Oslo Accords at 33: Anatomy of an ongoing Palestinian disaster

MEM, September 3, 2026 at 8:00 am

 

Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres (C) signs the historic Israel-PLO Oslo Accords on Palestinian autonomy in the occupied territories on September 13, 1993 in a ceremony at the White House in Washington, D.C. [J. DAVID AKE/AFP via Getty Images]

• by Dr Mustafa Fetouri MFetouri

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According to the popular narrative surrounding the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), some sort of fully functioning, internationally recognized Palestinian state should have been established over two decades ago. The Declaration of Principles signed in 1993 explicitly mandated a transitional “interim period” not to exceed five years, setting May 1999 as the strict deadline for a permanent-status agreement covering Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, and borders. Yet a meticulous examination of the text reveals a structural paradox at the very heart of Oslo: while the diplomatic marketing and global expectations framed the process as a march toward eventual Palestinian statehood, the word “state” does not appear once in the agreements—substituting sovereign independence with vague language about “interim self-government.” 33 years later we ended up with much bloodier, brutal and wider occupation than it was when Oslo was signed. 

Instead of a bridge to incremental steps toward full independence, Oslo established a permanent interim administration, the Palestinian Authority (PA), whose powers were systematically eroded by Israel until making it an empty shell. Now The PA has evolved into a third hand of the Israeli occupation it was supposed to gradually end.

It functions as a security subcontractor tasked with suppressing local Palestinian resistance to protect the very forces colonising its land. Rather than fostering democratic statehood or focusing on ending the occupation—at least within its own administered areas—the PA’s administrative structure, with the direct or indirect help of the occupation, mutated into an authoritarian regime marked by deep-seated corruption, arbitrary detentions, and violent suppression of civilian dissent, typified by the fatal  beating of activist Nizar Banat in June 2021. Clinging desperately to power in Ramallah, the PA leadership remains headed by Mahmoud Abbas—the very  architect who signed the Declaration of Principles on September 13, 1993—ensuring that the same hands that sealed the initial structural trap continue to enforce its endless, destructive survival. 

READ: Palestinian commission records 2,030 Israeli army and settler attacks in West Bank in August

Turning to the Gaza Strip, the contrast between Oslo’s promises and today’s grim reality is staggering. It is worth recalling that Gaza, alongside Jericho, was the very first territory transferred to the emerging PA under the 1994 Cairo Agreement—another Oslo based deal. Yet today, the situation in the Gaza Strip is more tragic than words can convey. After nearly two decades of a crippling Israeli blockade that transformed the enclave into an open-air prison, the occupying forces have escalated their campaign into unrestrained brutality.

Israeli officials have openly declared policies of total siege and starvation, forced mass displacement, and engaged in a military campaign that the highest international courts are investigating as genocide.

All of this is happening in the exact same Gaza that Oslo envisioned as Palestine’s gateway to the world—a blueprint not only for independence but for economic development and state-building. Instead, those promises have evaporated. Today, the Oslo Accords are nothing more than a bitter memory for Palestinians, whether they are enduring the occupied West Bank, surviving a devastated Gaza, or living the harsh realities of the global Diaspora.

WATCH: Is Evidence of Genocide in Gaza Being Erased? | Palestine This Week

Thirty-three years on, international lip service to a “two-state solution” functions not as a pathway to peace, but as a convenient diplomatic shield. By maintaining the fiction that a sovereign Palestinian state remains just around the corner, global powers have effectively bought time for Israel to finalize its violent territorial absorption of the West Bank and reduce Gaza to rubble. Even as the genocidal war in Gaza generated unprecedented pro Palestinian political momentum—prompting European nations like Norway, Ireland, Spain, UK and Slovenia to formally recognise Palestinian statehood—such recognition remains nearly meaningless without sovereign control on the ground.

Declarative statehood without borders, airspace control, or protection from Israeli military aggression only reinforces the Oslo apparatus, where process eclipsed substance and endless negotiations served to cover the physical erasure of Palestinian geography.

What Oslo Accords envisioned as an incremental peace process meant to culminate in Palestinian independence has instead been crushed under Israeli apartheid policies and reduced to empty rhetoric. At no point in the history of the conflict has the denial of Palestinian statehood been more explicit, driven by daily, aggressive raids by illegal settlers against Palestinian villages. State-backed settler violence is actively encouraged by far-right cabinet ministers—themselves illegal settlers—such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who openly call for the total annexation of the West Bank. This official Israeli backing directly fuels the surge of armed settler invasions of Palestinian homes, illustrated starkly by the village of Qusra near Nablus. There, violent settler attacks unfold under the direct protection of Israeli occupation forces, who either stand passively by or actively assist settlers in trapping and forcing Palestinian families from their land. Far from restraining this theft the Israeli government, last July, allocated  $434 million this year alone to build and expand illegal settlements across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, systematically severing any possibility of a viable Palestinian state. 

To speak of Oslo today as a “failed peace process” is to misunderstand its function: it succeeded entirely in eradicating international accountability while establishing a permanent infrastructure of Israeli control, shifting the argument away from an illegal occupation that must end and toward a mere dispute over land. The major powers, particularly through the UN Security Council, must directly reassess and formally rewrite the Oslo framework, which can no longer serve as the basis for any legitimate conflict settlement. Continuing to frame the conflict through a traditional “balance of power” dynamic is a pure distraction—it ignores Israel’s long-term strategic objective of permanently burying the Palestinian people’s rights to freedom and independence. Moving forward requires discarding the hollow machinery of 1993 and confronting the reality on the ground: a single, entrenched apartheid occupation that cannot be reformed through “interim” illusions, but must be dismantled through direct international accountability.

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