable and unacceptable. In Gaza itself, amid the suffering of the Palestinian civilians there, some 50 Israeli hostages are still being held after being kidnapped during the brutal Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023.

The idea that the military responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths can be trusted to guard any kind of humanitarian operation is unworkable

Sadly, however, more speculative contributions are coming to light; experts have been alarmed by reports that an American official, quoted anonymously in US news outlet The Hill, said that the Middle East’s borders are “illusory”, dismissing the sovereignty of a number of nation states.

It is time to come back to political reality. The overwhelming majority of the international community agree on the need to end the war in Gaza, to get humanitarian aid to its suffering inhabitants, to stop the creeping Israeli annexation of the West Bank and to move from merely “managing” the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to bringing it to a negotiated end. The possibility of peace in the region – that includes all the countries of the Middle East – cannot be met without a path to Palestinian statehood, with peace and security for Palestinians and Israelis.

Reconvening the high-level UN conference on the two-state solution that was postponed by the Iran-Israel war would be a good place to start. No-one should object to good-faith proposals or fresh thinking about how to resolve this conflict’s many related aspects, such as reaching a ceasefire, releasing Palestinians held in Israeli detention, rebuilding Gaza and encouraging consensus among Palestinian factions so they can eventually deliver good governance for their people. But proposals such as an Israeli-run “humanitarian city” amid the ashes of Gaza do not offer real solutions nor serve regional peace.