The Media Line: What President Trump’s Gaza Deal Actually Says About Hamas’ Weapons 

What President Trump’s Gaza Deal Actually Says About Hamas’ Weapons 

The body that would take custody of the weapons was formed in January and has been working from Cairo. Israel has not permitted most of its members into the territory they are meant to govern. 

 By Waseem Abu Mahadi and Jacob Wirtschafter/ The Media Line  

[CAIRO] Late Saturday, Mohammad Dahlan, the former Fatah security chief who now heads the Democratic Reform Current from exile in the United Arab Emirates, said in a post on his official Facebook page that US special envoy Jared Kushner had told him he had reached an agreement with Israel to halt its attacks on Gaza the following morning.  

“Mr. Jared Kushner confirmed to us that he had agreed with the Israeli side to halt the attacks on Gaza beginning tomorrow morning,” Dahlan wrote.  

Less than two hours later, Dahlan edited the post, removing both the claim that Kushner had reached an agreement with Israel and the deadline. “Mr. Jared Kushner has informed us that he is working with the Israeli side to stop the attacks on Gaza,” the revised version read. “We continue our intensive contacts with the US side to ensure the agreement is implemented fully and faithfully.”  

The revised post said the agreement’s success now depended on Israel fully committing to ending its daily attacks. A Board of Peace official separately walked back a claim that the disarmament had already begun.  

“There is a clear Israeli rejection of the matter of storing the weapons,” Mohamed Ibrahim, an Egyptian security analyst involved in the 2011 Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange, told The Media Line. “This is the most important problem facing the agreement, and we will make a great effort to solve this problem, which could obstruct implementation.”  

Israel will keep attacking Gaza despite Hamas’ agreement to hand over its weapons, Energy Minister Eli Cohen said Sunday. In an interview with Army Radio, Cohen, a member of the security cabinet, denied that Israel had agreed to end its assault and backed a full military takeover of the Strip, which Israel already holds about 70% of. Cohen, who as foreign minister opened talks with Rwanda and Congo on accepting displaced Palestinians from Gaza, has said Israel is moving toward full control “until we reach 100%.”  

Two people were killed in Deir al-Balah before the hour the halt was meant to take effect. Medics counted nine dead in Gaza on Sunday morning. By afternoon the figure was 13. By evening Palestinian medical sources put it at least at 15.  

An Israeli helicopter struck an apartment in the Al-Masha’ala area of Deir al-Balah, killing Kamal Abu Muailaq, head of Hamas’ administrative body in the city, and his wife; the Israeli military said its strikes there targeted two commanders of Hamas’ Nukhba force.  

In Gaza City, a strike on an apartment in the al-Sousi tower killed Abdullah Adnan Abu al-Tayef, his wife Abeer and their son Azzam. Three members of the al-Hams family, one of them a child, were killed in al-Qarara, northwest of Khan Yunis.  

It was the second straight day of airstrikes since President Donald Trump announced what he called a historic agreement for the “complete disarmament” of Hamas.  

Dahlan said contacts with Washington were continuing and that the ball is now in the Israeli court.  

Hamas and the other Palestinian factions accepted the roadmap on Thursday at El-Alamein, on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. It names one body that may hold Hamas’ weapons, and it is not Israel.  

Only the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza may “hold, store or control weapons in Gaza,” the document says. No weapons may be transferred or surrendered to Israel or to any non-Palestinian party. Palestinian factions would take part in identifying and storing them. An International Verification Committee would monitor the process, backed by an International Stabilization Force. Point two requires Israel to cease its military operations “fully and without delay.”  

President Trump says “complete disarmament.” Hamas officials do not use the word, and neither does Cairo.  

Hamas would lose independent control of its arsenal. But nothing in the document sends those weapons to Israel or out of Gaza—the two things Israeli officials have called essential. Hamas has since submitted amendments to the weapons article and to the clause covering Gaza’s government employees. It has asked for changes to the definition of the military infrastructure to be dismantled, seeking language it says cannot later be reinterpreted. It is waiting for an Israeli response.  

