Weapons of Willpower: Hamas and Islamic Jihad on Trump's Gaza Plan
The UN put a stamp of legitimacy on President Trump’s colonialist plan for Gaza. In a Drop Site exclusive, Palestinian resistance leaders assess the state of the war.
اقرأ هذا المقال بالعربية على موقع (مدى مصر)
Shortly after 3:46 p.m. Doha time on September 9, Osama Hamdan received a call from a journalist asking him if he knew anything about the explosion that had just taken place in the Qatari capital. The senior Hamas leader was at a meeting across town from the Islamic resistance movement’s offices on Wadi Rawdan Street in the upscale Legtaifiyah District. He had not heard a sound. “There was an explosion in Doha,” Hamdan recalled the journalist telling him. “I think your people were targeted.” Hamdan began calling other Hamas officials. “No one is answering. All the phones [were] out of order,” Hamdan recalled. “After around five minutes, one of the brothers came to me and he said, ‘There was an airstrike against the office.’”
As Hamdan made his way to the scene, Israeli officials began telling media outlets that Israel had conducted a series of airstrikes aimed at assassinating top Hamas officials. “The members of the leadership who were attacked led the activity of the terrorist organization for years, and were directly responsible for the massacre of October 7, and directed the war against the State of Israel,” the military said in a statement. Israel said the bombing was intended to kill the head of Hamas in Gaza, Dr. Khalil Al-Hayya. “We are waiting to see the results of the attack,” one official said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was at a gathering sponsored by the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem in the immediate aftermath of the strikes. “At the beginning of the war, I promised that Israel would reach those who perpetrated that horror,” Netanyahu boasted. “Today that was done.”
The Israeli airstrikes were brazen, not the least because they were conducted in Qatar, a U.S. ally that hosts U.S. Central Command, the premiere strategic American military facility in the region. The Hamas offices in Doha were established in 2011 at the direct request of the U.S. government in order to keep diplomatic lines with the group open. The Qatari government, along with Egypt, has served as one of the main liaisons the U.S. relies on for regional conflict negotiations.
“It was a very clear political message that Netanyahu is not willing to have a ceasefire or any kind of solutions. He wanted to get rid of the delegation that was negotiating,” Hamdan told Drop Site. He added that Netanyhau wanted to claim “a victorious situation when he assassinated the head of Hamas in Gaza.” By bombing Qatar, “It also shows that he doesn’t respect even the people who are willing to achieve the ceasefire as mediators.”
Social media sites were flooded with pro-Israel accounts claiming Al-Hayya had been killed, along with other senior Hamas officials including Khaled Meshaal and Zaher Jabbarin. Netanyahu said Israel had struck “against the top terrorist chieftains of Hamas.” But Hamdan soon discovered that, in fact, no senior Hamas officials had died. “They concentrated on the area in which they expected the meeting of the delegation,” Hamdan said of the attempted assassinations. “But they didn’t succeed.”
Instead, the strikes killed Al-Hayya’s son, Hammam, along with the Hamas leader’s personal secretary, and three office assistants and bodyguards. A Qatari security officer was also killed. In all, Israeli warplanes reportedly fired 10-12 missiles at the compound, blasting the administrative offices and Al-Hayya’s apartment. Al-Hayya’s wife, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren were also injured in the strikes.
Hamdan had to break the news to Al-Hayya that his son had been martyred in the attack. The Hamas leader, whose son Osama was killed in an Israeli strike in 2014, lost numerous family members to the genocide in Gaza. Hamdan said Al-Hayya absorbed the news and then offered sentiments that the Hamas leader would later reiterate in public.
“As much as the pain of losing my son, my companion, my office director, and the young men around me—as much as this pain, which is a natural human pain—we are not made of iron or stone. We weep for our martyrs; we weep for our families; we weep for our brothers,” Al-Hayya said. “What I see every day of killing, tyranny, assassinations, and destruction in Gaza makes me forget the pain of losing my loved ones, my brothers, and others. Because I feel that all of them are like my own children.”
While Israel publicly justified the Doha strike by invoking October 7, the attack was, in reality, an attempt to kill Hamas’s negotiating team at a crucial moment and to do it inside the borders of a country that was mediating the ceasefire talks. In the days leading up to the bombing, the Trump administration, via Qatari mediators, had sent Hamas an outline of what U.S. officials claimed was a new ceasefire proposal.
