Reimagining the Gaza Peace Plan: From Governance to (Co)existence

CONFLICT RESOLUTION - MEDIATION, 16 Feb 2026

Derya Yüksek – TRANSCEND Media Service

13 Feb 2026 – At moments of profound violence, the question is not only whether peace is possible, but who gets to envision and build it, and on what terms. In the Israeli-Palestinian context, decades of governmental, military, and procedural interventions have repeatedly failed to secure even the minimal conditions for shared life, let alone the end of armed hostilities. These repeated breakdowns highlight the limits of technocratic approaches to peace.

What is required is not another adjustment within existing frameworks, but a more radical rethinking—one that moves beyond institutional constraints and inherited horizons of imagination. Rather than asking how to refine official proposals, we must ask what must be ethically and materially present for any arrangement to be recognizable as peace at all.

The task, then, is not to advance another authoritative plan for Gaza, but to reconsider what a peace plan would look like if composed from responsibility, care, and the conditions of livable life. This essay builds on existing critiques while moving in this direction: it seeks not to improve a plan, but to reimagine its foundations.

Background: Beyond Correcting the Peace Plan

Since late September 2025, international discussions on Gaza have largely centered around the U.S.-led Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict, announced by U.S. President Donald Trump alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Often described as a twenty-point framework, the plan outlines an immediate ceasefire, prisoner and hostage exchanges, demilitarization provisions, reconstruction measures, and a transitional governance structure for Gaza. Endorsed through United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803 in November 2025, the plan has acquired formal international standing, including support for a proposed Board of Peace to coordinate post-war reconstruction.

Preceding and accompanying this framework were a number of transitional governance proposals, most notably the Gaza International Transitional Authority (GITA), introduced in September 2025 as a multinational interim administration for the Strip. Elements of this proposal were later incorporated into the broader U.S. framework and subsequent discussions surrounding the Board of Peace. Reports emerging from the January 2026 Davos meetings indicate that the Board of Peace has also been exploring technocratic governance and implementation models for Gaza, prompting serious concerns about limited civic and Palestinian participation, about extending administrative control without a parallel rethinking of peace itself, and about the “exciting development ideas” mentioned in the plan.

From civil society organizations to independent analysts and academics, many have pointed out to the plan’s profound asymmetries, including the sidelining of Palestinian political agency, and the troubling proximity to earlier tried-and-failed models of externally managed peace. These critiques have rightly asked how the proposed peace plan and associated practices could be made fairer, more accountable, and more representative of those most affected by violence. They have advanced alternative and corrective proposals, which have sought to foreground Palestinian sovereignty, co-leadership, and explicit alignment with international law from the outset—substituting the Trump plan’s components with decolonized ethics and agency.

Yet most of these interventions oriented toward improving the framework—correcting deficits, recalibrating governance mechanisms, or supplementing it with missing guarantees. Here, the move is different. Rather than proposing a more inclusive version of the plan, this essay reimagines its organizing logic: shifting attention from sovereignty to life, from inclusion to co-authorship, and from feasibility to coexistence—treating the plan not as a technical arrangement to be finalized, but as a framework for ongoing critical, ethical, and participatory practice, under which peace can be articulated, inhabited, and sustained. What follows is an attempt to sketch those components.

Reversing the Sequence: From Sovereignty to Life

Even critical alternatives are often founded upon familiar political coordinates: recognition, sovereignty, governance, borders, authority. These are, without doubt, essential political questions. But when they are treated as starting points rather than outcomes, they risk abstracting peace from the conditions that make politics possible.

Reimagining the Gaza peace plan requires reversing this sequence. Peace must begin not with territory, but with livable conditions; not with authority, but with dignity and care; not with administrative order, but with access to water, housing, health, land, and the possibility of mourning and burial. This is not an anti-political stance. It is an insistence that politics cannot meaningfully proceed over the wreckage of life itself. The right to life, enshrined in international human rights frameworks, precedes governance arrangements. Political recognition must follow, not substitute for, the conditions that allow life.

From Inclusion to Participation

A recurring demand in critical debates and in many civil society critiques is that Palestinians must be “included” or “consulted” in peace processes that affect their lives. While vital, the language of inclusion often remains tethered to procedural logics that still presume peace as something designed elsewhere and extended to those harmed.

Palestinians are co-authors of the meaning of peace—through lived relations to harm, displacement, survival, and reconstruction. Reimagining the Gaza peace plan from this position entails recognizing Palestinians not as voices added to a process, but as sources of legitimacy themselves, and a main actor in the design and implementation of the plan.

From Feasibility to Compossibility

Much policy debate, including those surrounding Gaza peace plan, evaluates proposals in terms of feasibility: what is realistic, enforceable, or acceptable to existing power configurations. While such considerations may dominate diplomatic reasoning, they obscure another, equally crucial question—whether the elements of a plan can be applicable without negating one another, and the foundations of peacebuilding as we know it.

This reimagination introduces a different evaluative criterion: compossibility. Can reconstruction proceed without erasing memory? Can security arrangements be compatible with ecological repair? Can urgent relief measures remain consistent with long-term justice? And so on. This shifts the focus from the likelihood of the plan to succeed within current power dynamics; to whether it can hold together ethically and relationally at all.

 Peace as Practice, Not Endpoint

Finally, as many other official peace proposals, the Gaza plan consider peace as an endpoint: a settlement to be reached, a transition to be completed, a timeline to be managed. This risks turning peace into an administrative milestone rather than a sustained condition.

Reimagining the Gaza peace plan through a critical-ethical lens repositions peace as an ongoing practice—one that must be continually articulated, contested, and held accountable to those affected. It must remain open to revision when coherence collapses—when procedure overrides dignity, or expediency displaces responsibility. This openness is not fragility. It is what prevents the plan from hardening into another instrument of domination.

This perspective resonates with the evolving articulation of peace as a right in itself—not a reward granted at the conclusion of negotiations, but a continuous obligation owed to peoples. This aligns with the right of peoples to peace: not a distant promise delivered by elites, but a civic and ethical practice that remains accountable to those who live with its consequences.

If peace is to be reclaimed as such a practice, then existing and future proposals must be read not only for what they promise, but for what they enable—or foreclose, and how these could be imagined otherwise to reconstruct conditions for coexistence without erasure or subordination.

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Dr. Derya Yüksek is a communication and media studies scholar whose work focuses on alternative media, participatory democracy, and conflict transformation. Her research bridges theory and practice to examine how participatory processes reconfigure political imagination and civic agency in contexts marked by division and protracted conflict. Alongside her academic career, she has specialized in project management and worked as a manager and consultant on international cooperation initiatives in the field of culture, arts, and education across the Euro-Mediterranean and beyond.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 16 Feb 2026.

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