After five months of daunting negotiations with President Trump’s Board of Peace, Hamas agreed last month to a road map under which it and other armed Palestinian groups would decommission their heavy weapons and give up security control in Gaza. Hamas also agreed to step down from governing Gaza and accept the deployment of an international stabilization force. In return, Israel would halt airstrikes, withdraw its troops from Gaza and allow the devastated enclave to be rebuilt.
Hamas’s agreement represented a fragile opportunity to break out of an otherwise intractable deadlock. The rejection of the plan by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Sunday is a setback for Israelis who want peace and security, and for Palestinians in Gaza who want relief from the cruel and painful conditions imposed by Israel. It is the latest example of Israel’s inability to say yes.
There is a narrow window to pressure Israel to change its mind and lock in Hamas’s compromise. Once Hamas’s disarming and Israel’s withdrawal took place, it would become impossible for Hamas to renege. The world would blame it for giving Mr. Netanyahu a pretext to collapse the deal and resume Israel’s military campaign.
In rejecting the peace plan, Mr. Netanyahu said Israel would not begin to withdraw until the Palestinian groups completed their disarmament. But Hamas is unlikely to accept that. It believes it would lose all leverage in the negotiations, and may have difficulty convincing its entire rank-and-file membership to disarm immediately, instead of in phases, without something in return.
One sign Hamas might be serious about giving up its weapons is that, aside from an alleged incident of a sole projectile being fired and landing inside Gaza itself, it and other armed groups have apparently not fired a rocket at Israel since the original cease-fire took effect in October. They have shown this restraint despite the fact that Israel has killed over 1,000 Palestinians in Gaza in that time, including Hamas’s top military leaders.
This unusual holding back could very well indicate that Hamas has no better cards left to play. Armed resistance in Gaza has reached its limit and has exhausted the rationales that sustained it. Well before the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas’s deputy leader, Saleh al-Arouri, admitted as much in 2020, according to a leaked phone conversation. “Frankly, armed resistance failed to create change,” he said. “The resistance presented heroic examples and fought honorable wars, but the blockade wasn’t broken, the political reality didn’t change and none of the land was liberated.”
When Hamas fired hundreds of improvised projectiles on Israel in 2021, purportedly to deter Israel’s escalation in East Jerusalem, Sheikh Jarrah and the West Bank, a cease-fire was reached, only to result in a sharp escalation of Israel’s military raids and settler violence in the West Bank. The years 2022 and 2023 became two of the deadliest on record in the West Bank.
The Oct. 7 attack failed to ignite the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s dream of a multifront war in which Israel would be overwhelmed by assaults from Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Yemen along with popular uprisings in the West Bank, inside Israel and in neighboring countries. Instead, it led to an Israeli offensive that killed more than 70,000 people and destroyed most of the Gaza Strip. Some Hamas officials have suggested openly and privately that Oct. 7 was a strategic mistake and that they failed to take into consideration the severity of Israel’s reaction.
Palestinian factions such as Hamas, which defined themselves for decades by the ideology of armed resistance, have been looking for a face-saving way out, figures close to Hamas have told me. Hamas leaders like Khaled Meshaal have been sending the message that Gazans have done their part in contributing to the Palestinian cause and paid the heaviest price, and should now be allowed to recover and heal.
Sensitive messaging is crucial to avoid mistakes made in other decommissioning experiences, like in Colombia, where a significant number of former FARC militants defected and joined cartels or created new gangs. For example, disarming for a group dedicated to armed resistance must be framed as a transition, not a surrender. That is why the Board of Peace’s road map for Gaza tries to avoid the spectacle of defeat, surrender or forfeiting of the right to armed resistance by using the language of “storing” rather than “destroying” weapons, and by placing a Palestinian police force in charge of the process rather than Israel or other external parties.
A better idea needs to fill the vacuum created by suspending Palestinian armed resistance. The appeal of violence has not historically increased support for Hamas. Hamas benefited instead from the failure of nonviolent options or their undermining, whether diplomacy, protests, advocacy or legal pressure.
Northern Ireland’s experience shows that decommissioning can eventually be successful only if coupled with a genuine political process leading to lasting peace, in this case a credible path toward Palestinian self-determination and statehood. Mr. Trump’s plan gestures toward this as a possibility in the indefinite future, but that is not enough.
Mr. Netanyahu’s insistence on Hamas’s disarmament before any Israeli troop withdrawal from Gaza is detached from reality. Israel’s military path has been proven futile. After over two years pulverizing Gaza, with heavier bombing than Dresden or Hamburg during World War II, Israel has failed to destroy Hamas. An extensive study on militant groups found that only 7 percent were defeated militarily, while 43 percent disbanded through a transition to a political process, dialogue and conversion to unarmed politics.
Israel’s argument that the road map would allow Hamas to regroup for another Oct. 7 is a scare tactic rather than a serious assessment. Surprise was a decisive element in making the attack possible, not the superior firepower of a militia against one of the world’s most powerful militaries. As the Israeli journalist Nir Gontarz noted, it was more about “the stupidity, arrogance and negligence of the Israeli Army and government, than about sophistication and danger on the part of Hamas.” What are the chances of another Oct. 7 today when the surprise element is lost?
Mr. Netanyahu’s obstructionism is most likely mainly about his political survival ahead of Israeli elections. A group of Mr. Netanyahu’s government ministers joined a march last month calling for the rebuilding of illegal settlements in Gaza. His defense minister last month announced plans to build such settlements in Gaza and bragged, “Today, there is no Shajaiye, no Jabaliya,” referring to the Gaza City neighborhood and Gazan city. “All these terrible places that you remember don’t exist.” That’s why withdrawal or reconstruction would, for Mr. Netanyahu, constitute political suicide.
America’s political leaders should not indulge Mr. Netanyahu’s argument that he is constrained by Israel’s domestic politics. They should say: We, too, have our own domestic political calculations, regional interests and international standing to worry about, and we will not let you endanger them to save yourself from a reckoning with your people.
Muhammad Shehada is a Palestinian analyst and a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post The Board of Peace Road Map for Gaza Gives Hope appeared first on New York Times.
