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On Sunday in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected a 15-point Gaza roadmap backed by President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace. He informed his cabinet that Israeli forces will not withdraw until Hamas is “genuinely disarmed.”
“It needs to be genuine disarmament, not fictitious disarmament,” Netanyahu said, resisting a plan that would tie phased IDF withdrawal to incremental steps toward Hamas demilitarization.
The decision met with swift criticism from Western media and certain intermediaries linked to the Trump administration. These voices have presented Israel’s insistence on disarmament as the chief barrier to a Gaza ceasefire. Israeli officials reply that the disagreement concerns sequence alone. Withdraw first, they caution, and Hamas retains its arsenal undiminished.
Palestinian polling lends weight to that caution. A PCPSR survey conducted between 22 and 25 October 2025 found that 53 percent of Palestinians believe Hamas was right to launch the 7 October attack. Fully 86 percent deny that Hamas committed atrocities against Israeli civilians, and nearly 70 percent oppose the disarming of Hamas even if it would end the war for good.
Among Gazans themselves, 55 percent reject disarmament, 68 percent refuse an Arab security force to supervise demilitarization, and two-thirds reject a demilitarized Palestinian state even if it terminated the “occupation.”
Israel has set two conditions for ending the war and withdrawing: the return of every hostage and the verified disarmament of Hamas. The reasoning, as Israeli officials explain it, is elementary. One cannot disarm an organization whose own population declines to surrender its weapons. If Israel leaves before those weapons are eliminated, Hamas emerges from the conflict with its army intact, free to rearm, regroup, and attempt another 7 October.
Hamas has deliberately embedded its military infrastructure within civilian sites, among them mosques, schools, and hospitals, its command centre operating beneath Gaza’s largest hospital. Disarmament without IDF enforcement simply means those weapons remain concealed.
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| The next generation of terrorists |
In a hypothetical presidential contest, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal would defeat PA President Abbas by 63 percent to 27 percent. In legislative polling, Hamas leads Fatah by 44 percent to 30 percent. The notion that Hamas fails to reflect Palestinian political will is contradicted by the preferences Palestinians themselves express.
The prospect of external rearming only sharpens the urgency of sequence. In August 2026, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian publicly reaffirmed Tehran’s determination to keep Hamas armed, telling the group’s new political leader, “We are with you, and we support you in every action you take.”
Israel has privately informed the Trump administration that there is “no alternative” to the IDF for enforcing disarmament. Israeli Ambassador Yechiel Leiter has confirmed that there can be no peace in Gaza unless Hamas returns all hostages and disarms.
“The population of the Gaza Strip is supportive of Hamas. They embrace that genocidal ideology,” Pesach Wolicki of Eyes on Israel observed in October 2025.
The genuine obstacle is not Israel’s refusal to append a signature to a document. It is that nearly 70 percent of Palestinians reject the disarmament required for any withdrawal to prove durable, while Iran undertakes to keep Hamas armed and no international force possesses a credible plan to compel compliance.
Under such conditions, withdrawal before disarmament is not a ceasefire. It is a countdown to the next round.
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