Hamas Agrees to Disarm, But Only If Israel Leaves Gaza
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UPDATE: On August 5, I spoke to Chris Cook for his Gorilla Radio show in Canada, about this article, and about the ongoing persecution of Palestine Action activists and their supporters in the UK. Listen to the whole show on Substack here. I’m in the second half-hour; Yves Engler in the first.
The world’s media has briefly remembered the beleaguered Gaza Strip today, after Donald Trump claimed, in a post on his inaptly-named Truth Social account, that the Board of Peace — the body set up under his administration last October to supervise the future of Gaza — has “reached a HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT of Hamas and all the other armed groups in Gaza”, which he described as “a monumental step towards lasting PEACE and SECURITY”, and “a critical step towards Gaza finally being governed by a new Palestinian government that will work closely with the Board of Peace to help the Palestinian people.”
“At the same time”, he added, “Israel will have the security it deserves, with Gaza no longer used as a base for terror attacks.”
To briefly summarize the situation to date, last October, after two years of genocide, in which at least 70,000 Palestinians (mostly civilians) had been killed, a ceasefire was negotiated whereby Hamas and the other armed factions in Gaza agreed to hand over the remaining Israeli hostages seized on October 7, 2023, in exchange for an end to Israeli hostilities, the withdrawal of their forces to a “Yellow Line”, behind which they retained military control of around 53% of Gaza, and the provision of adequate humanitarian aid for the surviving population, set at 600 trucks a day.
While Hamas faithfully adhered to its obligations, Israel did not. In at least 3,500 violations of the ceasefire agreement, it has killed around 1,300 Palestinians, has expanded its control of Gaza to around 70%, and has failed to allow in anything even vaguely resembling the agreed amount of humanitarian aid.
Competing Visions for Gaza’s Future: Endless Bloodshed Or Bloodless, Sterilized Techno-Concentration Camps
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While the attention of the conscious world is, quite correctly, focused right now on Rakefet Prison, an underground detention facility inside Israel’s maximum-security Ramla Prison Complex, where the pediatrician Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya is held without charge or trial, brutalized and in fear of death, it’s important not to forget that, in the Gaza Strip, the surviving Palestinian population is still suffering from an acute and enduring humanitarian crisis.
The crisis is engineered solely by the State of Israel, which has failed to abide by the requirement, in the ceasefire deal agreed last October, to allow 600 trucks of humanitarian aid — containing, at a bare minimum, adequate supplies of food, water, fuel and medical supplies — to enter Gaza every day.
Insight into the humanitarian crisis can be found via regular updates issued by UNRWA (the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), established in 1950, which remains the largest provider of educational and health support to the Palestinians, despite persistent efforts by Israel to destroy it.
The Intractable Search for Peace in Gaza
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My detailed analysis of the current situation in the Gaza Strip, after Nickolay Mladenov, the “High Representative of Gaza” in Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace”, insisted that no reconstruction will take place in Gaza without the complete disarmament of Hamas, even though Hamas never agreed to that, and even though the humanitarian situation in Gaza, as controlled by Israel, remains dire. I draw extensively on interviews by Drop Site News with senior Hamas officials, and an article in Haaretz by the head of an Israeli NGO supporting the Palestinians, pointing out the complicity of the west in the ongoing humanitarian disaster.
962 days since Israel’s genocide in Gaza began, and 227 days since a ceasefire took effect through the implementation of the first phase of Donald Trump’s “Peace Plan”, Nickolay Mladenov, the Bulgarian former UN official who is now the “High Representative of Gaza” in Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace”, has alarmed those seeking a balance between Israel’s obligations under the ceasefire deal and an acceptable response by Hamas by telling the UN Security Council on May 21 that Hamas was the “principal obstacle” to the continued implementation of the next phase of the “Peace Plan” because “it refused to accept verified decommissioning, relinquish coercive control and allow a genuine civilian transition.”
Mladenov’s speech to the UN followed what Drop Site News, on May 22, described as a “15-point roadmap” that he delivered to Hamas in April, which “amounted to an ultimatum: If the Palestinian resistance does not surrender its weapons, no meaningful reconstruction will be permitted in Gaza and Israeli forces will not withdraw.” In his report to the UN Security Council, Mladenov described the total disarmament of Hamas and other resistance groups as “the single factor that unlocks every other element of the plan.”
