On Thursday evening, President Trump announced that his Board of Peace had reached what he called a historic agreement for the complete disarmament of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza. The word “historic” appears to be the only point on which the parties to the conflict agree.
Trump’s version, posted on Truth Social, is clean and total. Disarmament will happen in carefully structured phases. As it is completed, Israeli forces will withdraw, and an International Stabilization Force will work with a new Palestinian police force to keep Gaza safe for its residents and its neighbors. He thanked the mediators from Egypt, Qatar and Turkey. The Board of Peace, the body Trump created to manage his Gaza plan, said Hamas had agreed to a detailed road map and that an official statement would come soon.
Hamas’s version is conditional. Ghazi Hamad, a member of the group’s negotiating team, told Reuters that Hamas will hand over its weapons to the new Gaza administration, but that the deal depends on Israeli withdrawal from the strip. A senior Hamas official told AFP that an agreement had been reached on the question of weapons and on a gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces. Hamad described the move as concessions made for the sake of the people of Gaza, to save them from killing and displacement. In the Hamas telling, disarmament is not a surrender; it is one step in a phased exchange that also includes the deployment of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza and reconstruction work.
Israel’s version is silence, and what comes out around the silence is not encouraging. There was no official statement from Jerusalem after the announcement. An Israeli political source told AFP that the proposed deal does not satisfactorily address Israeli demands, and that Israel requires the complete disarmament of Hamas, including the removal of weapons from Gaza and full demilitarization of the strip, as a precondition for any process. A far-right minister went further, saying the only solution was encouraging emigration and destroying Hamas.
The gap between the three versions is not a detail. Trump presents the disarmament as done. Hamas presents it as a trade. Israel presents it as not yet agreed at all. A deal in which one party says the other has agreed, and the other party says it has not, is not a deal; it is an announcement.
The background makes the gap more visible. The ceasefire has held, more or less, since October, when Israel and Hamas agreed to the first phase of Trump’s 20-point plan, a phase built around a prisoner exchange. The second phase was always going to be the hard one: disarmament and Israeli withdrawal, the two questions on which the war began and on which both sides have staked everything. The United Nations Security Council endorsed the plan’s framework in November. Yet the violence has not stopped. Israeli strikes killed at least four people in Gaza on Thursday, including two children, according to health officials. Cairo is expected to host a meeting of the mediators soon to discuss implementing the second phase.
Disarming an armed group that controls territory, by negotiation, is one of the hardest things to accomplish in modern warfare. It has been attempted in Lebanon, in Northern Ireland, in Colombia, always slowly, always with verification, and usually with one side trying to keep its weapons until the last possible moment. Nothing in the record suggests it can be done by announcement, from a social media post, while the other party to the conflict says it has not agreed.
The pattern here is familiar. Big declarations at the top, no signatures at the bottom, and the ground between them unchanged. Hamas says it will give up its arms when Israel leaves. Israel says Hamas must give up its arms before anything else happens. Trump says the whole thing is done. One of these statements is true to each of its authors, and the three cannot all be true at once. Until Israel says yes, complete disarmament is a slogan, not a plan, and the killing continues while the slogan is being polished.