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Benjamin Netanyahu was under pressure on Friday from far-right members of his government to reject a plan announced by US President Donald Trump under which Hamas would disarm in exchange for a phased Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
Trump said overnight that his Board of Peace had reached an agreement for the “complete disarmament of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza”, and that Israeli forces would withdraw from the Palestinian enclave “as disarmament is completed”.
As details of the deal leaked out, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister, called on Netanyahu not to go ahead with the agreement — which US officials insisted was in line with a 20-point plan drawn up by Trump earlier this year that Israel had already agreed to.
“You only talk with Nazis through the crosshairs — and no other way,” Ben-Gvir wrote on X. “After the 7.10 massacre, the prime minister must clarify even to our best friends: the only solution in Gaza to which Israel is willing to be party to is encouraging emigration and destroying Hamas.”
Netanyahu has not publicly commented on Trump’s announcement. But in a sign of the domestic sensitivity of any deal with Hamas, an Israeli official issued a statement claiming that Netanyahu had not discussed Gaza with Trump when the pair met in Washington this week.
The official also said the latest plan failed to address Israel’s demands for “the complete disarmament of Hamas, including the removal of weapons from Gaza and the full demilitarisation of the Strip as a precondition to any process”.
“There will be no Israeli withdrawal from the Yellow Line in the Gaza Strip before the dismantling of Hamas,” the official added, referring to the line separating the part of Gaza controlled by Hamas from that occupied by Israeli forces.
The nascent deal also came under fire from some opposition politicians, with Avigdor Lieberman, the hawkish former defence minister who heads the Yisrael Beiteinu party, saying any agreement with Hamas was “a return to the same preconception that led Israel to the October 7 massacre”.
“Instead of reaching understandings with Hamas, Hamas must be eliminated,” he said.
As of Friday morning, many of the details on how Trump’s deal would be implemented remained unclear. US officials said that there were no set dates for the implementation of the plan’s various stages, with analysts concerned that the sequencing between Hamas’s disarmament and any Israeli withdrawals remained a key point of divergence.
It was also unclear when a new international peacekeeping force and Palestinian police units — to which Hamas is meant to surrender its weapons — would be up and running.
In a further sign of the challenges to the deal’s implementation, a senior Hamas official, Ghazi Hamad, told Al Jazeera that Hamas would not begin disarming unless Israel first withdrew from Gaza.
However, US officials made clear that Trump expected both sides to abide by the deal, putting Netanyahu — who is hoping for the US president’s backing ahead of Israeli parliamentary elections later this year — in an uncomfortable position.
“We are not asking Israel to do anything other than agree to the 20-point plan that they agreed to initially, and so we are very confident they will adhere to it,” said one US official.
“If they don’t, obviously President Trump would be very, very disappointed.”
Source:
www.ft.com