Ghazi Hamad, a member of the Hamas negotiating team, said the movement was making concessions “for the sake of our people in the Gaza Strip, to save them from killing and displacement.” The weapons go into storage only after Israel completes what it owes under the Sharm El Sheikh protocol: halting attacks, pulling back, letting in aid and commercial goods.  

Hamad, a member of Hamas’ political bureau, told Lebanon’s LBC TV in October 2023 that the group would repeat the Oct. 7 attack “again and again” until Israel was annihilated, and that Israel “is a country that has no place on our land.”  

Hamas “is demonstrating considerable flexibility and making substantial concessions in an effort to save the Palestinian people in Gaza,” Mohammad Seyam, a Palestinian researcher from Gaza based in Doha and a professor of security and conflicts, told The Media Line, and “at the same time, deprive Israel of its pretexts.”  

The 15-point roadmap sorts Gaza’s arsenal into categories and sends each one down a different route.  

Police weapons go first. When the committee enters Gaza and takes up its duties, every police weapon passes to its authority. Serving officers and new recruits face vetting. Hamas’ police force numbers about 10,000 officers, mostly unarmed and dressed in navy uniforms, and whether any of them join the new force is one of the plan’s unresolved questions: Hamas wants them included, and Israel rejects any officer with a Hamas affiliation.  

The same commission is mandated to rebuild Gaza’s civil registration and identity systems and to coordinate with the Palestinian Authority, Israel and international partners on a unified population registry. Israel has controlled that registry since Oslo; births, marriages, deaths and address changes all require Israeli approval.  

Heavy weapons follow—a gradual, sequential process covering heavy arms, production facilities, depots and tunnels. The text says decommission and store. It does not say where, who guards the sites, how inspectors get in, or whether anything is destroyed.  

Personal weapons are the rifles and pistols held by individuals, families and clans rather than by the factions. Under the roadmap, they come under Palestinian law, with the committee alone registering and licensing them, revoking licenses and enforcing the rules. Civilians would be allowed to sell privately owned weapons, and the roadmap asks factions, clans and other parts of Palestinian society to cooperate.  

No published estimate exists of how many such weapons are in Gaza. The large clans have been heavily armed for decades. Hamas tried and failed to disarm the Doghmush family of Sabra in Gaza City repeatedly after the movement’s founding in the 1980s, in clashes that continued through last October. Armed groups outside Hamas now field roughly 3,000 fighters across the Strip, according to Sky News’ Data and Forensics Unit.  

Militias outside Hamas are covered too. Their weapons are placed in committee storage, and their members are barred from the new police and security services. Israel has armed and supported anti-Hamas groups inside Gaza.  

Dahlan called on all Palestinian factions to abide by the agreement, “end all armed activity and refrain from any actions that could give Israel a pretext to undermine it.”  

The stabilization force would not police Palestinians. It deploys between Israeli troops and committee-run areas, watches the ceasefire, trains Palestinian police, guards aid convoys. Internal security stays with the committee. The verification committee decides when the process moves from one stage to the next. The roadmap does not name its members, does not say what happens if they disagree, and does not say what follows if anyone blocks an inspection.  

Establishing a stabilization force “without clear command structures, UN oversight, and the privileges and immunities established through the United Nations” is “particularly worrisome,” said Susan Akram, a clinical professor at Boston University School of Law, who added that it remains unclear whether the mission is peacekeeping or peace enforcement.  

The roadmap makes each stage conditional on the last, and Israel controls the first one.  

On Thursday, Netanyahu’s office said the proposal did not meet Israel’s demand for the complete demilitarization of Gaza. On Sunday, Doron Spielman, spokesperson for the Prime Minister’s Office, said Israel had raised serious security concerns with Washington.   

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called the roadmap unacceptable and said Israel should keep killing Hamas leaders. Ben-Gvir, convicted in 2007 of incitement to racism and support for a terrorist organization, has said the only path to victory is “the full conquest of the Gaza Strip, a complete halt to the so-called ‘humanitarian aid,’ and the encouragement of emigration.” Netanyahu himself has not commented publicly.  

