Hamas says it has accepted a far-reaching proposal to stop the war with Israel, a deal that would put its weapons under a new oversight process and tie disarmament to a staged Israeli pullback from Gaza.
The fate of the group’s arsenal has long been among the most difficult obstacles facing efforts to move beyond the ceasefire that has held in Gaza since October.
US President Donald Trump said late last night that an agreement had been reached for the “complete disarmament” of Hamas, describing it as an essential move toward establishing a new Palestinian administration in Gaza.
Hamas officials said the storage of the Islamist movement’s weapons would be handled by a committee created by Mr Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’, the body set up to govern Gaza.
US President Donald Trump called the move a ‘monumental step’ toward lasting peace
Ghazi Hamad, who sits on the group’s negotiating team, said Hamas was making “concessions for the sake of our people in the Gaza Strip, to save them from killing and displacement”.
“Israel will not intervene in the issue of disarmament. The National Committee is the body that will undertake this task,” he said, referring to the National Committee for Administration of Gaza (NCAG).
Israel did not immediately issue a statement.
The ceasefire that began in October has not brought a full end to bloodshed in Gaza, where health officials said Israeli strikes killed at least four people yesterday, among them two children.
Focus now on implementation
The ‘Board of Peace’ said in a post on X that Hamas had “agreed to a detailed Roadmap for implementing the next phases of the Gaza ceasefire”.
“Our focus now turns to implementation,” the organisation wrote, saying the NCAG will “soon begin a phased transition toward full authority”.
In an earlier post on social media, Mr Trump said that after Hamas completes its disarmament, “Israeli forces will withdraw, and the International Stabilisation Force will work with a new Palestinian police force to take responsibility for Gaza being safe for its residents and its neighbours”.
Nickolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace’s high representative for Gaza, said the agreement “took months of very difficult negotiations”.
“What happens next matters even more. Implementation and verification have to be real,” Mr Mladenov wrote on X.
“Withdrawal must move in lockstep with decommissioning,” he added.
Egypt’s state-linked Al-Qahera News reported early today that Egypt is expected to host a meeting “soon” of the Gaza truce mediators, a group that also includes the United States, Qatar and Turkey, to discuss the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire plan.
‘No exceptions’
Earlier, a diplomatic source said: “We continue to advance the implementation roadmap that offers a balanced and pragmatic path forward, with all weapons decommissioned and a phased transition of responsibilities taking place to hand over full authority to the technocratic government.”
The source, who requested anonymity because he was not authorised to discuss the matter publicly, said there would be “no exceptions for certain weapons or certain people. One authority, one law, one weapon”.
According to the source, the roadmap would establish “a process for the elimination of all tunnels, depots of weapons and any weapons production facilities”.
The source said a verification mechanism would be used to ensure both sides comply.
A Hamas source familiar with the negotiations had said earlier that the movement was “awaiting the Israeli response to the amendments we recently submitted to the mediators”.
The source said those amendments related to two articles in the roadmap put forward by the ‘Board of Peace’.
Under the 20-point plan, the second phase of the ceasefire was to involve Hamas’s disarmament and a gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from the territory
On the article dealing with weapons, the Hamas source said that “some points were removed, and alternatives were proposed”.
Before the agreement was announced, an Israeli political source said the proposed deal did not “satisfactorily” meet Israel’s demands.
“Israel demands the complete disarmament of Hamas, including the removal of weapons from Gaza and full demilitarisation of the Strip as a precondition for any process,” the source said.
The source also said that “the issue of Gaza did not come up at all” during the meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Mr Trump in Washington this week.
Meanwhile, the Middle East Director of the International Communities Organisation said the deal announced overnight represented a very good development, because many had argued that Hamas would never agree to disarm.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, Dr Gershon Baskin said that the devil is in the detail, and the agreement has not been seen yet.
“There will be disagreements in interpretation between Israel and Hamas,” he said, noting that Israel is three months from elections and Mr Netanyahu is facing heavy pressure.
“He’s not doing well in the polls, and he’s unlikely to pick a fight with President Trump, who’s his main calling card on his relationship with the US government.”
Even so, he said Mr Netanyahu would face significant pressure from his political base over the deal.
Asked whether Israeli military activity in Gaza would stop, Mr Baskin said there would be “enormous American pressure” on Mr Netanyahu to halt the military operations there.
