Hamas-led gunmen killed about 1,200 people and took 251 hostage into Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023. Three years later, the man tasked with steering Gaza’s future says the central question remains unanswered: who legitimately controls force inside the Strip?
Nickolay 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, outlined three possible futures for Gaza in a commentary published Oct. 7, 2026. The first repeats a familiar, painful cycle: Hamas rebuilds its military capabilities, Israel prepares for another confrontation, and a ceasefire follows another bout of violence without changing the underlying conditions.
The Security Picture
Mladenov didn’t soften his account of the attack. Families in southern Israel woke to a nightmare, he wrote. Parents held safe-room doors shut while children hid. Young people fleeing a music festival were hunted across open fields. The assault shattered Israeli security assumptions and left wounds that remain open.
He also heard out Israeli caution. Mladenov said he understood why Israelis might link withdrawal or transitional administration with past failures. The lesson, he argued, is that withdrawal without durable security and governance arrangements inside Gaza has proved insufficient. Security arrangements must be verified and enforced, he said.
The path he favors combines verified weapons decommissioning, deradicalisation, accountable Palestinian civilian governance, phased Israeli withdrawal and reconstruction. Under US President Donald Trump’s Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict, lawful structures answerable to a civilian transitional authority should exercise security. Reconstruction, Mladenov wrote, depends on permanently decommissioning weapons and dismantling military infrastructure, so investors, donors and families can trust that war isn’t simply being postponed. He called this a political as well as a technical requirement.
His warning about the alternative was blunt. “Political vacuums rarely stay empty,” he wrote, and despair can help recruit people to extremism. A second future—humanitarian aid standing in for governance while the world gradually loses interest—would invite exactly that.
A Message to Palestinians
Mladenov directed his sharpest passages at Palestinians and Arabs across the region. He acknowledged anger over Gaza’s destruction and suspicion of international initiatives, then asked whether armed factions had brought Palestinians closer to statehood, prosperity or freedom. Societies grow stronger when schools educate children, hospitals care for patients and accountable governments provide services, he wrote—not when armed groups decide questions of war and peace.
He said Gaza must also confront the ideologies and narratives that normalized violence and extremism. Change can’t be imposed from outside, he added. It has to come through education, functioning institutions, economic opportunity and a political horizon that gives young people an alternative to militancy. Palestinians in Gaza, he wrote, deserve a future whose politics demands more than aid or calls to sacrifice.
Diplomatic Dead End, and a Competing View
A framework the parties accepted about a year ago aimed to move Gaza away from full-scale war through demilitarisation, deradicalisation, transitional Palestinian governance, Israeli withdrawal and reconstruction. Mladenov wrote that the challenge lies in turning commitments into reality, not agreeing on a destination. Implementing the plan, endorsed by U.N. Security Council resolution 2803, will require political courage and sustained commitment after international attention moves elsewhere.
A separate Oct. 7 editorial in The National took a different tack. It condemned Hamas’s crimes against civilians but said security can’t justify open-ended war forever. The editorial called for an end to the occupation and argued that three years of conflict haven’t brought lasting security. It said Israel has 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 2025. It also called Palestinian elections increasingly necessary and said Israel’s coming election offers a chance to debate what a genuinely secure Israel would look like in 10, 20 or 30 years.
The editorial said the Oct. 7 attack didn’t begin the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It also said the attack came from a besieged and impoverished Gaza and strengthened Israel’s nationalist extremes. Grief runs on both sides. Families of those killed or kidnapped marked the anniversary, as did families of thousands of Palestinians killed, injured or displaced in the Israeli offensive.
Mladenov’s closing line cut across the argument. “While the dead deserve remembrance, the living deserve a future,” he wrote, adding that there is “no neutral ground” between preserving conditions that repeatedly produce war and building conditions for peace.
Why This Matters: The framework on the table puts disarmament first and reconstruction second; that sequence is the real test. If weapons aren’t verifiably decommissioned and tunnels and military infrastructure aren’t dismantled, Hamas keeps the option to rebuild, and Israelis who lived through Oct. 7 have little reason to trust any withdrawal. If armed factions and a transitional civilian authority keep contesting governance, whoever has guns may fill the vacuum Mladenov warns about. Regional partners and donors face a choice too: back credible security guarantees and accountable Palestinian institutions, or fund another cycle that ends where the last one did.