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Arab Plan for Gaza Ignores Existence of Hamas

(Council on Foreign Relations) Elliott Abrams - In reaction to President Trump's proposal for Gaza, Arab leaders held a summit meeting in Cairo on March 4. They produced a 100-page plan that managed never to mention Hamas or the massacres of October 7, 2023, that began the Gaza war. In fact, the Arab plan is weakest when addressing (or avoiding) the hardest question about Gaza, which is who will provide security and prevent Hamas from replicating the conditions that led to the October 7 attacks. The Arab plan might work on another planet but certainly not in Gaza. It is useless as a guide to what comes next for Gaza. It suggests that if we all just recommit to the "two-state solution," security issues will magically fade away. The Arab plan insists that the Palestinian Authority should run Gaza very soon. As has been very clear for decades, the goal of Palestinian terrorist groups is not at all and never has been to build a Palestinian state or restore Palestinian "legitimate rights." Their goal is to destroy Israel. Indeed, the Palestinian Authority itself under both Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas has repeatedly walked away from Israeli proposals for Palestinian statehood. The U.S. rightly rejected the new Arab plan. The writer is Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the CFR.
2025-03-09 00:00:00
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