The Trump ‘Peace Plan’ is Itself a War Crime

It's illegal to use civilian lives as leverage.

Much has been written and debated since Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu jointly unveiled Trump’s 20-point ‘peace plan’ earlier this week. As of this writing, Hamas has not yet decided whether to accept it. (Israel hasn’t accepted it, either, although you wouldn’t know that by following US media.)

One point has been neglected, however: the proposal, as presented, is itself a form of war crime.

The Hidden Hostages

Parts of the plan are uncontroversial. All sane people want the war to end quickly. And few would object to point 18, which calls for “an interfaith dialogue ...based on the values of tolerance and peaceful co-existence.”

And yet, I wonder how many Americans noticed that #5 calls on Israel to release the 1,700 people it has seized from Gaza since 2023, “including all women and children ...”

For that matter, how many Americans even knew that Israel routinely imprisons children? Our media doesn’t mention it very much, but it’s been going on for a long time. A 2013 report from UNICEF found that:

“Each year approximately 700 Palestinian children aged 12 to 17, the great majority of them boys, are arrested, interrogated and detained by Israeli army, police and security agents.”

Investigators found that “ill-treatment of children who come in contact with the military detention system appears to be widespread, systematic and institutionalized.” They estimated than some 7,000 children had been imprisoned and mistreated over the preceding decade and concluded:

“The pattern of ill-treatment includes the arrests of children at their homes between midnight and 5:00 am by heavily armed soldiers; the practice of blindfolding children and tying their hands with plastic ties; physical and verbal abuse during transfer to an interrogation site, including the use of painful restraints; lack of access to water, food, toilet facilities and medical care; interrogation using physical violence and threats; coerced confessions; and lack of access to lawyers or family members during interrogation.”

The authors found that Israel’s treatment of these children systematically violated both the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

Bear in mind that this report was written a full ten years before the events of October 7.

Under international law, the United States and other countries should condemn this child abuse and demand that the children be released. Instead, the Trump plan uses this longstanding criminal practice as leverage, declaring that the children will only be released when Hamas accedes to the demands in this proposal.

Genocide as Leverage

Paragraph #7 of the Trump proposal is even worse. It reads:

“Upon acceptance of this agreement, full aid will be immediately sent into the Gaza Strip. At a minimum, aid quantities will be consistent with what was included in the 19 January 2025 agreement regarding humanitarian aid, including rehabilitation of infrastructure (water, electricity, sewage), rehabilitation of hospitals and bakeries, and entry of necessary equipment to remove rubble and open roads.”

It is a war crime to withhold humanitarian aid under any circumstances, include both a state of war and the occupation of outside territory. Again, however, this plan rewards the war crime. Worse, it actively uses both this crime and the criminal abuse of children to advance its own ends.

That is immoral and illegal. It turns children, and everyone else in Gaza, into hostages.

Threatening to withhold aid in this way is probably an additional war crime. The Geneva Conventions (Additional Protocol I, Article 54, 1) states unequivocally:

“Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited.”

Article 54, 2 states:

“It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive.”

“Whatever the motive” in the above paragraph presumably includes, “for the purpose of getting them to sign the agreement we want them to sign.”

The United States is a signatory to these conventions, and these principles were reaffirmed in 2018 with the passage of UN Security Council resolution 2417. (They are also upheld in the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court, which the United States has not signed.)

Summary

This isn’t about the merits of the Trump deal (which in my view aren’t much, since it’s extremely-one sided). It’s about the criminal tactics being used to advance it. There’s an extensive body of law and research documenting the very principles it violates.

The law isn’t ambiguous. Lawyers may argue the finer points, but its essence is simple: civilian lives must not be used as pawns, whether for military or diplomatic purposes. It’s illegal to use their survival as leverage. Doing so isn’t just morally reprehensible. It is, in all probability, yet another prosecutable war crime.