Israel’s position is that the weapons leave Gaza, said Nimrod Goren, president and founder of Mitvim, the Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies, and that Israel signs off on the decommissioning before it moves.  

“It’s essentially an Israeli stamp of approval—that it was done according to the expectations,” Goren told The Media Line. “Only then Israel will move to withdrawal.”  

When Israeli and Egyptian officers met in Cairo in early July, Egypt said it was willing to take Hamas’ weapons if they are handed over.  

“If Israel does not accept the agreement formally, the ground will be prepared for further tension, and we could return to a state of war,” Ibrahim said. Egypt will step up coordination with the mediators and the United States “in order to pressure Israel into accepting the agreement in full.”  

“The Egyptian state trusts the American administration completely,” he said. Without bilateral coordination between Cairo and Washington, he added, Trump’s original 20-point plan “could not have been reached.”  

Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty spoke with Nickolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace’s high representative for Gaza, and with US envoy Steve Witkoff the same day.  

“There should be simultaneous steps—a gradual Israeli withdrawal against a gradual resolution of the weapons problem, the inventory and storage of the weapons,” Ibrahim told The Media Line. “If the two parties commit to the principle of simultaneity, the agreement will succeed. The opposite is also true.”  

Mladenov, the architect of the phased approach, wrote on X that implementation and verification mechanisms must be “real and effective,” and that the Israeli withdrawal must proceed in parallel with the dismantling of weapons.  

What Israel has given Washington is narrow approval for the stabilization force to enter, some flexibility for a partial entry, and a decision not to attack the agreement publicly, Goren said.  

“All of these smaller operational things, or symbolic or statement-related things, are not really impacting the way the Israeli presence in Gaza looks like,” he said. “And then he will avoid anything that can bring political backlash during a campaign season.”  

Israelis vote Oct. 27. The disarmament sequence runs six to eight months.  

The 14-day clock may not have started. The roadmap does not give Hamas two weeks to empty its depots. It gives the parties 14 days to write the implementation timetable, and only after all sides approve the document. The verification committee can extend even that.  

“There’s no real debate on the practicalities,” Goren said. “This whole discussion about this process is so detached from the debate in Israel.”  

The body that would take custody of the weapons was formed in January and has been working from Cairo. Israel has not permitted most of its members into the territory they are meant to govern. The committee said this weekend it was fully ready to take on governance and reconstruction once the transition begins.  

Abdelatty raised it with Mladenov by phone on Sunday, stressing the importance of the committee beginning its work from inside Gaza to manage the transitional phase and preserve the unity of the Palestinian territories, according to a statement from the Egyptian foreign ministry.  

Hamas announced in July that it was dissolving its emergency government.  

Neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority has faced voters since 2006. The committee’s members were approved by the Palestinian factions, not elected, and hold little decision-making power inside the Board of Peace structure.  

The committee “may not enjoy widespread popularity among the people of Gaza because it was established through arrangements involving those parties who,” they claim, “committed genocide against them,” Seyam said. “Nevertheless, the people of Gaza continue to hold on to it because it represents the only remaining thread of hope for saving them from Israeli brutality and returning them to a path toward normal life.”  

Israel’s security cabinet gave initial approval on July 26 for a stabilization force of roughly 200 troops, with a headquarters near Rafah, and reserved the right to decide which countries may take part. Ben-Gvir voted against, telling ministers Hamas had not disarmed, and Israel was therefore not obligated to proceed. No deployment date has been set.  

Since the ceasefire took effect in October 2025, Israeli forces have killed 1,222 Palestinians and wounded 4,053, according to Gaza’s health ministry.  

“Without a different Israeli leadership, you could not really make any progress—either with or without the Board of Peace,” Goren said.  

“Even if Hamas were to raise the white flag and all its leaders, together with the population of Gaza, were to surrender, this would still not satisfy Israel,” Seyam said. “It would continue to demand more.”