President Donald Trump on Jan. 27. Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Columnist Dan Perry January 28, 2025

The riveting scenes, this week, of tens of thousands of Gazans trudging north to their bombed-out homes underscore the urgent need to create a viable governance plan for Gaza — and to ensure that the ceasefire framework now in place is seen through to the end. There has been too much pain and suffering on all sides for the war to resume.

But unless Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu begins to take seriously the possibility of returning the Palestinian Authority to power in Gaza, that is, almost certainly, exactly what will happen. And the only person with the influence to make him consider that move is President Donald Trump.

Right now, the open-ended truce is effectively set up to leave Hamas in power in Gaza, an outcome that Netanyahu’s far-right government is unlikely to survive, due to its dependence on far-right factions. And if there’s one thing Netanyahu has made clear, it’s that his political survival is his number one priority. If it takes restarting the war to ensure it, he will.

Unless Trump, who has unique political capital with Netanyahu, persuades him otherwise.

That task is a difficult one. The West Bank-based PA, which is in theory committed to peace with Israel and is the sole Palestinian political alternative to Hamas, has a bad reputation for good reasons.

It is corrupt and unpopular. Its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, no longer has a popular mandate, having been elected 20 years ago. It pays stipends to the families of terrorists in a pandering bid for popularity, and uses textbooks that promote not peace with Israel, but rather resistance to Israel.

But governance by the PA, which Hamas expelled from Gaza by force in 2007, is clearly a less-bad option for longterm peace than governance by Hamas. (It was only when Hamas — which is dedicated to Israel’s destruction — took over Gaza that Israel, and Egypt, clamped a blockade on the strip, both to prevent arms smuggling and in hopes of compelling Hamas to step down.) Humans are not wired to embrace the less-bad option — we often prefer to seek one that can legitimately be considered “good” — but sometimes doing so is the wisest choice.

And in the Middle East, often least-bad is the best one can hope for.

Both the Arab world and Western nations, recognizing the stakes, may be willing to invest significant resources in the PA’s rehabilitation. The building blocks would include:

1. International oversight: A coalition of Arab states, Western powers, and international organizations would need to oversee transitioning Gaza to the PA’s hands to ensure transparency and accountability.
2. Security guarantees: Israel cannot sign off on a return of Gaza to the PA without assurances that the strip will not become a launching pad for future attacks. These assurances could involve the installment of an international peacekeeping force, or robust security arrangements with neighboring countries. Gulf states may be willing to provide troops.
3. Economic investment: Gaza’s economy must be rebuilt to provide jobs, infrastructure, and basic services. This will require significant investment from both regional and global actors.
4. Reforms within the PA: The PA must commit to addressing its own shortcomings to gain the trust of Palestinians. This includes tackling corruption, reforming its education system, ending policies that incentivize violence, and political renewal. It will also require a plan — long overdue — to replace Abbas.

Netanyahu has long seen value in having the Palestinian leadership stay divided. By splitting Palestinians between two governing bodies at odds with each other, he believed, Israel would better be able to push back on demands for a genuine process leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

This — the desire to prevent the creation of such a state — is why Netanyahu has long refused to partake in any serious discussion of the day-after plan for Gaza, because he knows that discussion can, realistically, only be about the PA. It’s why government officials fill the airwaves even now with gaslighting claims that the PA is just as bad as Hamas. For extra points with Netanyahu, some would even argue that the PA is worse.

This, even though the PA has been fighting Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants in the town of Jenin for much of December, on behalf of Israel, drawing angry charges from Hamas of “betrayal.”

Netanyahu is notoriously difficult to convince. But doing so is not impossible. It is widely understood that even the current stage of the ceasefire is only happening due to Trump’s insistence, delivered before he even took office. If Trump were determined, he would have leverage, because Israel cannot resume the war without U.S. backing — diplomatically at the United Nations, with arms shipments, in the global legal arena and beyond.

Of course, even Netanyahu’s acceptance of a plan for the PA to take over Gaza would not necessarily persuade Hamas to go along. But for Hamas itself, ruling Gaza in its current state is not necessarily such a prize; the place has been largely destroyed, and many (and probably most) of those who have survived the war in Gaza understand that living under Hamas has been a nightmare, with repression, poverty, and constant fear of Israeli retaliation.

The most recent poll by the respected Palestinian Center for Policy and Research (from September) showed support for the Hamas Oct. 7 attack falling steadily. Then, civilians in Gaza opposed Hamas’ decision to attack Israel by 57%-39% . (Support for the attack is far higher in the West Bank, which did not suffer the consequences.) Only about a third of Palestinians said they would vote for Hamas, and those results are skewed by the absence of a strong PA candidate;the overwhelming majority of Palestinians are fed up with Abbas.

The Arab world — especially engaged partners in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and even Qatar — can be expected to respond with enthusiasm if Israel drops its obstinacy and agrees to a constructive process to replace Hamas. The region has levers to deploy in persuading Hamas to let go of its control — including, mainly, a total cutoff of funding.

There would be promising new political horizons in Israel as well. Especially if the day-after plan for Gaza came together with the bonus of a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia, the moderate Israeli opposition would likely agree to prop up the Netanyahu government for a while longer, allowing him to ditch the far-right parties that are causing so much damage. If Netanyahu wanted to run for office again (elections are due by late 2026), he’d have the option of doing so on a legacy that was at least in some way positive.

For this to happen, the Trump administration must step in right now, and start to engineer it. The clock is ticking.

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