Peace in Gaza Depends on Palestinians’ Right to Remain – and Return
Amid some extremely cautious optimism for peace following a tenuous and incomplete ceasefire in Gaza, any hope for Gaza’s future depends significantly on a little-noticed point in President Donald Trump’s original 20-point peace plan.
The plan’s twelfth point says, “No one will be forced to leave Gaza, and those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return.” The plan goes even further, saying, “We will encourage people to stay and offer them the opportunity to build a better Gaza.”
Although there are reasons to doubt many elements of the Trump “peace plan” – which neither side has agreed to in full – the assertion that no one will be forced to leave Gaza represents a major reversal: prior Israeli and U.S. government policy clearly aimed to force some or all Palestinians from the Strip.
Indeed, Trump’s previous plan to turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” involved displacing Palestinians outside the Strip. Last March, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated his support for the “realization of the Trump plan” and what some Israeli and U.S. leaders euphemistically called “voluntary migration.”
“This is the plan. We are not hiding it,” Netanyahu said. That same month, the Israeli cabinet approved the creation of a so-called Voluntary Emigration Bureau charged with moving Palestinians out of Gaza and to other countries such as Libya, Indonesia, and the Republic of the Congo.
The mass expulsion of Palestinians by the Israeli government has been a major feature of the last two years of violence following the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas and allied forces, which resulted in the deaths of around 1,200 Israelis and foreigners. In a new report published by Brown University’s Costs of War Project, I compiled the best available international data to document how the Israeli military has displaced almost everyone in Gaza over the past two years: 2,026,636 people or around 92 percent of the Strip’s pre-war population. Many have been displaced multiple times: on average, three to four times for every displaced person. Around 45 percent of the displaced have been kids.
The displacement has extended to the West Bank, where some Israeli leaders have also supported ethnic cleansing. In the last two years, 43,624 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have been displaced from their homes by the Israeli military and police forces, government-backed Israeli settlers, Israeli government demolition orders, and other violent causes. Broader Israeli and U.S. wars in the region have displaced an additional 3.2 million people in Iran, Lebanon, and Israel itself, as well as what are likely thousands more in Yemen and Syria.
According to numerous experts, the mass displacement of Palestinians – nearly 12,000 per day on average in Gaza alone – constitutes the war crime of “forcible transfer,” which is a crime against humanity under international law. Senators Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley concluded in a September 2025 report that “the facts demonstrated overwhelmingly” that Israel was “implementing a plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians and dealing a death blow to the vision of a future Palestinian state that would include Gaza and the West Bank.” Any implementation of the original Trump plan to displace Palestinians to other countries would constitute further war crimes and ethnic cleansing. It would also continue a pattern of ethnic cleansing dating to the founding of the Israeli state in 1948 and Israeli military forces’ expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians in what Palestinians call the Nakba – the catastrophe.
The lives of millions of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and ultimately the lives of millions of Israelis, hang in the balance as the world waits to see if Netanyahu’s government abides by the current ceasefire and commits to a full end to its war or if it re-commences its assault and genocide as it has in prior ceasefires.
Since the announcement of a deal last week, thousands of displaced Palestinians have filled roads walking in search of their homes in a vast landscape of grey rubble. The sight of people trying to return home amid such destruction offers a glimmer of hope while reflecting the immensity of the challenges ahead.
“I’m going to Gaza City even though there are no conditions for life there – no infrastructure, no fresh water,” one of the displaced, Naim Irheem, insisted to one of the few news outlets reporting from Gaza. “Everything is extremely difficult, truly difficult, but we must go back. My son was killed, all my daughters were wounded. Still, I want to return. We’ll pitch a tent and live in it, however it can be done.”
Ending the displacement of Palestinians as well as the mass killing and destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure are clear requirements for anything approaching peace. Israeli and U.S. leaders must commit to the Trump peace plan’s promise that no one will be expelled from Gaza.
This promise—and the entire peace process – may prove to be yet another cynical ruse, much like the Israeli government calling past expulsion “voluntary migration.” For now, supporters of peace must work to ensure that no one will be forced to leave Gaza, that the displaced can return home as international law requires, and that they receive aid and reparations for their displacement.
These must be among the first steps toward real peace and justice that will require holding perpetrators accountable for their crimes and addressing Palestinians’ rightful demands to return to homes from which they were displaced beginning in 1948.
Reprinted from Foreign Policy in Focus.
David Vine is a political anthropologist and contributor to the Costs of War Project.
The Unvanquished Will: Gaza’s Triumph of Spirit Against the Architecture of Genocide
by Ramzy Baroud | Oct 27, 2025 |
For the last two years, my social media algorithm has been relentlessly dominated by Gaza, particularly by the voices of ordinary Gazans, displaying a blend of emotions that centers on two core principles: grief and defiance.