President Donald Trump’s backchannel offer was sparse in its details, but its central demand was that all Israeli captives held by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza be released at once—not in phases. In return, the U.S. president suggested he would push Israel to accept a ceasefire and resume the flow of humanitarian aid to the enclave. From Hamas’s perspective, the offer seemed like a trap, in large part because its language was vague and noncommittal on the conditions the deal would impose on Israel for ending the genocide and forced starvation campaign.
Hamas also had been burned by Trump’s promises before. In May, U.S. emissaries met directly with Hamas officials to negotiate the release of U.S. citizen and Israeli soldier Edan Alexander, who was among the captives held in Gaza. In return, Hamas was told Trump would call for an immediate ceasefire and the resumption of aid deliveries to Gaza. Hamas freed Alexander and Trump reneged on his pledge.
Still, senior Palestinian resistance leaders recognized the only path to a negotiated end to the genocide would have to go through Trump, and it was for this reason they had gathered in Doha to discuss the U.S. proposal on September 9 when Israel attempted to assassinate them.
Hamas Accepted a Deal Before Israel’s Assassination Strike
On August 18, three weeks before the Israeli attack in Doha, the Palestinian negotiating team had offered substantial concessions and already accepted the terms of a 13-point ceasefire proposal that Trump and Israel demanded. The “Witkoff framework” was originally drafted in March and named for Trump’s Special Envoy Steve Witkoff. Hamas’s acceptance of the terms was the culmination of months of negotiations and technical talks following Israel’s unilateral abandonment, on March 2, of the original January ceasefire deal, its imposition of a full-spectrum blockade on Gaza, and the resumption of scorched earth bombing on March 19. The Witkoff framework centered on an initial 60-day ceasefire with the resumption of aid deliveries, the release of half of all living and deceased Israeli captives, and the possibility of extending the ceasefire as negotiations to end the war continued.
“I believe President Trump’s assessment was that Hamas would not hand over the 20 captives in Gaza all at once, because this is the only card Hamas and the resistance still held,” said Mohammed Al-Hindi, the chief political negotiator for Palestinian Islamic Jihad, in an interview with Drop Site last week. “Hamas and the factions—we consulted with each other and decided to accept the Witkoff agreement.”
The Palestinian negotiators came to the conclusion that it was important to break the stalemate and pare down their red lines to the bare minimum. For months, the Israelis had repeatedly issued new demands after the Palestinian negotiators would indicate a deal was possible. In an effort to call the question, the Palestinian negotiators informed mediators they would agree to make substantial concessions. These included the release of eight Israeli captives on the first day of a deal, dropping their demands for a clear timeline for withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Philadelphi corridor and accepting an Israeli “buffer zone” encircling Gaza that cut deeper into Palestinian territory than they wanted. They also agreed to move forward with a temporary agreement in the absence of a clear guarantee from Trump that the war would end. “If the Israeli government now refuses to accept the mediators’ proposal—which is fundamentally their own—it exposes the true nature of the Israeli position,” Al-Hindi told Drop Site in August.
The Palestinian negotiators saw the Witkoff framework as a flawed and temporary plan that left open the door for Israel to resume the genocide and keep significant forces inside Gaza, but the negotiating team reiterated its position that Hamas was prepared to enter into an “all-for-all” deal to release all Israeli captives at once and to sign a long-term truce with Israel.
“The question was for Mr. Witkoff: How do you define the ceasefire? Is it a permanent ceasefire, or will it be just for a period of time?” Hamdan recalled. “The answer was: it’s a step toward the end of the war, but it’s not a permanent ceasefire,” he said. Despite their reservations then, the Palestinian negotiators decided to accept the terms and move forward with what they hoped would be the start of a process that would bring the war to an end.
“Even when we accepted that [deal] on the 18th of August, in our reply, we said we prefer to have an end of the war, and if that happened, we will return all the war prisoners and the bodies,” Hamdan said. “We suggested: why not make a modification for the first sentence, saying ‘According to this arrangement, there will be a permanent ceasefire,’ or a declaration of the end of the war with a complete prisoner exchange?”
Israel did not officially reply to Hamas’s acceptance of Witkoff’s framework or to its suggestion of a comprehensive deal. Instead, Israel joined senior U.S. officials in falsely claiming Hamas was refusing to make a deal, despite the fact that it had agreed to what a senior Qatari official said constituted 98% of the U.S.-Israeli demands.
“We were surprised that Israel rejected it, and even Witkoff rejected it, trying to place responsibility on Hamas and the Palestinian resistance,” Al-Hindi said. “They gave Israel yet another opportunity to destroy the Gaza Strip. During this period, Israel [intensified] strikes on Gaza against civilians—these were all crimes—as if it was responding to the factions’ refusal, even though the factions had accepted [the proposal].”
