Stopping military operations and implementing humanitarian protocols constitutes the first stage of disarmament.
While the language used by Mladenov infers the usual concept of both sides, as if equivalence exists between the coloniser and the colonised, the first stage actually points to the failure of maintaining the agreed-upon ceasefire in October 2025 and entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza.
Disarming Hamas continues to provide a veneer for Israel’s genocide by various means, including violating ceasefires and depriving Palestinians of humanitarian aid. According to Mladenov, the first phase is based on reciprocity, but reciprocity is not a reality in a colonial genocidal reality.
The second stage, which Mladenov terms sequencing, refers to the collection of “the most dangerous weapons” and destroying Gaza’s tunnels. Rhetorical reciprocity is only related to the first stage. While focusing on collecting weapons from Hamas – on a scale from the most dangerous to personal weapons, there is no mention of Israel’s US-made 2,000 pound bunker buster bombs. The colonial enterprise that committed genocide will not reciprocally be asked to surrender its most dangerous weapons. Instead, Hamas, resistance groups and Palestinians in possession of weapons which are no match for Israel’s military arsenal, remain the focus of Mladenov’s plan, if only for the Board to Peace to maintain a semblance of relevance.
Verification is the third stage. “Compliance (with the program) will need to be monitored and verified,” Mladenov stated. Compliance is of course only requested from Palestinians, not from Israel which committed genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. Mladenov noted that reconstruction will only take place if Hamas is disarmed, thus clearly implying that human rights and basic needs are now negotiable and cannot be taken for granted. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who recently expressed support and cooperation with the Board of Peace, likely finds no objection to human rights bargaining.
No one expects any better from the UN at this point, but the UN is also at a point in time when it can relinquish its human rights posturing in favour of a more authentic positioning – an institution whose existence depends upon human rights violations, just like colonialism depends upon colonial violence to thrive.
In the fourth stage, which according to Mladenov “addresses the people”, Palestinians affiliated with resistance groups will be allowed to “re-enter civilian life with dignity, through structured amnesty arrangements and reintegration programs.” Colonialism offers no dignity, and Israel will likely oppose any so-called reintegration not only because Hamas has been used as the narrative for genocide in Israel’s rhetoric, but also because Israeli leaders have called the entire population of Gaza a legitimate target for genocide.
The fifth state would verify the disarmament, and Israeli forces’ withdrawal from Gaza “except for a presence in a security perimeter.” Based upon verification of disarmament, reconstruction would then be able to start.
The National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, previously linked to overseeing reconstruction, will be involved in the disarmament plan. The NCAG is headed by Ali Shaath, who previously held positions within the Palestinian Authority. In January, Shaath stated, ‘We are committed to establishing security, restoring the essential services that form the bedrock of human dignity such as electricity, water, healthcare and education, as well as cultivating a society rooted in peace, democracy and justice.”
There are too many PA echoes in that statement, not least the security narrative that is not derived from within an independent Palestinian society, but as a surveillance imposition that erodes the political freedom for Palestinians in Gaza.
The NCAG, Mladenov told the UN Security Council, “exercises authority solely on an interim basis. The end state is a reformed Palestinian Authority capable of governing Gaza and the West Bank, and ultimately a pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.”
Reform and Palestinian statehood may look like a gradual progress in diplomatic rhetoric, but Mladenov has not stated what the PA’s reform would look like, and how much further it would have to capitulate to Western demands and illusory state-building to be allowed authority over Gaza. The PA has not been able to negotiate one single demand towards Palestinian statehood, although it did celebrate its futile symbolic achievements while Israel further expanded its settlements in the occupied West Bank and eroded even the illusion of a Palestinian state.
It is easy to see why Mladenov, Israel and the US would want Gaza to suffer the same fate as the occupied West Bank. The international community would benefit from the illusion of prosperity, of a society that partly mimics the normalised economic inequalities found in Western societies. Such discrepancies are easier to overlook than the unfolding genocide in Gaza, where the near total destruction of the land and its visibility have now reached an unwanted global scrutiny.
In the short term, hypothetically, disarming Hamas will leave Israel with a lesser security narrative. However, turning Gaza into a replica of the occupied West Bank facilitates the colonial process for Israel. With Palestinian anti-colonial resistance stamped out, and the PA as the governing body, the West would envisage a similar scenario of donor funding creating dependence on the West and marginalising the resistance movements.
However, one crucial detail which the Western narrative leaves out is Gaza’s strength as a representation of the entirety of the Palestinian population since 1948. Israel and Western leaders worked hard to consolidate an image of Gaza and the occupied West Bank as distinctive entities to fragment Palestinian liberation. The same colonial dynamics will now have an equally hard time convincing Palestinians in Gaza to subjugate themselves to what the occupied West Bank symbolises in terms of politics and security coordination with Israel, paid for by the West.
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