Nickolay Mladenov said Hamas-led attacks on Israel killed about 1,200 people and took 251 hostage into Gaza. In a commentary published on the third anniversary of the attacks, he set out three possible futures for the territory. His proposed path puts verified weapons decommissioning, the dismantling of military infrastructure and accountable Palestinian civilian governance at the center of Gaza’s security arrangements.
Mladenov, identified as the high representative for Gaza under the Board of Peace and director general of the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy in Abu Dhabi, described a return to a familiar cycle as one possibility. Hamas rebuilds its military capabilities; Israel prepares for another confrontation; and renewed violence brings a ceasefire without changing the conditions underneath. That cycle, he warned, could begin again.
Disarmament and Governance
A framework accepted by the parties about one year before October 7, 2026, aimed to move Gaza away from full-scale war through demilitarisation, deradicalisation, transitional Palestinian governance, Israeli withdrawal and reconstruction. Mladenov said turning those commitments into reality remained the challenge.
He described verified weapons decommissioning, deradicalisation, accountable Palestinian civilian governance, phased Israeli withdrawal and reconstruction as the basis of a third possible future. Under US President Donald Trump's Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict, he wrote, lawful structures answerable to a civilian transitional authority should exercise security.
Reconstruction, Mladenov said, required the permanent decommissioning of weapons and the dismantling of military infrastructure. Investors, donors and families needed confidence that war wasn’t simply being postponed. He called the task a political and technical requirement.
Mladenov said withdrawal without durable security and governance arrangements inside Gaza hadn’t been enough, and that control of force there had never been resolved. Security arrangements, he argued, had to be verified and enforced. Walls, buffer zones and repeated military operations 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.
The Cost of Another Cycle
Mladenov recalled that on October 7, 2023, parents in southern Israel held safe-room doors shut as children hid. Young people fleeing a music festival were hunted across open fields. The Hamas-led attack shattered Israeli security assumptions and left wounds that remained open, he wrote.
The ensuing war devastated Gaza and killed tens of thousands of Palestinians. Displacement, hunger and fear became part of daily life for children, Mladenov said. He described grief in homes, schools and neighbourhoods on both sides, including families in Nir Oz and Khan Younis.
A second possible future, he wrote, would bring an indefinite state of uncertainty: humanitarian aid trying to substitute for governance, reconstruction moving 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.
The National’s accompanying editorial condemned Hamas’s crimes against civilians but argued that security couldn’t serve as a permanent justification for open-ended war. It said the response to October 7 had become part of a wider regional confrontation, describing Israeli military action against targets linked to Iran and its allies in Lebanon, Syria and Iran, as well as an attack on Hamas figures based in Qatar in September 2025.
Regional Commitments
Mladenov said regional partners and the international community had responsibilities to provide credible security guarantees, support reconstruction and equip Palestinian transitional institutions to succeed. The framework, he wrote, had the backing of U.N. Security Council resolution 2803. Making it work would take sustained commitment after international attention moved elsewhere.
The editorial called for an end to the occupation and for a political process addressing Palestinians’ right to a credible future of their own. It said Palestinian elections were increasingly necessary and argued that negotiations, rather than continued war, offered a route to a future where security and Palestinian self-determination weren’t treated as contradictory goals.