As Israel expanded its ground operations against Gaza and launched what it said would be a full-scale invasion of Gaza City aimed at forcibly displacing a million Palestinians, President Trump announced on September 3 that he was making another “final” offer to Hamas. Ignoring the fact that the Palestinian negotiators had already conceded to what Trump had also called the “last chance” for a deal, the U.S. delivered a 100-word document to Hamas via Qatari mediators that called for the unconditional release of all Israeli captives in Gaza, living and dead. This exchange would entail a 60-day ceasefire and a vague commitment to end the war.
“Hamas welcomes any initiative that helps in the efforts to stop the aggression against our people. We affirm our immediate readiness to sit at the negotiation table,” the group said in a statement on September 7.
As the U.S. initiated backdoor communications with Hamas, claiming to want to make a deal, Israeli army Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir publicly threatened to assassinate Hamas leaders outside of Gaza if the Palestinian resistance did not surrender. “Most of Hamas leadership sits abroad; we will reach them too,” he said.
On September 8, Qatari mediators delivered to Hamas an expanded version of Trump’s 100-word proposal. The next day, less than two hours after Hamas’s negotiators gathered in Doha to discuss their response to Trump, Israel launched the assassination operation.
Trump and other U.S. officials claimed that Israel did not inform the U.S. in advance of the strike and that the president was only briefed on the movement of Israeli warplanes by the U.S. military shortly before the strikes. This narrative is implausible, given that Qatar houses CENTCOM, along with substantial U.S. military and intelligence assets.
Qatar also possesses extensive U.S. air defense systems and routinely coordinates with the American military, including in confronting Iranian missile strikes on Al Udeid Air Base in June 2025. On September 9, Israel faced no resistance in its strikes against the Hamas offices in Doha. Two days before the Israeli attacks, Trump issued an ominous statement. “I have warned Hamas about the consequences of not accepting. This is my last warning, there will not be another one!” he wrote on Truth Social.
“One hundred percent they knew it,” Hamdan said of U.S. knowledge about the Doha strikes. “I think there was a kind of green light, maybe less than authorization, because Netanyahu would tell them before doing that, ‘I can do something which can change the whole situation. And if we did that, you can give Israel a clear victory and you can have the chance to stop the war.’” Hamdan said Trump’s claim—after the fact—to have opposed the bombing amounted to theater.
The Doha strike was the opening salvo in a new U.S.-led push to help Israel achieve what it failed to win through its genocidal war: a surrender of the Palestinian liberation cause and the long-term subjugation of the Palestinian people.
Palestinian Unity In Response to Trump’s Plan
To listen to Donald Trump, the agreement eventually signed by Israel and Hamas on October 8 was a monumental achievement not seen in the Middle East for millennia. He celebrated his 20-point plan as “one of the great days ever in civilization” and boasted it would bring “eternal peace in the Middle East.”
Trump’s plan was sweeping in its scope and carried with it monumental ramifications for the future not just of Gaza, but of Palestinian liberation writ large. On a practical level, the negotiators would not be able to respond to each point of the plan swiftly. On a political level, Hamas did not believe it had the right to unilaterally negotiate such an agreement on behalf of all Palestinians.
Trump’s plan included the deployment of foreign troops and the establishment of an international board, with Trump at its helm and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair at his side, to dictate Gaza’s affairs. It also left open the likelihood of a long-term Israeli military presence inside Gaza and envisioned the total disarmament of Palestinians, erasing their right to resist Israeli occupation. Trump’s overarching message, in the eyes of the negotiators, was that Palestinians must surrender their fight for liberation and self-determination and submit to international—mostly U.S.-Israeli— subjugation.
In reality, the Palestinian side did not agree to all of Trump’s terms. Instead, Hamas offered a multifaceted response that was the product of consultations with a wide range of political factions, including those who do not control armed forces, in an effort to respond to President Trump with a unified position. If the only issues facing the negotiators involved a ceasefire, the Palestinian resistance was confident they could come to an agreement. The situation was more complex because the proposed ceasefire was linked to what Hamas officials saw as existential issues for the national liberation struggle and involved arriving at a unified position across Palestinian factions and negotiators.
In the days leading up to the October agreement, Palestinian negotiators faced unprecedented pressure from Arab and Islamic mediators to make significant concessions and finally reach a ceasefire agreement. They also were hearing intensifying demands from inside Gaza to make a deal that would end the genocide. The heads of Turkish and Egyptian intelligence, along with senior Qatari officials, assured them that Trump was serious about stopping Israel’s onslaught.
