President Donald Trump announced Thursday that an agreement had been reached between Hamas and Israel, under which the Palestinian movement would disarm in exchange for a withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza. Billed by the White House as a « monumental step » toward ending the war, the announcement comes nine months after a US-brokered ceasefire was signed in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.
On paper, the agreement marks a turning point. Hamas and several other Palestinian factions signed a document outlining the broad strokes of a disarmament plan. A detailed roadmap is due to be drawn up within fourteen days, overseen by an international verification body, with the possibility of an extension if all parties agree. Over the next two weeks, Gaza’s police force is also expected to hand over its weapons to a new technocratic administration backed by the Board of Peace, the body created by Washington to oversee the territory’s reconstruction.
But this first step covers only a limited slice of the weaponry present in Gaza. The local police force represents just a small fraction of Hamas fighters, and heavy weapons are not part of this stage of the deal. The surrender of the most sensitive equipment – rockets, anti-tank missiles, explosives – along with the destruction of the tunnel network, has been pushed to a later phase that could stretch between two hundred and three hundred fifty days, according to American officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Neither Hamas nor Israel had officially confirmed their acceptance of the exact terms at the time of the announcement. That ambiguity is not trivial: negotiations had been stalled for months over the implementation of the second phase of Trump’s twenty-point plan, particularly over the order in which Hamas’s disarmament and Israel’s withdrawal should unfold.
On the Israeli side, deep skepticism persists about whether Hamas is genuinely willing to give up its arsenal, a weapon the group considers central to its identity and to its founding charter, which calls for armed resistance against Israel. For its part, a Hamas official warned that the movement would not carry out any part of the agreement unless Israel met its own obligations in parallel. Each side appears to be waiting for the other to move first, a familiar pattern of mutual distrust that has already derailed several stages of the process since October’s ceasefire.
Beyond disarmament, the twenty-point plan envisions the arrival of a technocratic Palestinian government, the deployment of an international stabilization force, and the launch of reconstruction in an enclave devastated by more than two years of war. On the ground, the humanitarian situation remains dire: the Israeli military still controls more than half of the territory, and a large share of the population remains confined to tent camps or heavily damaged urban neighborhoods. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, Israel’s offensive – launched after the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, which killed roughly 1,200 people and took 251 hostages in Israel – has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, including deaths since the ceasefire.
Trump himself acknowledged that the agreement would be carried out « in carefully structured phases, » saying that as disarmament progressed, Israeli forces would withdraw and an international stabilization force would work alongside a new Palestinian police to take over. Yet this sequencing, presented as the cornerstone of the deal, is precisely the point over which both sides continue to clash behind closed doors.
For now, the announcement amounts to more of an agreement in principle than a fully operational framework. The coming weeks – with the drafting of the detailed roadmap and the first weapons handed over by Gaza’s police – will offer an early, concrete indication of how solid this commitment really is. But the fate of Hamas’s heavy weapons and the exact timeline of Israel’s withdrawal will not be settled for months, leaving lasting uncertainty over how the process will actually play out.