On Oct. 7, 2026, The National published competing arguments about Gaza’s future on the third anniversary of the Hamas-led attacks. One called for new security and governance arrangements; its editorial said occupation couldn’t be managed indefinitely. People living with the consequences remain surrounded by decisions made through armed factions, military operations and diplomatic frameworks.
Three futures, one apparatus
Nickolay Mladenov, high representative for Gaza under the Board of Peace and director general of the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy in Abu Dhabi, laid out three possible futures in a commentary published Oct. 7, 2026. The first was a return to the familiar cycle: Hamas rebuilds its military capabilities, Israel prepares for another confrontation, and a ceasefire follows without changing the underlying conditions.
Mladenov described the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed about 1,200 people and took 251 hostage into Gaza. He wrote that families in southern Israel faced a nightmare as parents held safe-room doors shut and young people fleeing a music festival were hunted across open fields. The ensuing war devastated Gaza, killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and made displacement, hunger and fear part of children’s daily lives.
His second future was a seemingly more stable but indefinite uncertainty: humanitarian aid trying to substitute for governance, reconstruction proceeding slowly or not at all, and the world gradually losing interest. Mladenov warned that political vacuums rarely remain empty and that despair can help recruit people to extremism. Aid can’t stand in for political arrangements or functioning institutions.
The third option was a framework of verified weapons decommissioning, deradicalisation, accountable Palestinian civilian governance, phased Israeli withdrawal and reconstruction. Mladenov said Gaza should be governed by accountable Palestinian civilian institutions rather than competing armed factions. Under US President Donald Trump's Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict, he wrote, security should operate through lawful structures answerable to a civilian transitional authority.
Who controls force?
Mladenov said reconstruction required dismantling military infrastructure and permanently decommissioning weapons so investors, donors and families could trust that war wasn’t merely being postponed. He called this both a political and a technical requirement. The proposal puts the question of who controls force at its centre, places the proposed authority in transitional institutions, and relies on security arrangements that must be “verified and enforced.”
He acknowledged why Israelis might associate withdrawal or transitional administration with past failures. Withdrawal without durable security and governance arrangements inside Gaza, he argued, had been insufficient; who legitimately controlled force there had never been resolved. Walls, buffer zones and repeated Israeli military operations, he added, couldn’t provide lasting security if Gaza remained unstable and controlled by armed factions. “A strategy built entirely around managing the next war is not, in the long run, a strategy for peace,” he wrote.
Addressing Palestinians and Arabs across the region, Mladenov asked whether armed factions had brought Palestinians closer to statehood, prosperity or freedom. He argued that schools, hospitals and accountable governments mattered more than armed groups controlling decisions about war and peace. Change can’t be imposed from outside, he said, and education, functioning institutions, economic opportunity and a political horizon had to offer young people an alternative to militancy. Palestinians in Gaza, he wrote, deserved a future whose politics demanded more than aid or calls to sacrifice.
Diplomacy’s promise, war’s record
The framework accepted by the parties a year earlier aimed to move Gaza away from full-scale war through demilitarisation, deradicalisation, transitional Palestinian governance, Israeli withdrawal and reconstruction. Mladenov said the challenge was turning commitments into reality. Regional partners and the international community, he wrote, had responsibilities to provide credible security guarantees, support reconstruction and equip Palestinian transitional institutions to succeed.
The plan, endorsed by U.N. Security Council resolution 2803, would require political courage and sustained commitment after international attention moved elsewhere, Mladenov said. He wrote that the framework, regional partners, technical expertise and financial resources were available; whether political will existed remained the question. Conference-room commitments still had to produce changes on the ground.
The National’s separate editorial said the attacks began in a besieged and impoverished Gaza Strip but didn’t begin the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It condemned Hamas’s crimes against civilians and said Israel’s response had left Palestinians in Gaza defenceless against retaliation, while politically strengthening Israel’s nationalist extremes. Israel had also launched or supported military action against targets linked to Iran and its allies in Lebanon, Syria and Iran, and attacked Hamas figures based in Qatar in September last year, the editorial said.
The editorial called for an end to occupation and warned that security couldn’t justify open-ended war. Israel’s coming election, it argued, offered a chance to debate the country’s future; it also said Palestinian elections were increasingly necessary. Its closing demand was for a political future that didn’t treat security and Palestinian self-determination as contradictory. On the third anniversary, the same editorial put the choice starkly: “While the dead deserve remembrance, the living deserve a future.”