As Drop Site News proceeded to explain, however, “disarmament was categorically not a part of the phase one deal signed by Hamas and Israel in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt in October 2025.” As they added, “Despite repeated claims by US and Israeli officials that Hamas agreed to all of Trump’s terms, [they] and other Palestinian factions did not sign an agreement beyond a ceasefire, exchange of captives, and an initial framework for the redeployment or withdrawal of Israeli forces from some parts of Gaza.” The limited deal, they added, “also included the opening of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt and the resumption of deliveries of life essentials and equipment to clear rubble and begin early reconstruction efforts.”
Gaza: Caught Between Israel’s Ongoing Genocide, and Trump’s US-Led Neo-Colonial Takeover
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In the Gaza Strip, the remaining Palestinian population, who have survived two years and three months of the most diabolically well-publicized and even relentlessly celebrated genocide in history, which is still ongoing, albeit at a slower pace than before, are squeezed into just 42% of their homeland — 60 square miles in total, less than the size of Washington, D.C.
The rest, the other 58%, has been occupied by Israeli forces since a ceasefire was declared on October 10, when they withdrew to an arbitrary “Yellow Line” that was meant to be temporary, a phase in a staged withdrawal from the whole of the Gaza Strip, but which is regarded by the occupiers as a new and permanent border with Israel.
Under the terms of the ceasefire deal, which was mainly negotiated by Qatar, Egypt and the US, although Donald Trump, predictably, made it all about himself, even staging a “Peace Summit” in Egypt to which world leaders were invited to fawn over him, Israel was prevailed upon to stop its relentless bombing raids, and its ongoing and merciless ground invasion of Gaza City, in return for the immediate release of all the surviving Israeli hostages seized on October 7, 2023.
800 Days of Genocide in Gaza: The Equivalent of 3,500 9/11s Or Ten Million Dead Americans
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Sunday, December 14, marked 800 days of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, and yet you could be forgiven for not knowing anything about what is, by any objective measure, an unforgivably grim milestone, because no news network or newspaper in the western world could be bothered to report it.
If you’re reading this because of the headline, then yes, the death toll of the genocide is equivalent to 3,500 9/11s, or the equivalent of ten million Americans having been killed, but I’ll be discussing that in more detail at the end of the article, after running through every aspect of how the last two months of the “ceasefire” don’t constitute any meaningful kind of conclusion to Israel’s atrocities at all.
Since Donald Trump, to his credit, managed to stop Israel’s relentless carpet-bombing of Palestinian civilians two months ago, in return for Hamas handing over the last 20 surviving hostages seized on October 7, 2023, and, subsequently, all but one of the 28 dead hostages, most of the countries of the west, many of whom had started to become a little uneasy about Israel’s naked genocidal intent, have been behaving as though the genocide — or the “war”, as they manipulatively prefer to call it — is over, even though that is patently untrue.
Why The UN Resolution For Trump’s Colonial Takeover of Gaza Is Wrong, and Will Fail
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Over two days last week, the United Nations, formed in 1945, with its primary motive being “to maintain international peace and security”, sadly demonstrated all of the weaknesses that have prevented it from fulfilling that core aim of its Charter over the last 80 years.
On November 18, the UN General Assembly, which represents all 193 member states of the UN, overwhelmingly passed a worthy resolution affirming “the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination”, including “the right to their independent State of Palestine.”
The resolution was introduced by Armenia, China, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Norway, the Russian Federation and Viet Nam, with Egypt’s contribution undertaken on behalf of the 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.
164 countries voted in favor of the resolution, with just 7 votes against (including the US and Israel), and nine abstentions.
Gaza and the Palestinians’ Inalienable Right to Self-Determination
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Reflecting on Donald Trump’s tiny mind, in which he has the attention span of a toddler, and is only interested in simplistic outcomes that he can use to bolster his own delusional self-image as an extraordinary victor and savior, the peace deal for Gaza that he announced three weeks ago, including the ceasefire that began on October 10, is the most startling example of his solipsistic view of reality, and his inability to think deeply, or with any nuance, about any given topic for longer than it takes to draw in breath and exhale.
It is unreservedly commendable that the negotiations to end Israel’s two-year-long genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip have, for the last 20 days, prevented Israel from resuming, on a permanent basis, its merciless enthusiasm for the relentless aerial bombardment of Gaza, although it has broken the terms of the ceasefire deal on numerous occasions, requiring the intervention of US baby-sitters to keep it from breaking down, and, yesterday, embarked on its most violent violation yet, killing over a hundred Palestinians, including at least 46 children, and injuring over 250 more, in numerous air strikes.
