A phased cease-fire, a mass exchange of hostages and prisoners, staged Israeli withdrawals, Gaza placed under international trusteeship with Tony Blair cast as a 21st-century colonial governor… On paper, the design looks tidy, even seductive. Israel secures its safety. Palestinians get billions for reconstruction. The international community can indulge in the illusion of stability. Yet the essential question remains unresolved: who will actually govern Gaza, and under what legitimacy?

Trump himself is in a race against time. October 10 — the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize — is fast approaching. Having failed to turn Ukraine into a stage for his “peacemaker” ambitions, the former president now throws all his weight behind Gaza. He dreams of equaling, even outshining, Barack Obama — his phantom rival who, in 2009, was crowned with a Nobel for a promise never kept. But geopolitics is not Hollywood. Middle Eastern wars do not yield to campaign calendars or the ego of a president chasing a legacy, even if he commands the world’s most powerful nation.

The obstacles are daunting. How do you exclude Hamas without igniting another war, perhaps even a Palestinian civil conflict? How do you persuade Netanyahu to betray his hardline base by releasing thousands of prisoners and ceding ground in Gaza? Which Arab states will foot the multi-billion-dollar bill for reconstruction with no clear political horizon or ironclad guarantees? And how can Tony Blair — forever linked to the “global lie” of the 2003 Iraq invasion — possibly embody international legitimacy in Gaza?

And then there is the West Bank. Each settlement expansion, every annexation project, every provocation at Jerusalem’s holy sites risks detonating the fragile machinery of compromise. This is the sword of Damocles that has hung over every peace initiative since Oslo.

The truth is stark: the “Trump Plan” is neither treaty nor vision. It is a transaction — a marketplace logic grafted onto tragedy. Hostages for prisoners, dollars for silence, military withdrawals for trusteeship. At best, it might end a war. At worst, it inaugurates a new form of dependency. Gaza as a laboratory of multilateral governance, where Palestinians are relegated to a side seat while Washington, Tel Aviv, and a handful of Arab capitals steer the levers of power.

Can we call that peace? Perhaps. Should it be embraced as a political horizon? That is another story.

For Trump, the calculation is simple: to stage himself as a “man of peace” long enough to grasp the Nobel medal. But history will judge not the performance, only the outcome: Gaza freed from war — or shackled by tutelage. Between an imperfect peace and the illusion of sovereignty, the trap is already closing.

And once again, the true, the only viable alternative is kicked down the road to the Greek calends: the two-state solution.