Seizing 70 percent of Gaza is not part of US President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated on Tuesday at the House Appropriations subcommittee meeting. “We have a plan. That plan does not envision such a thing. Netanyahu made that statement, but it is not part of the plan,” Rubio said.
Point 16 does state that Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza. However, it also includes a loophole for Israel to exploit. The Israeli military is supposed to hand over occupied territory to the International Stabilisation Force “according to an agreement they will make with the transitional authority until they are completely withdrawn from Gaza, save for a security perimeter presence that will remain until Gaza is properly secure from any resurgent terror threat.”
The Yellow Line, at first ostensibly marking areas in which Hamas was not operating, has now expanded into the unmarked Orange Line. Israel’s primary justification was its security narrative which it based on Hamas’s refusal to disarm – a premise which the US Board of Peace, mostly through Nickolay Mladenov, has repeatedly asserted. The lines have been blurred for a long time, as they usually are rhetorically, to allow colonialism to appropriate territory unhindered.
Rubio repeated Mladenov’s reiteration that reconstruction happens based on Hamas’s willingness to disarm, although he does not directly link disarmament as the justification for Israel’s military occupation of Gaza. Between what Mladenov asserts directly, and what rubio hints at, Israel has the perfect excuse for manipulating Point 16 of the US plan for Gaza to its advantage.
There is no real conflict between the US and the Board of Peace. The Board of Peace exists as an extension of what the US for now prefers not assert overtly. Even if the Trump administration has expressed several times that it is against Israel’s military occupation or annexation of Gaza, the US is doing nothing to stop Israel from territorial appropriation. If logic was truly applied, the argument of disarmament to appease impunity does not hold.
Mladenov made it clear that Palestinians have no say in what happens in Gaza. Giving Israel the green light to break the ceasefire terms and opening the way to genocide once again does not give Hamas an incentive to disarm.
Not to mention the discrepancy between the weapons used by Hamas and Israel’s military technology, funded also by Western countries. However, for the Board of Peace, the US and the West, the discrepancy is justified because of the need to vilify the colonised in order for Israel’s security narrative to gain political relevance.
The question, therefore, should have never been about Hamas’s willingness or unwillingness to disarm. Israel should have been put continuously in the spotlight – not to validate its purported justifications, but to expose the colonial logic behind genocide and the ongoing forced displacement, which leaves Gaza’s territory vulnerable to appropriation. If the US was truly against annexation and military occupation, Point 16 would contain no loopholes to accommodate Israel’s colonial enterprise.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
