What the Gaza roadmap actually says

What this roadmap prescribes is a change of custody within Gaza, certified by a body that does not yet exist and enforced by an ISF that has barely arrived.

By Pierre Rehov, Gatestone Institute

On July 30, US President Donald J. Trump announced that his Board of Peace had obtained an agreement for the disarmament of Hamas and of every other armed group in Gaza.

The 15-point roadmap published the following morning promised the transfer of government to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), an International Stabilization Force (ISF), an International Verification Committee, and a phased Israeli withdrawal from Gaza tied to certified progress.

The roadmap’s governing formula could hardly be more categorical: “One Authority, One Law, One Weapon.”

Gaza would stop being a territory where ministries, terrorist battalions, clan networks, and foreign patrons compete beneath the fiction of Palestinian government.

Everything then turns on a question the announcement left unanswered: Has Hamas agreed to surrender the power and weaponry that have defined it for decades, or only to change the label on them?

The text rewards a slow reading. Its central security clause commits the parties to a “process to decommission and store heavy weapons, military production sites, depots of weapons, and tunnels.”

Storage is not destruction, however, and the same clause in the roadmap names the custodian: the new Palestinian NCAG, and “no weapons shall be transferred or handed to Israel or non-Palestinian parties.”

What could possibly go wrong?

When the sequence ends, NCAG alone – the Palestinian one – will be permitted to hold and control arms in the Gaza Strip.

Israel has always demanded demilitarization, meaning all weapons taken out of Gaza.

What this roadmap prescribes is a change of custody within Gaza, certified by a body that does not yet exist and enforced by an ISF that has barely arrived.

The roadmap also writes into its first article the aim to “facilitate launching a credible political path that achieves self-determination and statehood”—the reward for terrorism that Hamas has demanded for a generation.

The quarrel over sequence follows directly.

Senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad—who has vowed that the terrorist group will repeat the October 7 attack time and again until Israel is annihilated—made the storage of weapons conditional on Israeli withdrawal, the entry of NCAG, and the dismantling of the clan militias Israel has armed.

Jerusalem reverses the order. The Prime Minister’s Office rejected the proposal as falling short of full demilitarization, and Israeli officials repeated their opposition to any pullback from the “Yellow Line” security demarcation before disarmament is completed and verified.

The Board of Peace, for its part, has already declined to enforce Israel’s obligations for a ceasefire while Hamas withholds its signature.

Hamas has spent nearly four decades converting truces into arsenals.

Israel withdrew every soldier and expelled every Jewish resident from the Gaza Strip in 2005, and what grew there since is an Iranian-sponsored war machine: rockets, a vast terrorist tunnel network, weapons factories wedged into crowded neighborhoods, and a school system that teaches children that terrorism is a career.

Billions of dollars of international aid arrived, earmarked for housing, clinics, and employment.

Instead, the funds were used to produce weaponry and build an underground military comprising at least 350 miles of terror tunnels with 5,700 entry shafts and command centers in and under hospitals. October 7, 2023, was the return on that investment.

A terrorist organization that diverted concrete for tunnels, international aid funds for a military buildup, and used ceasefires for rearmament has not earned the presumption of good faith.

This roadmap extends it anyway and adds an offer of amnesty for those who hand over their weapons.

That presumption is harder still to defend given what Hamas has done just during this ceasefire. Israeli military intelligence estimates that Hamas has rehabilitated its forces to roughly 27,000 men under arms, while the movement continues paying monthly salaries to some 49,000 officials, running 13 municipalities and the ministries of economy, education, health, and welfare; collecting taxes on commerce; and skimming the international aid funds.

It still rules about 40 percent of the Gaza Strip, the part where most of the population lives.

The “Security” clause of the roadmap shows how the machinery is likely to fail:

Newly trained police personnel shall be incorporated into existing police structures. All police personnel shall undergo a comprehensive vetting.

Those who do not meet the required standards of vetting shall be offered alternative civilian roles consistent with their earlier experience or retire in accordance with Palestinian law.

None of those shall be deprived of their financial rights, particularly due to political affiliation.”

American officials briefing reporters confirmed that serving Hamas “policemen” will be eligible for the new force.

The article governing the Israeli-supported clan militias that oppose Hamas is drafted with an entirely different hand: “Members of those militias shall not be integrated in the security and police services.”

The clans that fought against Hamas are excluded. Hamas itself is merely processed, “vetted,” reassigned and kept on salary.

Verification rests on institutions that scarcely function. The International Verification Committee is to be assembled from the guarantor states, the Board of Peace and the ISF.

Israel’s cabinet approved an initial entry of 200 soldiers drawn from Morocco, Kosovo, Albania, and Kazakhstan against pledges of 5,000, of which only a handful have reached the region.

Certifying the demilitarization of a territory holding 27,000 trained and heavily armed Hamas terrorists is not a mission for a company-sized pilot project.

Above that force sits a Gaza Executive Board on which Turkey and Qatar hold seats, two governments whose usefulness to Washington derives precisely from their access to Hamas.

Qatar, Hamas’s patron, has been invited to certify the disarmament of its client.

“Qatar is at the top of funding terrorism worldwide…. Even more than Iran,” according to Udi Levy, a former senior official of Israel’s Mossad spy agency who dealt with economic warfare against terrorist organizations.

Qatar most likely sees its sole mission in Gaza as making sure that Hamas remains armed and in power to further the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which, largely thanks to funding from Qatar, Hamas is the Palestinian branch.

Qatar, of course, through its Al Jazeera media empire, is the Muslim Brotherhood’s chief megaphone throughout the Middle East and South Asia.

The motto of the Muslim Brotherhood is

“Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

Against this architecture, Israel holds the one instrument that has produced any movement at all.

Under Trump’s September 2025 peace plan, the Israeli army pulled back to a line leaving it in control of roughly 53 percent of Gaza and has since pushed to about 60%.

That presence is the reason Hamas signed anything.

Trading it for a schedule of “certifications” would repeat the oldest error in Middle Eastern diplomacy: an irreversible Israeli concession bought with a reversible Palestinian promise.

Inspections can be postponed, inventories disputed, tunnels concealed, and crises manufactured around aid convoys. By the time the deception becomes undeniable, Israeli soldiers will be fighting their way back onto ground they have already taken twice.

Parts of the roadmap need to be upheld. Mediators in Cairo insisted that the framework allows no exceptions for particular weapons or particular people and that it rests on reciprocity rather than trust.

Tunnels must be photographed and destroyed or rendered unusable, weapons production facilities destroyed, not sealed off, and all rockets removed from Gaza.

Command structures must be dissolved, Hamas and Islamic Jihad barred from every armed institution, including the police—and each stage confirmed by Israeli and American intelligence rather than by a committee sitting in Cairo. That is what compliance would look like.

Until then, the Israeli soldiers holding the line remain the only verification mechanism Israel actually has. They should stay where they are.

Board of PeaceGazaHamasWeapons