Grief has characterized life in Gaza for many years, a consequence of successive Israeli wars, the unrelenting siege, and habitual bombardment. The last two years, marked by genocide and famine, however, have redefined that grief in a way almost incomprehensible to the Palestinians themselves.
Yes, Palestine has endured numerous massacres before, during, and since the Nakba – the tragic destruction of the Palestinian homeland. But those massacres were typically episodic, each distinctively marked by specific historical circumstances. Each is incorporated into the Palestinian collective psyche as proof of Israeli barbarity, but also as a demonstration of their own enduring resilience as a people.
I grew up in a Gaza refugee camp where we commemorated each massacre with rallies, general strikes, and artistic expressions. We knew the victims and immortalized them through chants, political graffiti, poetry and the like.
The war of extermination launched by Israel against Gaza in the last two years has fundamentally changed all of that. On a single day, October 31, 2023, the Israeli army killed 704 Palestinians, and 120 in the Jabaliya refugee camp alone. Single bombs would annihilate hundreds in one strike, often in hospitals, refugee shelters, or UN schools. Massacres were taking place every day, everywhere.
There was no time to reflect on any of these massacres, to pray for the victims, or even to bury them with proper dignity. All that Gazans could do was desperately try to cling to life itself, bury their loved ones in mass graves, and use their own bare hands to dig out the wounded and dead from underneath the massive slabs of concrete and mountains of rubble. Thousands remain unaccounted for, and about a quarter of a million Gazans have been killed and wounded.
The tally will continue to grow, and the degree of devastation keeps worsening, even now that the rate of killing has subsided. But why, then, does my social media feed continue to show Palestinians openly celebrating their victory? Why are Gaza’s children, though gaunt and exhausted due to the famine, continuing to perform traditional debka dances? Why is 5-year-old Maria Hannoun, one of Gaza’s many influencers, continuing to recite the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and sending fiery messages to US President Donald Trump that Gaza will never be defeated?
To say that ‘Gazans are built differently’ is a massive understatement. I have spent the last twenty years dedicated to academic research on the people‘s history of Palestine, focusing heavily on Gaza, and I still find their collective will astonishing. They seem to have made a shared, conscious decision: the metrics for their defeat or victory would be entirely separate from those used by the media covering the war.
These measures are rooted in resistance as a foundational choice. Core values like Karamah (dignity), Izza (pride), and Sabr (patience), among others, are the standards by which Gaza judges its performance. And, by these profound standards, the people of the genocide and famine-stricken Strip have won this war.
Because these values are often ignored or misinterpreted in war coverage, many have found Gaza’s response to the ceasefire, one of unbridled joy and celebration, confusing. The scene of mothers waiting for their sons to be released in a large celebration in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza, was particularly illuminating. They cried bitterly, while clapping and ululating all at once. One mother perfectly clarified the paradox for a reporter: the tears were for the sons and daughters killed in the war, and the ululating was for the ones being released.
News media, however, rarely understands the complexity of the Gaza survival paradigm. Some, including Israeli military analysts, have concluded that Benjamin Netanyahu has lost the war because he failed to achieve any of his declared objectives. Others speak of some kind of Israeli victory simply because Israel managed to obliterate nearly the whole of Gaza and a large section of its population.
Each side uses numbers and figures to back up their claims. Yet, Palestinians in Gaza view this situation in a fundamentally different way. They understand that Israel’s war was ultimately an attempt to destroy their very peoplehood – to shatter their spirit, disorient their culture, turn them against one another, and ultimately eradicate the core essence of being Palestinian.
Gazans celebrate precisely because they know Israel has failed. The Palestinian nation has emerged even more deeply rooted in its identity, both in Gaza and elsewhere. The child singing of the martyrs, the civil defense workers dancing the debka for their fallen comrades, and the woman using the wreckage of a destroyed Israeli Merkava tank to air her laundry – all these images speak of a nation unified by its love for life and its fierce commitment to shared values of valor, honor, and love.
Some analysts, trying to find a more nuanced and reasoned conclusion, have resolved that neither Israel won the war, nor were Palestinians defeated. While this balanced approach can be appreciated in terms of the strategic reading of the ceasefire, it is still profoundly incorrect when understood against the backdrop of popular Palestinian culture. For ordinary people, survival, continuity, and self-assertion are the ultimate signs of victory against Israel, a country that does not hesitate to use genocide for temporary political gains. The core of their triumph is simply this: they remain.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His forthcoming book, ‘Before the Flood,’ will be published by Seven Stories Press. His other books include ‘Our Vision for Liberation’, ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
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