At the opening ceremony for Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace in Davos, Jared Kushner unveiled glossy images of his vision for a “new Gaza”: shining apartment towers, luxury developments, and sweeping views of the Mediterranean. There were no Palestinians at the ceremony—and none on the Board of Peace itself. In Kushner’s fantasy, Palestinians appear only as an absence, buried beneath the rubble of the real Gaza.

But how, exactly, are Palestinians to be “demilitarized” and pacified to make way for this Riviera of the Middle East? The assassination of Gaza’s Khan Younis police chief in a drive-by shooting this January offers a chilling clue. It was not an isolated act of lawlessness, but an ominous signal of what lies ahead. As Israeli-backed Palestinian militias openly take credit for targeted killings, the United States is reviving a familiar, deadly—and thoroughly discredited—playbook from Iraq and Afghanistan, in which death squads, night raids, and “kill or capture” missions are cynically repackaged as stabilization and peace.

Gaza is now being positioned as the next laboratory for this model, under the banner of Donald Trump’s so-called “peace plan,” with consequences that history has already shown to be catastrophic.

That strategy was laid bare on January 12th, 2026, when Lieutenant-Colonel Mahmoud al-Astal, the police chief of Khan Younis in Gaza, was assassinated by a death squad based in the Israeli-occupied part of Gaza beyond the “yellow line.” A militia leader known as Abu Safin immediately took credit for the killing, which he said was ordered by Shin Beit, Israel’s anti-Palestinian spy agency.

Another Israeli-backed militia, reputedly linked to ISIS, killed a well-known Gaza journalist, Saleh Al-Jafarawi, in October. That militia’s leader, Yasser Abu Shabab, was disowned by his family for running a pro-Israel death squad and was killed on November 4th, reportedly by one of his own gang.

These Israeli-run death squad operations follow a similar pattern to the targeted killings of Iraqi civil society leaders as resistance grew to the hostile US military occupation of Iraq in 2003 and 2004. But as they did in Iraq and Afghanistan, these targeted killings are likely to grow into a much more systematic and widespread use of death squads and military “kill or capture” night raids in the next phase of Trump’s “peace” plan.

President Trump has announced that the so-called “International Stabilization Force” (ISF) in Gaza will be under the command of US Major General Jasper Jeffers, who was, until recently, the head of US Special Operations Command. Jeffers is a veteran of “special operations” in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the US occupation responded to widespread armed resistance with death squad operations, thousands of airstrikes, and night raids by special operations forces that peaked at over a thousand night raids per month in Afghanistan by 2011.

But like Israel’s Palestinian death squads during the first stage of Trump’s “peace” plan, the US mass killing machines in Afghanistan and Iraq began on a smaller scale.

For an article in the New Statesman, published on March 15, 2004, British journalist Stephen Grey investigated the assassination of Abdul-Latif al-Mayah, the director of the Baghdad Centre for Human Rights and the fourth professor from al-Mustansariya University to be killed. Professor al-Mayah was dragged out of his car on his way to work, shot 20 times and left dead in the street. A senior US military spokesman blamed his death on “the guerrillas,” and told Grey, “Silencing urban professionals… works against everything we’re trying to do here.”

On further investigation, Grey discovered that it was forces within the occupation government, not the resistance, that killed Professor Al-Mayah. An Iraqi police officer eventually told him, “Dr. Abdul-Latif was becoming more and more popular because he spoke for people on the street here… There are political parties in this city who are systematically killing people. They are politicians that are backed by the Americans and who arrived in Iraq from exile with a list of their enemies. I’ve seen these lists. They are killing people one by one.”

A few months later, retired Colonel James Steele, a veteran of the Phoenix program in Vietnam, the US war in El Salvador and the Iran-Contra scandal, arrived in Iraq to oversee the recruitment and training of new Special Police Commandos (SPC), who were then unleashed as death squads in Mosul, Baghdad and other cities, under command of the Iraqi Interior Ministry.

Steven Casteel, who ran the Iraqi Interior Ministry after the US invasion, was the former intelligence chief for the US Drug Enforcement Agency in Latin America, where it worked with the Los Pepes death squad to hunt down and kill Pepe Escobar, the leader of the Medellin drug cartel.

In Iraq, Steele and Casteel both reported directly to US Ambassador John Negroponte, another veteran of US covert operations in Vietnam and Latin America.

Just as John Negroponte, James Steele and Steven Casteel brought the methods they learned and used in Vietnam and Latin America to Iraq, Jasper Jeffers brings his training and experience from Iraq and Afghanistan to Gaza, and will clearly bring other special operations and CIA officers with similar........

© Common Dreams