Hamas has moved toward disarming - now it's up to Israel

Donald Trump has trained the world to greet even his most serious announcements with scepticism.

His Board of Peace, ostensibly created to oversee Gaza's reconstruction and post-war governance, is a case in point.

Announced in January on his Truth Social platform as "the Greatest and Most Prestigious Board ever assembled at any time, any place", it demands $1 billion from states for permanent membership.

At the Davos signing ceremony, the US President presented AI-generated renderings for a "New Gaza" - skyscrapers, luxury seafront apartments, data centres and tourism zones.

Mr Trump told the room that he’s "a real-estate person at heart" and described Gaza as "prime real estate".

It was language you’d expect from a property developer’s pitch deck - not a body tasked with governing a war-torn territory.

But, for all the bluster and self-congratulation, the 20-point plan underpinning the Board of Peace is, improbably, the most credible attempt in decades to resolve the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict - not merely to pause it.

You could say that’s simply because nobody has proposed anything better.

And that’s kind of the point. As Hillary Clinton, no natural defender of Mr Trump, said last month, the plan is flawed, but it’s what we’ve got - and paralysis is much worse.

There were reasonable doubts about whether the Trump administration, or the board itself, had the patience for the grinding diplomacy the plan requires.

But officials have reportedly spent months in painstaking, closed-door negotiations on the next phases of the deal. This isn’t a plan that was announced with fanfare and then quietly abandoned once the world moved on.

The plan’s substance faced scrutiny too. Critics questioned the plausibility of nearly every step along the way to its ultimate goal - creating "a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood".

For instance, though the plan promised there would be a "process of demilitarisation of Gaza", as part of which weapons would be placed "permanently beyond use", Hamas officials repeatedly insisted that the group would not disarm.

So what are we to make of Mr Trump’s latest announcement - that Hamas has agreed to "COMPLETE DISARMAMENT"?

"This is a monumental step toward lasting PEACE and SECURITY," he wrote on Truth Social overnight.

Here we go again.

Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official involved in the talks, said the group was prepared to accept the "difficult and painful" terms reached in Cairo.

But he stopped short of using the word "disarmament" - instead describing a "comprehensive framework" contingent on Israel first honouring its own commitments under the original ceasefire agreement.

Though several media outlets have quoted Hamas officials speaking about the deal, the group hasn’t officially confirmed it has agreed to the disarmament plan announced by the Board of Peace.

In a statement this afternoon, Hamas did appear to tacitly acknowledge some agreement had been reached - stating that Israel’s commitment to ending its attacks was a "fundamental prerequisite for proceeding with implementing and establishing a timeline for what has been agreed upon".

Under the first phase of the October ceasefire, Israel’s troops were meant to withdraw to an initial demarcation line - the so-called "Yellow Line" - as a first step.

Instead, satellite imagery and reporting on the ground show Israeli forces have spent months pushing the line deeper into Gaza. By late April, Israel effectively controlled an estimated 64% of the territory, and Mr Netanyahu has said it intends to expand that to 70%.

Since that ceasefire took hold in October, Israeli strikes have killed at least 1,190 Palestinians, according to Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry - an average of more than four deaths a day, in a war that was meant to be over.

Set against that grim reality, it’s hard to blame Hamas for wanting Israel to hold up its end of the deal before progressing to another phase.

And so, whatever scepticism is warranted about how this ultimately plays out, there is something in what has been announced by the Board of Peace.

For years, disarmament was a red line Hamas refused to even discuss. In October, it agreed to a peace plan that made disarmament an explicit goal.

And now, however grudgingly, however conditionally, it’s engaging with a framework that addresses it directly. That is progress - even if it remains fragile.

Of course, if there’s a party that warrants genuine scepticism, it’s Israel.

Even the Board of Peace appears to recognise as much.

Posting on X, it today reiterated that Israel "shall fully complete, without delay" all the commitments it made in October, "particularly the cessation of military operations".

But, three months from an election, nothing suggests Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is inclined to follow through on its side of the bargain.

Today, it indicated it wouldn’t do so until Hamas fully disarms.

A senior Israeli official said: "There will be no IDF withdrawal from the current Yellow Line without the genuine disarmament of Hamas."

That, of course, gets the sequencing backwards. While Hamas has hardly been a model citizen - its increasing armed presence in Gaza violates the spirit of the deal - it did fulfil phase one's central requirement back in January, returning the last of the deceased hostages.

Israel’s commitments to end its offensive and withdraw were never conditional on disarmament - they are already owed as part of phase one.

For all the doubts about whether Hamas would ever disarm, and all the scepticism Donald Trump’s Board of Peace invited, it’s Israel that now has to prove it can hold up its own end of the bargain.

Read more: Israel must honour peace deal for Hamas disarmament - official