Mladenov says a frozen Gaza plan would make two states practically impossible

Nickolay Mladenov told an audience in Abu Dhabi on Monday that a two-state settlement will become “practically impossible” if the Gaza plan he is paid to advance stays on paper. He was speaking at the Hili Forum as the Board of Peace high representative for Gaza.

The Bulgarian diplomat put the map in one sentence. More than 50 percent of Gaza is now under the Israeli army. Less than 50 percent is under Hamas. In the West Bank, he said, violence is rising at the same time. “There is no credible pathway forward to a political resolution of the conflict,” he said, unless three things happen in Gaza: transitional government, decommissioning of weapons, and an Israeli withdrawal.

The Board of Peace is the American-backed body set up to carry an October 2025 ceasefire plan. Mladenov is its man for Gaza. Hamas accepted the latest written stage of that plan last month. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the same text, which called for a staged pull-back tied to disarmament. An International Stabilization Force under U.S. General Jasper Jeffers is still being assembled and is meant to deploy only when the fighting is quiet enough.

Mladenov listed three futures. The strip can stay as it is. Israel can widen the war and reoccupy the rest. Or the roadmap can be carried out: agreed disarmament, an agreed withdrawal, and reconstruction with money and cover from states in the region. He called the third option the reasonable one. He also said two million people in Gaza are still living in conditions that will not survive another winter without a change on the ground.

He warned that a generation growing up inside that freeze would have “every reason to be radicalised and angry,” and he tied that cost to 7 October 2023. The line is an argument about time. If the political track dies, the next cohort does not wait for a conference.

The West Bank half of his warning sits on published settlement numbers. More than 500,000 Israelis live in settlements that most of the world treats as illegal, among about three million Palestinians. Mladenov did not invent that figure. He used it to say that Gaza and the West Bank are now moving in ways that close the same door.

Asked what happens if a new Israeli government after October elections walks away from the current cabinet’s promises, he said election seasons produce “knee-jerk reactions.” He also said Israelis, in the end, want to leave the present tragedy. That is a hope, not a count of Knesset votes.

Mladenov does not speak for the United Nations in this role, though he is a former UN envoy. He speaks for a board that Washington assembled. His value on Monday was the admission from inside that machinery that the map on the ground has already outrun the diplomacy. A strip split between an army and a militia, plus a West Bank that is getting hotter, is not a basis for two states. It is a basis for managing a freeze until someone decides to reopen the war.

The practical test is narrow. Does Israel implement the commitments already written. Does Hamas hand over weapons to a force that does not yet exist. Does a transitional authority appear that Palestinians will accept. Mladenov named those steps in that order. None of them is scheduled. Until they are, his own forecast is that the two-state file moves from difficult to closed.

Abu Dhabi was a soft room for that message. The harder rooms are Jerusalem, Gaza City and the Security Council. The Board of Peace can write roadmaps. It cannot move brigades or collect rifles. Monday’s speech put that limit on the record.