SACC Statement on Trump's plan to end the war in Gaza
01 October 2025 - SACC
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SACC deplores Keir Starmer’s endorsement of Trump’s disgraceful plan for Gaza. The plan offers a pathway for the physical survival of the people of Gaza in exchange for the abandonment of Palestinian rights.
The Trump plan (1) makes the provision of “full aid” to Gaza conditional on Hamas acceptance of it, or else limited to localities where Israel has defeated Hamas and handed control to the International Stabilisation Force (2). It endorses the indefinite continuation of Israeli measures regarded in international law as occupation, while stating (3) that “Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza”. It doesn’t set out Palestinian statehood as a requirement or a goal or recognise it as a right, but states (4) that “when the PA reform program is faithfully carried out, the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognise as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.” It says nothing about Israeli settlements.
While requiring the entry and distribution of aid “without interference” (5), it sets no requirement for Israel to lift its longstanding siege of Gaza.
It implicitly endorses the continuation of Israeli military operations (6) – in other words, genocide – if Hamas delays or rejects the plan. It is not a framework for a just peace, but an ultimatum to the Palestinian resistance that threatens and seeks to legitimise genocide.
It requires the resistance to hand over Israeli captives within 72 hours of Israel’s acceptance of the agreement (7), but sets out no penalties for Israel if Israel then fails to respect the rest of the agreement.
It is a deeply unjust plan made more unjust by the fact that Trump and Netanyahu are liars and are unlikely to adhere to it. Netanyahu has already made statements that are at odds with the plan.
SACC deplores the statement by the Palestinian Authority that it “welcomes the sincere and determined efforts to end the war on Gaza, and affirms its confidence in his ability to find a path toward peace” (8).
The sycophancy towards Trump isn’t just diplomatic language. It encourages Palestinians and the international community to disregard the lack of meaningful guarantees in the Trump plan. And it allows the PA to disregard the gulf between the take-it-or-leave-it Trump plan and the aspirational “comprehensive agreement” through which it says it seeks to end the war in Gaza. In doing so it undermines solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
The statement gives a veneer of legitimacy to a plan that would otherwise be manifestly illegitmate. It has been given extra weight by the UK’s announcement on 20 September that it recognises the state of Palestine. The announcement now stands exposed as a cynical manoeuvre to empower the PA to more effectively whitewash the Trump ultimatum.
The correct international approach to peacemaking in the current circumstances would be to demand that Israel immediately and unconditionally complies with the call made by the United Nations General Assembly on 13 September 2024, with a deadline of 13 September 2025, that “Israel brings to an end without delay its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” and in tandem with this to impose sanctions sufficiently stringent to make the continuation of Israel’s genocide in Gaza impossible.
The welcome given to the Trump plan by countries around the world blocks any such approach. It moves the diplomatic goalposts away from the January 2025 ceasefire agreement that Israel reneged on and towards goals more acceptable to Israel. It seeks to reverse Israel’s growing international isolation and appears to give Israel a stronger diplomatic hand than it has had for some time. This is a potentially disastrous situation for the Palestinian people.
In these circumstances, and recognising the invidious nature of the ultimatum presented to the resistance factions, SACC continues to support the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people and their right, as recognised by international law, to engage in resistance, including armed resistance, to occupation and colonisation. We urge, and will continue to support, efforts by civil society around the world to pressure Israel and other states to fully respect Palestinian rights.
We particularly welcome the recent call made by dockworkers last weekend (9) for a Europe-wide general strike against the genocide in Gaza.
SACC remains strongly opposed to the UK ban on Hamas and we deplore the trend amongst countries where Hamas is not banned to adopt policies whose effect is to de-legitimise Hamas and other Palestinian factions engaged in resistance.
The effect of the criminalisation and de-legitimisation of Hamas has been to allow the political destruction of Hamas to stand almost unchallenged as a war aim alongside criticism of Israeli war crimes. It creates the impression that peace in Gaza must inevitably create an administrative vacuum. This has created the space for the preposterous colonial arrangements set out in Trump’s plan.
We regret that colonisation through the de-legitimisation of resistance has been made easier by the failure of large sections of the solidarity movement in the west to adequately challenge it. We call urgently for organisations in the UK that stand in solidarity with Palestine to state clearly that they are opposed to the ban on Hamas. We remind them that such a statement would not be illegal.
Hamas stands accused of committing war crimes in the course of exercising the internationally recognised right of the Palestinian people to resist occupation and colonisation. Israel, on the other hand, has committed and continues to commit the much greater crime of genocide in pursuit of the internationally unacceptable goal of colonisation and in maintenance of Israel as an apartheid state.
Yet the Trump plan requires that Gaza be “deradicalised” (10), requires the political destruction of Hamas, requires the “demilitarisation” of Gaza (11), and provides for a “guarantee” of this by “regional partners” (12), while setting no comparable conditions on Israel. A framework so grossly unbalanced cannot lead to either peace or justice.
The nearest the plan comes to hinting at a need for change in Israel is in a provision for an “interfaith dialogue process based on the values of tolerance and peaceful co-existence to try and change mindsets of Palestinians and Israelis by emphasing the benefits that can be derived from peace” (13).
This provision is presumably motivated by a false assumption that conflict over Palestine is created by faith rather than by the secular political ideology of Zionism. It assumes a false equivalence between a Palestinian mindset of anti-colonial resistance and an Israeli mindset of racism and expansionism. It sits uncomfortably with the remainder of the Trump plan which assumes, even more damagingly, that anti-colonial resistance has no legitimacy at all. Interfaith dialogue is in any case meaningless while the religious right continue to hold the keys to power in Israel, while wider Israeli political culture continues to conflate Judaism with Zionism, and while Israeli laws entrench Zionism in the Israeli state.
Like the provision creating a “Board of Peace” to be chaired by Trump and to include Blair, the requirement for interfaith dialogue is perhaps best read as a calculated insult to Palestinians.
Despite its absurdities, the Trump plan is a deadly serious attempt to turn the tide of Israel’s growing international isolation. It threatens to shift international discourse even if never properly implemented. It has already won a startling degree of international acceptance. It appears to have caught much of our movement by surprise and it exploits some of our weaknesses. It requires a serious response. That must include a greater willingness to challenge the de-legitimisation of Palestinian resistance.
Photo: Donald Trump during meeting with Netanyahu, Washington DC, 7 April 2025 © Shutterstock
Notes
- The full text of the Trump plan can be found at https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/full-text-trumps-20-point-plan-end-war-gaza-0
- Clause 7 states: “Upon acceptance of this agreement, full aid will immediately be sent into the Gaza strip.” Clause 17 states: “In the event Hamas delays or rejects this proposal, the above , including the scaled-up aid operation, will proceed in the terror-free areas handed over from the [Israeli military] to the ISF.
- Clause 16 of the plan.
- Clause 19 of the plan
- Clause 8 of the plan
- Continuing full-scale Israeli military operations are implied by Clause 17 (see note 2).
- Clause 7 of the plan
- Statement by the State of Palestine on efforts to end the war in Gaza, 30 September 2025, https://english.wafa.ps/Pages/Details/161877
- See https://www.leftvoice.org/dockworkers-across-europe-meet-to-call-a-general-strike-for-gaza/
- Clause 1 of the plan
- Clause 13 of the plan
- Clause 14 of the plan.
- Clause 18 of the plan.
