Palestinian children are silhouetted as they stand during sunset in Jabalia, northern Gaza Strip, 6 November 2025. REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa

A landmark UN resolution on Gaza, while welcome, hasn’t changed facts on the ground. Bombing has resumed, disarmament is frozen and reconstruction is stalled, pushing peace and justice further out of reach.

The UN Security Council resolution passed in mid-November gave support to US President Donald Trump’s Gaza plan. But political gridlock, a Hamas snub and renewed Israeli strikes quickly froze progress beyond the initial fragile truce.

Adopted by 13 members, with China and Russia abstaining, the US-drafted text authorises a so-called International Stabilisation Force to demilitarise Gaza, backs reconstruction and creates a Trump-chaired ‘Board of Peace’ alongside a technocratic administration. Trump called it a major diplomatic win and predicted swift deployment.

Arab countries that backed the resolution said the success of the resolution was conditional on securing justice for the Palestinian people by creating a state. ‘Genuine peace in the Middle East cannot be achieved without justice, justice for the Palestinian people, who have waited for decades for the establishment of their independent state,’ said Algerian Ambassador Amar Bendjama during the UN Security Council debate.

Simmering violence

On 22 November, Israel resumed strikes on Khan Younis and Gaza City, killing at least 24 Palestinians and wounding 54, many of them children. Israel described the operation as retaliation for a ceasefire breach and claimed it was targeting senior Hamas officials. Hamas called it another Israeli violation and urged intervention from international mediators.

Since the mid-October truce, Israeli strikes have killed 340 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and WAFA News Agency, and several Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers have been killed. During a press briefing on 21 November, UNICEF spokesperson Ricardo Pires said that since 11 October – when the ceasefire began – at least 67 Palestinian children have been killed in ‘conflict related incidents’, a rate of two a day. ‘Although there’s a ceasefire, people still get killed,’ said Rik Peeperkorn, the World Health Organization representative for Occupied Palestinian Territory.

The Israelis say their recent strikes were in legitimate self-defence and solely against Hamas commanders who were re-arming, planning future attacks or rebuilding Hamas rocket capabilities.

The violations and trading of blame have created another casualty: the initial optimism that greeted the agreement. Talks on Hamas disarmament, which is Israel’s core demand, and on a new governing authority, which is the main precondition of Arab donors, remain stubbornly deadlocked.

Hamas says it will never fully disarm while Israeli forces remain in Gaza or without a clear path to statehood. Under Qatari–Egyptian pressure, the group eventually signalled some openness to a neutral civil administration, but still insists armed resistance is non-negotiable. It denounced the UN resolution as foreign ‘tutelage’ that would turn the stabilisation force into an arm of the occupation. ‘Assigning the international force with tasks and roles inside the Gaza Strip, including disarming the resistance, strips it of its neutrality, and turns it into a party to the conflict in favour of the [Israeli] occupation,’ said Hamas in a statement.

From the Israeli side, the promised withdrawal of troops remains subject to a list of security conditions, including destroying the Hamas tunnel network, allowing constant monitoring to permanently prevent its rearmament and future attacks.

Divisions are so sharp that Washington is now considering skipping disarmament altogether to move to the next phase to unlock much-needed reconstruction funds.

While most Arab regimes have aligned diplomatically with the US, the blueprint is unpopular with the Arab public as it’s perceived as favouring Israel. This has so far kept Arab rulers from pledging troops or funds towards the required $70bn cost of reconstruction. Gulf donors, led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, now demand a credible political horizon that must involve the anti-Hamas Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, which welcomed the UN resolution. They also want to see a clear path to statehood. These two conditions have been rejected out of hand by the Israelis, who argue that these steps would undermine Israel’s legitimate security needs, including stopping Hamas repeating the 7 October attacks.

On the ground, Israel’s newly built concrete block ‘yellow line’ now slices Gaza in two, placing roughly 53 per cent of the 141-square mile territory under direct Israeli military control. Critics warn of de facto partition, with aid possibly flowing only to the Israeli-held zone.

This impasse is further complicated by ongoing Israeli actions in the West Bank. According to the Israeli non-governmental organisation, Peace Now, the resolution is an ‘historic step’ but is being undermined by Israeli violations in the West Bank that could torpedo any ‘pathway’ to statehood. The group reports that settlement expansion, land expropriation and settler violence have all continued apace, with thousands of new housing units advancing since the ceasefire. The group says a new illegal outpost near Bethlehem is under construction. The Israeli government responds that it is creating buffer zones against possible future attacks.

Noticeably absent from the plan is any real mechanism for accountability or oversight, leaving survivors with the sense that justice has once again been pushed aside. International legal bodies, including the International Criminal Court, continue their investigations into war crimes committed during the conflict. However, these processes are slow and face their own headwinds.

Adding a layer of geopolitical cynicism, President Trump has repeatedly meddled in the long-running corruption trial of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite protests from the legal experts and opposition figures. In June, Trump called the case a ‘witch hunt’ and urged Israeli authorities to drop it or grant a pardon to Netanyahu. In his long, rambling speech before the Israeli Knesset, Trump repeated calls for a pardon. On 12 November 2025, just five days before the crucial UN Security Council vote on Gaza, the US president doubled down by sending a formal letter to Israeli President Isaac Herzog explicitly calling for a full pardon, citing Netanyahu’s role as a ‘decisive War Time Prime Minister’. Netanyahu is the first sitting Prime Minister of Israel to stand trial on criminal charges for bribery, fraud and breach of trust.

Though the UN resolution could be viewed as something of a coup for Trump, it has not resolved the fundamental conflict on the ground. With disarmament stalled, donors wary, partition underway and annexation accelerating, the vision of the UN-backed plan for a stable and rebuilt Gaza, Palestinian statehood and regional peace looks further away than ever.

Emad Mekay is a freelance journalist and can be contacted at emad.mekay@int-bar.org