What the Gaza Roadmap Actually Says
by Pierre Rehov • August 5, 2026 at 5:00 am
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?
[T]he same clause in the roadmap names the custodian: the new Palestinian NCAG [National Committee for the Administration of Gaza], 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.
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.
[W]hat 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 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.... 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."
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 percent. 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.
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.
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?
