Why the new UN resolution on Gaza signals a US-led trusteeship, not a path to peace

The recent passage of the US-backed Gaza resolution at the UN Security Council represents one of the most paradoxical moments of the post-October 2023 crisis: a plan endorsed by thirteen members of the Council yet openly opposed by the two actors whose future it most directly shapes, Israel and Hamas. The resolution authorises the establishment of an open-ended international stabilisation force in Gaza and places the territory, at least for the foreseeable future, under a form of externally managed transitional governance. The unlikely political geometry of its approval and the muted, telling abstentions of Russia and China reveals the deeper logic behind the proposal: a move toward an American-engineered trusteeship that seeks to freeze the conflict at a controllable level rather than resolve its underlying political structure.

The Israeli reaction is particularly revealing. Although Tel Aviv protested several elements of the plan, it refrained from deploying its most potent diplomatic tool its almost guaranteed American veto. Israel’s frustration is rooted primarily in its loss of unilateral control. For decades, successive Israeli governments have worked to shape the security and administrative architecture of Gaza directly, whether through blockade, military intervention, or the deliberate fragmentation of Palestinian political institutions. An international stabilisation mission, even one led and politically shielded by Washington, dilutes Israel’s exclusive authority to define Gaza’s security order. It inserts external oversight into Israel’s operational freedom, something Israeli policymakers accept only when the alternative is a damaging, public split with Washington. In other words, Israel opposes the resolution, but it opposes a rupture with the United States even more.

For Hamas, the implications are more existential. The resolution signals the end of the movement’s de facto governance of Gaza, a status regardless of one’s political view of Hamas—that has shaped Palestinian political geography since 2007. By transferring day-to-day security, administration, and reconstruction oversight to an international force lacking any clear exit criteria, the resolution effectively removes Hamas from the governance equation without creating a legitimate political mechanism to replace it. This is a structural, not ideological, critique: any durable political transition must be rooted in Palestinian consent, representation, and agency. Yet the resolution circumvents all three. It imagines a “stabilised” Gaza in which Palestinian political actors are either sidelined or reincorporated into externally designed frameworks that neither reflect the balance of forces on the ground nor acknowledge the political grievances driving the conflict.

The abstentions of Russia and China deserve closer attention. Their reluctance to support the resolution does not stem from sympathy for the US-led project, but from a pragmatic decision to avoid absorbing the political cost of its potential failure. A veto would have cast Moscow and Beijing as the states preventing the “stabilisation” of Gaza an image neither wishes to bear in the Arab world. At the same time, a yes-vote would have aligned them with a plan that consolidates American managerial authority over one of the most symbolically charged conflicts in the Global South. The abstentions therefore reflect a strategic middle position: registering discontent with a US-driven trusteeship while ensuring that Washington alone carries the burden of its implementation.

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The core problem with the resolution is not its stated intention to halt violence or rebuild Gaza goals widely shared across the international community. Rather, the issue lies in the political architecture it envisions: an open-ended international presence with no defined sunset clause, no clear mechanism for Palestinian self-determination during the transition, and no binding commitment to dismantle the structural conditions that produced the conflict. In contemporary international relations, “transitional” mechanisms without timelines often become permanent realities. The absence of a political horizon transforms the stabilisation force into a governing authority, displacing Palestinian agency while entrenching American influence in the most contested space in the Middle East.

This outcome deepens the concerns of regional actors aligned with the Palestinian resistance axis. From their perspective, the resolution is not a neutral peacekeeping arrangement but a geopolitical intervention aimed at restructuring the balance of power in Gaza under American supervision. By removing Hamas from governance without creating an inclusive Palestinian political framework, the plan risks generating a vacuum filled not by stability but by new forms of fragmentation and resistance. Moreover, an American-led security presence in Gaza is seen as a direct extension of Washington’s attempt to consolidate a post-conflict regional order that marginalises local actors in favour of externally managed stability.

In practice, the plan neither resolves the core political question of Palestinian sovereignty nor addresses the structural asymmetry between occupier and occupied. Instead, it attempts to regulate and compartmentalise the crisis through an international mechanism whose legitimacy remains contested by the primary actors on the ground. A cessation of violence without an accompanying political process risks managing the conflict rather than transforming it. It stabilises the symptoms while leaving the root causes intact.

The Gaza resolution is therefore best understood not as a roadmap to peace but as an attempt to internationalise the administration of the conflict under US stewardship, with all the inherent contradictions that accompany such a project. Any sustainable future for Gaza requires a political process grounded in Palestinian ownership, regional realism, and an acknowledgment of the structural forces that have shaped this conflict for decades. Without that foundation, the international stabilisation force may freeze the battlefield but it will not create the conditions for a just or durable resolution.

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