Board of Peace Gaza envoy Nickolay Mladenov on Sunday lamented the past two days of Israeli strikes in Gaza that “have killed civilians and destroyed medical supplies that people depend on,” days after the body reached a disarmament deal with Hamas that would also see Israel withdraw from the Strip.
Gaza medics said Israeli strikes Saturday overnight and into Sunday evening killed at least 17 people, including children.
In a post on X, Mladenov said the strikes came “after intense efforts by the Board of Peace and the mediators (Egypt, Turkiye, Qatar and the US) to bring the Palestinian factions in Gaza to agree to a Roadmap on the full implementation of President Trump’s plan, to hand over civilian governance and to decommission their weapons.”
He added that his team was “working around the clock with the parties, the mediators, and regional partners to de-escalate and create the space for the full implementation of the president’s plan. Achieving a lasting peace is hard, but achievable if everyone makes their best efforts.”
The Board of Peace had hoped that Hamas’s approval of its disarmament plan on Thursday after months of negotiations would immediately trigger its implementation.
However, Israel has indicated that it does not approve of the plan’s terms, and will not cooperate with it, leaving its implementation in question.
The deal would see Hamas gradually hand over its weapons to a new Palestinian administration in Gaza, but the arms would remain in the territory. It also mandates Israel to begin withdrawing from land it holds in Gaza before Hamas has fully disarmed.
But an Israeli official said Sunday that Jerusalem had shared “serious security concerns” with the White House regarding the proposed deal. US President Donald Trump had previously claimed that Israel was “very happy” with the deal.
Doron Spielman, spokesperson for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office told The Associated Press that Israel’s intelligence assessment was that Hamas remains committed to rebuilding its military rather than genuinely demilitarizing. He said the Israeli military would not withdraw from Gaza — where it controls more than 60% of the territory — before Hamas disarms.
“Our assessment is that if we redeploy before Hamas is truly disarmed, it will quickly expand its presence throughout Gaza, rebuild its terrorist infrastructure, once again threaten Israeli communities, and seek to carry out another October 7-style attack,” he said, referring to the deadly Hamas terror attack on Israel in 2023 that triggered the war in the Gaza Strip.
“Disarming means physically giving up the weapons. Nothing less,” Spielman said.
A statement issued by Netanyahu’s office on Thursday had said Israel demands “the full disarmament of Hamas, including removal of the weaponry from Gaza and the complete demilitarization of the Strip as a condition for any process” of withdrawal. The statement added that the agreement does not include “a sufficient response to those demands.”
A Board of Peace official told The Times of Israel on Sunday that “we’re in a tense moment,” as Israel continues to carry out lethal airstrikes in Gaza, and senior Israeli officials stress that they have not agreed to suspend attacks against Hamas.
“There’s been a lot of rhetoric and a lot of things said, and now quite a few actions in the last hours,” the official said. “We’re trying to get over the hurdle and just get some calm in because I think that’s a critical first step.”
Israeli airstrikes Saturday overnight and Sunday killed at least nine people, according to local health officials, and Energy Minister Eli Cohen vowed that strikes in the territory would not stop despite Hamas signing the US-backed disarmament plan.
“It’s very clear that the plan shows that cessation of military operations is a key element that we work to get to,” the official said.
The official said that Israel was briefed “extensively” as the deal came together.
“If you look at the roadmap from when we started this negotiation to when we concluded, very little has changed,” the official commented. “We’ve stuck to the principles that we started with at the beginning. This is an implementation of the comprehensive peace plan that President Trump unveiled last year that was enshrined by the UN Security Council. Israel agreed to both. And they’ve been fully kept fully abreast on the sequencing of it.”
Amid growing frustration with Israel from the Board of Peace, exiled Palestinian politician Mohammed Dahlan said the mediators had expected Netanyahu to try to undermine the Gaza disarmament roadmap.
“We had been aware since yesterday that Netanyahu would do everything in his power to kill the opportunity that President Donald Trump worked on in collaboration with Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey,” Dahlan wrote on X. “We worked for weeks and warned against the criminal behavior of the occupation and what Netanyahu might resort to, and today the entire world sees the gravity of the massacre he committed to block the path to the greatest promising opportunity to begin ending the war and establishing security for our people in Gaza and for all parties.”
He added: “We pledge to our people that we will work night and day to stop the aggression and save our people from the crimes of Netanyahu and his government.”
Channel 12 on Sunday quoted an unnamed US official expressing frustration with Israel’s actions.
“These are the fruits of eight months of negotiations meant to bring about the demilitarization of Gaza — why continue the assassinations now and give [Hamas] an excuse to withdraw?” the unnamed source told the network. “This further isolates Israel in the Middle East, as all the mediating countries view it as proof that [Netanyahu] does not keep his word or want peace.”
The source added: “He killed three innocent children, which makes Israel look like bloodthirsty savages.”
Trump’s 20-point peace plan calls on Hamas to surrender its weapons and destroy its vast network of tunnels. It also envisions Israeli forces withdrawing from Gaza, the arrival of a new technocratic Palestinian government, deployment of an international security force and the rebuilding of the battered Palestinian enclave.
Hamas disarming has been a sticking point and has deadlocked negotiations for months. In announcing the deal on social media on Thursday, Trump said it would be carried out in “carefully structured phases.”
The agreement stipulates that all weapons held by the Hamas-run police will be transferred to the US-backed Palestinian technocratic committee, known as the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), upon its arrival in the enclave. It’s not clear when that would happen since it is contingent on other steps.
A process to decommission and store heavy weapons and to dismantle military production sites and tunnels will begin after the arrival of the Palestinian committee and the deployment of international forces. The process will be linked to a phased Israeli withdrawal, according to the agreement.
Eventually armed groups are to hand over all weapons to NCAG, but the timeline for this has not been finalized.
The areas Israel controls in Gaza have been mostly destroyed and depopulated. Most of the territory’s 2 million Palestinians are in the Hamas-held part, where hundreds of thousands live in squalid tent camps and destroyed neighborhoods.
Israel appears unlikely to pull back significant forces or make other concessions ahead of its October elections. Netanyahu faces a tough reelection battle, with his far-right coalition partners urging him to keep up the pressure on Hamas and leave forces in Gaza.
While the heaviest fighting in Gaza has subsided, at least 1,230 people have been killed in Gaza since a ceasefire took effect in October 2025, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry. The toll does not differentiate between combatants and civilians and is not verified, though Israel has generally accepted Hamas’s tally. Israel says its strikes respond to violations of the ceasefire or target operatives posing a threat.
Gunmen have continued to carry out shooting attacks on Israeli troops, and Israel says its strikes are in response to those and other violations. Five Israeli soldiers have been killed since the ceasefire began.
Source:
www.timesofisrael.com