Before these attacks, Gaza’s Media Office assessed that Israel had committed 80 violations since the ceasefire began, killing 97 Palestinians and injuring 230. Those totals now stand at more than 200 killed, and 500 wounded. The average daily death toll may be less than it was before the ceasefire began, when between 60 and a hundred Palestinians were being killed every day in direct attacks, but it is a sign of Israel’s arrogance, its sense of impunity and its complete contempt for the value of any Palestinian lives that it has killed and injured so many, claiming to adhere to the ceasefire deal while switching it on and off at will, without any repercussions.
International Court of Justice Condemns Israel’s Persistent Restrictions on Humanitarian Aid for Gaza
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On the same day that the Israeli Knesset gave “preliminary approval to a bill to impose Israeli sovereignty on the occupied West Bank”, as Al Jazeera described it, accurately calling it “a move tantamount to annexation of the Palestinian territory, which would be a blatant violation of international law”, over 3,300 km away, in the Hague, the International Court of Justice delivered a blistering condemnation of Israel’s existing failures to “fulfil its obligations under international humanitarian law” as the occupying Power in the Occupied Palestinian Territory; namely, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, first occupied in 1967.
In an advisory opinion relating to the “Obligations of Israel in relation to the Presence and Activities of the United Nations, Other International Organizations and Third States in and in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory”, the Court’s eleven judges unanimously ruled that the State of Israel was required “to ensure that the population of the Occupied Palestinian Territory has the essential supplies of daily life, including food, water, clothing, bedding, shelter, fuel, medical supplies and services” — from all of which, despite persistent and risible protestations to the contrary by senior Israeli officials, the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip have been horrendously deprived, though various “sieges” on all essential supplies, for most of the last two years.
The Court also ruled, by ten votes to one, that Israel was required “to agree to and facilitate by all means at its disposal relief schemes on behalf of the population of the Occupied Palestinian Territory so long as that population is inadequately supplied, as has been the case in the Gaza Strip, including relief provided by the United Nations and its entities, in particular the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East [UNRWA], other international organizations and third States, and not to impede such relief.”
A Fragile Hope As A New Ceasefire Deal for Gaza Is Agreed
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Is it real? Dare we hope? Is there really going to be a ceasefire in Gaza? Will hostages be exchanged, will humanitarian aid be allowed to flood into Gaza, staving off mass starvation, and additional widespread deaths through the destruction of the healthcare sector and a rigid siege on vital medical equipment and supplies, and will there really be a durable end to Israel’s genocidal hostilities?
To secure the return of its remaining hostages, and to fulfil Donald Trump’s desire for a Nobel Peace Prize, will Israel really end its hostilities, and wean itself off what, for the last two years, has been its remorseless addiction to killing Palestinian civilians? On average, every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day for the last 731 days, Israel has been killing civilians — babies, children, women and men — all while falsely claiming that it is “defending itself”, seeking to “eliminate Hamas” and secure the return of all the hostages seized on October 7, 2023.
Will Israel really abandon its true aims — the steady, relentless extermination of the Palestinian people (behind a mirage of “voluntary migration”), and the complete destruction of the Gaza Strip to make it unliveable, so that its vile, long-cherished dream of colonizing the whole of Gaza — and then doing the same in the West Bank — can finally be fulfilled?
The Gaza “Peace Plan”: A Neo-Colonial Takeover, and the Erasure of Palestinian Resistance and Independence
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After nearly two years of the most horrific live-streamed genocide in history, the majority of the world’s eight billion people, shocked and appalled to varying degrees, want nothing less than an end to the ceaseless murder of Palestinian civilians and the total eradication of the Gaza Strip, the provision of humanitarian aid and medical supplies in vast quantities, and the reconstruction of Gaza.
They — we — also want the establishment of Palestinian autonomy so thorough that Israel can no longer treat Palestinians as vermin to be slaughtered in the pursuit of the malignant dream that has been the driver of its existence since its blood-soaked founding 77 years ago — the total control of all Palestinian land, and the complete subjugation, disappearance or extermination of the entire Palestinian population.
The 20-point “Peace Plan” unveiled by Donald Trump at the White House yesterday, which Benjamin Netanyahu, visiting after alienating most of the world at the UN General Assembly last Friday, seemed to accept, appears, at first glance, to finally offer the promise of an end to Israel’s relentless genocidal assault on Gaza’s trapped and starving civilian population.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
