Amid Israeli pushback to phased Gaza withdrawal, source reveals Board of Peace weighing new disarmament framework

Amid pushback from Israel over the Board of Peace’s plan to disarm Hamas, which envisions a corresponding phased IDF withdrawal from Gaza, a source directly familiar with the negotiations reveals to The Times of Israel that the US-controlled panel is considering a completely new framework under which Hamas would hand over its weapons.

The original disarmament roadmap approved by Hamas breaks the roughly 47 percent of the Gaza Strip still controlled by Hamas into five sectors and envisions each sector being demilitarized successively.

Under that framework, once the weapon handovers and tunnel destruction for a particular sector are verified by the Board of Peace, the IDF would be required to pull back the troops it has stationed along that decommissioned sector. The troops would redeploy closer to the Gaza-Israel border, moving back from the Yellow Line to a Red Line, as demarcated in the map issued as part of US President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan for ending the Gaza war from September 2025.

Netanyahu has come out against that framework, insisting that Israel will conduct no withdrawals until Hamas has been completely disarmed.

A second official familiar with the matter acknowledged that the dispute was not resolved during Monday’s Jerusalem meeting between top Trump aide Jared Kushner and Netanyahu.

While the first source familiar with the negotiations clarifies that the Board of Peace has not abandoned the original phased framework, he acknowledges that a wholesale approach is being considered.

In this different approach, the entire area currently under Hamas’s control would be decommissioned of weapons all at once, rather than sector by sector, the source says.

Once that wholesale disarmament has been verified by the Board of Peace, Israel would be required to withdraw its troops, not to the Red Line, but all the way to the perimeter of Gaza, the source adds.

Such a drastic change to the disarmament roadmap would inevitably require Hamas’s approval, in what would surely drag out the process further.

Arab diplomats from mediating countries have told The Times of Israel that this was the risk in trying to advance the disarmament plan before the October 27 Knesset election, given that Netanyahu is unlikely to make any substantive concessions as the vote approaches.

The source’s revelation helps explain a statement issued by a Board of Peace official earlier Monday that claimed Netanyahu and Kushner agreed “that there will be no IDF redeployment from Gaza until Hamas is fully disarmed and all of Gaza is demilitarized — every weapon, light and heavy, and every tunnel.”

The source notes that the operative phrase in that sentence is “from Gaza,” meaning that the sides have agreed that Israeli troops won’t be required to physically pull out of the Gaza Strip.

But that was never the main dispute, since the original Board of Peace plan only requires the IDF to pull its troops back closer to the Israel-Gaza border as each sector is verifiably decommissioned, rather than pull out of Gaza completely.

Given that Netanyahu has not agreed to such withdrawals, the Board of Peace sufficed with reiterating a point that the sides have already accepted.