If Disarming Hamas Is the Goal, Why Is Netanyahu Rejecting a Deal to Do It?
The new US-backed framework appears to address one of Israel’s central security demands. But with elections just two months away, political considerations may be getting in the way.
During the last three years since October 7 and the outbreak of the war in Gaza, the Israeli government and its political leadership have stated that the dismantling of Hamas’s military capabilities and capacity to strike Israel is one of their central war aims.
This makes Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rejection of the new American-backed Gaza plan rather puzzling.
President Donald Trump and the Board of Peace announced at the end of July that Hamas has agreed to a 15-point roadmap. Under this agreement, Hamas will relinquish all of its weaponry as well as surrender its governing role in Gaza. This will make way for a new Palestinian technocratic government to oversee the rebuilding and development of the Gaza Strip.
That, if true, is a huge and monumental accomplishment.
Hamas has governed Gaza for the last two decades since they violently seized power by overthrowing the Palestinian Authority. Gaza has since been their base of militant operations against Israel. But it’s also been a source of political power over Palestinians, and an immense financial benefit for Hamas itself. Giving up control is an enormous loss and undeniable defeat for Hamas. Securing its agreement to do so is no small achievement.
Crucially, this was not a proposal asking Israel to withdraw from Gaza and simply trust that Hamas might disarm and surrender afterward.
The Board of Peace’s terms were explicit:
“For the first time, Hamas officially has committed to an actionable plan for relinquishing all its weapons, which will be followed by Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.”
Notice the sequencing: Hamas is disarmed first. Only then will Israel leave.
The full roadmap is more detailed. It establishes an International Verification Committee and says movement from one phase to the next is conditional on the verified completion of the previous phase.
This means that Israeli withdrawal will only happen after decommissioning of Hamas’ weapons. In other words: Hamas and other armed groups lose their weapons and governing power, while Israeli forces progressively withdraw.
Yet Netanyahu has rejected the 15-point document, insisting that Israel will not withdraw at all until Hamas has been completely disarmed. In other words, Hamas must give up everything first for Israel to cede anything.
As I argued earlier this week, there are many reasons to distrust Hamas. Hamas is a jihadist terrorist organization that has committed grave abuses against both Israelis and Palestinians. Nobody should simply take its promises at face value.
But this untrustworthiness is exactly why the Board of Peace proposal created a verification mechanism and made the withdrawal conditional on its implementation.
If Hamas refused to hand over its weapons, Israel would not have to proceed with the corresponding withdrawal.
So why reject the framework outright?
One increasingly plausible explanation is Israeli politics.
Israel goes to the polls on October 27, and Netanyahu is fighting for political survival. His hard-right political partners and competitors—such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich—have every incentive to portray any territorial withdrawal as capitulation. So it’s hardly surprising to see that Ben-Gvir and Smotrich welcomed Netanyahu’s rejection of the plan and are likely to be important to his prospects of forming another government.
Palestinian-American analyst and peace advocate Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib makes this case even more strongly in a post responding to Netanyahu.
Alkhatib argues that Netanyahu’s announcement looks like political messaging aimed at the Israeli electorate. He notes that Board of Peace representative Nickolay Mladenov has already been negotiating Israeli objections, and argues that the modified framework substantially incorporates Netanyahu’s stated demand of verifiable disarmament before Israel completes its withdrawal.
There is other evidence pointing in the same direction. The Guardian reported that Netanyahu had been discussing implementation of the plan with senior Israeli military officials only days before publicly rejecting it.
Even Washington appears to view Netanyahu’s objections partly through the lens of domestic politics. The Times reported that the White House regards Netanyahu’s statement as part of his Israeli election campaign.
None of this conclusively proves that Hamas would actually have completed the disarmament process, to be clear. Hamas might well have stalled, or attempted to cheat.
But there was a simple way to discover that: test the agreement. Try to implement it. See what happens. If they are bluffing, call their bluff.
If Hamas refused to surrender its weapons, Israel would have been in a stronger position diplomatically. Netanyahu could say: we accepted the process, and Hamas rejected its obligations.
Instead, Netanyahu rejected the framework first.
Hamas can now tell Palestinians and the wider world: we accepted a process leading to disarmament and Israeli withdrawal; Israel rejected it.
This will undoubtedly serve as a rhetorical talking point for Hamas and its political allies or successors in the coming years.
Perhaps Netanyahu believes he can negotiate a better agreement. Perhaps there are genuine Israeli security objections that have not yet been publicly explained. And the Board of Peace itself says negotiations with Israel are continuing and that the plan remains operative.
If the answer is that no Israeli withdrawal can be promised until everything Israel wants has already happened, then this is not really a dispute over sequencing. It raises the question of whether there are any terms under which Netanyahu is prepared to end the war at all.
But if disarming Hamas is the overriding objective, then a verifiable international mechanism designed to do so seems like a victory. Not some kind of threat or problem.
Unless, two months before an election, being seen to make a deal is itself the threat.
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