My cellphone kept lighting up this evening as word came out of the White House that Hamas had agreed to disarm. “Today, the Board of Peace reached a HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza. This is a monumental step toward lasting PEACE and SECURITY,” President Trump announced on Truth Social.
Hamas had a bit different interpretation, however. “We didn’t say disarmament, we didn’t say handing over the weapons, and we didn’t agree on any Israeli involvement,” Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas’s negotiating team, was quoted as saying in the Wall Street Journal. He said they had agreed to put the weapons in a storage facility.
The other part of this disarmament/weapons storage development is that Israel must agree to withdraw from Gaza once the weapons are not in the hands of Hamas.
Egypt, which is hosting the talks as part of the Trump-brokered Board of Peace, would only say that a “road map” had been agreed to, and that negotiations would continue. Israel, which invaded the Gaza Strip after the Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023, has so far been silent on this development.
Hamas disarmament and Israeli withdrawal are both part of Phase II of the peace deal Trump engineered in October 2025.
