The official leading negotiations with Hamas and Israel over the future of the Gaza Strip urged the militant group on Wednesday to focus less on consolidating its grip in the part of the war-ravaged enclave it still controls and more on embracing an international plan to rebuild Gaza.
Hamas “is taxing people in the street who have nothing left to give,” said Nickolay Mladenov, a senior official of President Trump’s Board of Peace, which is tasked with overseeing the reconstruction of Gaza. He said Hamas was blocking workers from building temporary housing to help Gazans get out of rodent-infested tents and into more “humane” living conditions.
“To what end?” Mr. Mladenov added, speaking to international journalists in East Jerusalem. “To squeeze better terms of a negotiation? To prove that nothing in Gaza moves without your permission? To foreclose the choice that the Palestinians in Gaza might otherwise make about their own future, before they can make it themselves?”
Though he offered a harsh critique of Hamas, Mr. Mladenov imposed no deadline to embrace the Board of Peace’s plan for Gaza and made no clear threat of the consequences if the group failed to do so. He only painted a grim picture of continued misery and bloodshed.
But he said that Hamas’s acceptance of the plan, including surrendering its weapons and renouncing violence, could give the group a future in Gaza and in Palestinian affairs more broadly.
“We’re not asking Hamas to disappear as a political movement,” said Mr. Mladenov, a Bulgarian diplomat and former United Nations envoy serving as the board’s high representative for Gaza. “A political party that disavows armed activity can compete in national Palestinian elections.”
“What is not negotiable is that armed factions or militias with their own military command-and-control systems, with their own arsenals or tunnel networks, can exist alongside the transitional Palestinian authority,” he added, referring to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, a U.S.-appointed group of Palestinian technocrats waiting to enter Gaza and assume control over government functions.
A Hamas spokesman, Hazem Qassim, said the Hamas-run government in Gaza was ready to hand over the administration of the territory to the National Committee, without saying whether the group’s military wing was willing to give up its weapons. Until now, Hamas has resisted demands that it relinquish its military wing’s weapons.
In his first news conference since assuming his role on the Board of Peace in January, Mr. Mladenov also faulted Israel, though more obliquely. He acknowledged that its deadly airstrikes in the enclave, now occurring almost daily — and often in Gazan cities far from areas from which Israeli troops or citizens could be threatened — were violations of the cease-fire.
Experts say that Israel has repeatedly violated the October 2025 cease-fire in other ways as well, including by taking control of territory beyond the truce lines laid out in that agreement, and by hampering the delivery of humanitarian aid and rubble-removal equipment.
A spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, with whom Mr. Mladenov met earlier on Wednesday, declined to comment.
In the news conference, Mr. Mladenov sought to convey urgency, describing dire conditions in Gaza, with thousands of families living in tents swarming with rodents and contending with “misery, violence and uncertainty.”
“For many Palestinians in Gaza, in fact for all Palestinians in Gaza, the war does not yet feel fully over,” he said.
Mr. Mladenov described the Board of Peace’s road map for Gaza as an intricately choreographed sequence of steps to be taken by Hamas and Israel, each to be independently verified before the next. He called the U.S.-led effort the “most ambitious, most resourced and most internationally backed attempt in a generation to actually solve” the problem of Gaza, “rather than once again just manage it and push it under the cover.”
Repeatedly, he warned that the choice was between the Board of Peace’s plan and the “status quo,” which would mean Israel occupying most of Gaza, Hamas being entrenched in the rest, and its people suffering.
Mr. Mladenov’s suggestion that Hamas could have a future in Palestinian politics if it disarmed was greeted skeptically by Palestinian analysts, who said to do so would mean giving up the group’s core identity.
“Hamas was born with weapons,” said Akram Atallah, a Palestinian columnist originally from Gaza. “Hamas can’t be Hamas without weapons.”
David M. Halbfinger is The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, leading coverage of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. He also held that post from 2017 to 2021. He was the politics editor from 2021 to 2025.
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