Netanyahu says Hamas disarmament must include 60k rifles: ‘That’s what they used on Oct 7’

Hamas disarmament means “it must give up its weapons, not [just] its main weapons,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tells the 51st annual Conference of Presidents Leadership Mission to Israel.

Netanyahu says that there has been talk about Hamas giving up only its “heavy weapons.”

“There’s practically no heavy weapons in Gaza,” he says. “There’s no artillery. There’s no tanks. There’s nothing.”

“The heavy weapon, the one that does the most damage, is called an AK-47,” he says. “That’s how they execute people. That’s how they shoot our people. That’s what they use. Assault rifles. That’s what they used in the massacre of October 7. That’s what they used. They did the worst massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust with AK-47s.”

He says there are 60,000 rifles in Hamas hands. “They have to go outside,” as do RPGs and rocket.

Demilitarizing Gaza means Hamas’s remaining 350 kilometers (some 217 miles) of tunnels must be destroyed, and the same for any weapons factories, he says.

A report in The New York Times last week said Hamas would be allowed to keep “some small arms,” at least initially, while surrendering all weapons that are “capable of striking Israel,” according to a draft plan drawn up by officials involved in the US-led Board of Peace.

According to the report, a team including US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and Nickolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace Gaza envoy, plans on sharing the document in question with Hamas in the coming weeks.