Will Trump’s Peace Plan for Gaza Actually Lead to the Next War in the Region?

Donald Trump wants to create peace in Gaza. He wants headlines that frame him as a historic dealmaker and a global statesman. But behind the carefully staged announcements and the language of “stability” and “prosperity,” Trump’s newly assembled Gaza peace structure reveals a misplaced trust in failed diplomatic elites, and fails to accurately account for Israel’s security realities.

The appointment of Sigrid Kaag to Trump’s Gaza Executive Board is emblematic of this problem.

Kaag is frequently portrayed as an experienced, neutral technocrat. Her defenders point to decades of United Nations service and her time as a Dutch minister as proof of professionalism. Yet in the Middle East, neutrality is not an abstract virtue; it has concrete consequences. And the institutional culture in which Kaag built her career has consistently betrayed Israel, while empowering those who undermine it.

This is not a personal attack. It is a political assessment.

For decades, the United Nations has approached the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a deeply flawed lens. Israel is treated as a permanent suspect, the Palestinian leadership as a perpetual victim, and terrorism as an unfortunate but contextualized byproduct of “despair.”

This framework did not begin with Kaag, but she rose within it, succeeded within it, and continues to represent it.

That same UN ecosystem once elevated Yasser Arafat from terrorist mastermind to international statesman, without demanding that he dismantle the machinery of violence. The results were catastrophic: waves of suicide bombings, incitement, and a peace process that collapsed under the weight of its own dishonesty.

The lesson should have been clear. Instead, the same thinking persists.

Figures like Kaag emphasize humanitarian access, reconstruction, and governance mechanisms while consistently avoiding the core issue: Gaza’s problems are not caused by a lack of international oversight, but by the systematic indoctrination of hatred and the glorification of violence. Without confronting that reality, no amount of technocratic management will bring peace.

Donald Trump’s political history shows a consistent pattern at times: grand gestures, dramatic announcements, and a hunger for recognition that can override strategic depth.

The Gaza peace plan features these elements, and that’s a bad omen for the future of peace in the region.

Rather than anchoring Gaza’s future in hard security guarantees for Israel, clear red lines against terror financing, and ideological deradicalization, Trump has surrounded himself with figures whose records suggest the opposite: a preference for “balance,” moral equivalence, and pressure on Israel to accommodate the unacceptable.

Unfortunately, it seems that Gaza is being used as a stage, not treated as a powder keg.

And Israel will pay the price if this experiment fails.

The composition of Trump’s Gaza councils should alarm anyone who understands the region. UN veterans, European moral arbiters, and political figures with long histories of criticizing Israel’s self-defense now sit at the table defining “peace.”

What is absent is just as telling as what is present.

There is no serious focus on dismantling terror ideology. No insistence on ending incitement. No recognition that Gaza’s suffering is directly linked to Hamas’ strategy of embedding itself within civilian infrastructure, and radicalizing the population against Israel.

Instead, Israel is once again expected to prove restraint, flexibility, and goodwill, while its enemies are treated as stakeholders rather than threats.

Trump’s defenders will argue that engagement is better than isolation, and that new structures are better than stalemate. But engagement without moral clarity is not diplomacy. It is delusion.

By empowering figures whose careers were shaped by institutions that consistently misinterpret Palestinian politics and excuse extremist behavior, Trump is not stabilizing Gaza. He is laying the groundwork for the next crisis.

Trump should prioritize hard truths over flattering headlines. He should reject failed diplomatic paradigms instead of recycling them. And he should stop mistaking international applause for strategic success.

Peace built on denial is not peace at all.

It is merely the pause before the next war.

Sabine Sterk is the CEO of Time To Stand Up For Israel.