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Diplomatic officials are describing talks in Cairo as “making progress” on a framework to fully disarm Hamas and remove it from governance in Gaza — but before anyone declares victory, it is worth reading the fine print Hamas is reportedly insisting upon.
The roadmap under discussion, brokered with Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey serving as mediators, calls for the complete disarmament of Hamas under the banner of “one authority, one law, one weapon.” According to a diplomatic official cited by the Times of Israel, the framework would require Hamas to hand over all tunnels, weapons depots, and weapons production facilities to the Palestinian technocratic National Consensus Authority Government (NCAG). Those weapons would then fall under the coordination of the Israeli Security Forces, to be led by a two-star U.S. Special Forces general. The design is explicitly intended to prevent the arrangement that allowed Hezbollah to remain a state within a state in Lebanon for decades — Hamas would have no role “in front or behind,” as one official put it.
That is the framework. Here is the reality on the ground: Hamas has not agreed to it. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad-affiliated channel Palestine Al-Youm is reporting that an announcement is expected Wednesday — but that announcement, if it comes, would cover Hamas placing heavy weapons into storage, not destroying them. And Hamas is making that conditional on a full IDF withdrawal from Gaza and an end to Israeli targeted killings. Israel has not accepted those terms. It is unlikely to. These are not minor procedural disputes — they are the core sticking points that have stalled every previous round of negotiations.
This is the second phase of the Trump peace plan, driven by his so-called Board of Peace, not by Brussels or the United Nations. Whether that makes it more likely to succeed is a separate question. The first phase included the resignation of Hamas’s civil administration on July 6, which was a meaningful step. But the history of this region is littered with signed frameworks that fell apart on implementation, and with armed groups that agreed to “disarm” while burying their weapons in concrete and waiting out the political cycle. The Hezbollah model — the very model this framework claims to prevent — did not survive because Hezbollah defied the paperwork. It survived because the international community had no stomach to enforce the paperwork.
The talks are real. The reciprocal structure — Hamas fulfills a commitment, Israel responds in kind — is a reasonable mechanism. But a framework in negotiation is not a signed agreement, and a signed agreement is not disarmament. Anyone claiming Hamas has surrendered is several steps ahead of the facts. The devil, as always, is in the conditions — and right now, the conditions are the problem.
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