The Palestinian negotiators, aware of Trump’s erratic nature, did not doubt Trump had made such statements to the regional mediators. Still, if Trump decided to allow Israel to resume the genocide after all of the Israeli captives were released, they were concerned there would be no way to enforce the ceasefire.
“The regional mediators are incapable of compelling Israel to abide by any commitments in accordance with the agreement. This is something we emphasize: there is an incapacity among the regional mediators,” Al-Hindi said. “Of course, the Americans are biased—biased in favor of Israel and supportive of it. Despite occasional differences, they remain supportive of Israel.”
In their deliberations, the coalition of Palestinian factions crafted a strategy to thread the needle: Hamas and Islamic Jihad—whose armed wings held the Israeli captives and were fighting the Israeli occupation—only had a mandate to enter into a deal on issues directly related to a ceasefire and the exchange of captives. “The turning point was that, for the first time in the last two years, there was a clear position from the mediators and the United States administration that this means the end of the war against Gaza, which means that the genocide will be stopped,” said Hamdan.
Releasing all of the captives with Israeli forces still deeply entrenched in Gaza was a gamble the Palestinian resistance had consistently rejected. The internal assessment, however, was that Trump had determined that ending the active war against Gaza was a priority for him. This was not because Trump had any genuine respect or concern for Palestinians, but because of the complex constellation of interests at play: business deals, Trump’s relationship with Gulf monarchies, and his pursuit of the Nobel Peace Prize. They also understood that Trump recognized Israel would be incapable of retrieving the 20 Israeli captives alive from Gaza through military force and that its international reputation was in critical condition.
Al-Hindi laid out the strategic thinking to Drop Site:
From the beginning, we had no objection to releasing all the captives at once, but only if two conditions were guaranteed: a halt to the aggression and a withdrawal. These were the two elements we insisted on at all times. If Israel had agreed to a deal in which all the captives were exchanged at once, neither Islamic Jihad nor Hamas would have had any objection. But it was Israel that insisted on a phased approach. And I tell you, they insisted because Netanyahu wants to prolong the war for political reasons related to his governing coalition in Israel, and for personal reasons as well. And so he went for fragmented deals—smaller exchanges. But we were prepared to release everyone from day one if Israel had agreed, and the price was ending the war and withdrawal.
Al-Hindi said that, when it came to terms for negotiating an end to the active genocide in Gaza, the outline of Trump’s plan was “generally in line with our position, but we needed guarantees that the war would be over and that the withdrawal would occur, even in stages.” In a series of meetings—including with Witkoff and Kushner, as well as mediators from Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey—the Palestinians were told that Trump was serious about compelling Israel to end the war.
In the week leading up to the announcement of the deal, Hamas’s negotiators circulated proposed language among Palestinian factions and delivered it to the commanders from the Qassam Brigades and Hamas’s political leadership inside Gaza. Despite repeated invitations from Hamas and others, Abbas and the Palestinian Authority refused to participate in the deliberations. A consensus was reached that ending the genocide was the most urgent priority, but it could not come at the price of conceding to Trump’s menacing demands regarding Palestine’s future.
“The most important thing about Trump’s plan is the ceasefire,” said Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, the general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative and a prominent political leader, in an interview with Drop Site.
A former presidential candidate who was elected to parliament in 2006, Barghouti has spearheaded efforts to build consensus across the Palestinian political landscape throughout the genocide, and he was directly involved in determining the response to Trump’s plan. He agreed that achieving a ceasefire needed to be separated from responding to Trump’s broader demands. “The rest has to be negotiated in a way that will guarantee that there is a true reconstruction of Gaza and that Palestinians, Gaza, the West Bank will eventually be freed from the Israeli occupation,” Barghouti told Drop Site. “That’s the main issue, in my opinion, and we have to deal with that.”
For these reasons, Hamas and Islamic Jihad agreed to a narrowly crafted acceptance only of the terms to end the acute war, lift the blockade on the entry of life essentials to Gaza, and exchange prisoners. “This is the first phase, and we fully committed to successfully implementing this phase,” said Al-Hindi, who directly participated in the negotiations. Any agreement or formal response on the bulk of Trump’s proposal would require the involvement of all Palestinian factions—not just Hamas and Islamic Jihad—the Palestinian negotiators asserted.
In accepting Phase 1, Al-Hindi said that the Palestinian negotiators told mediators that they wanted a UN Security Council resolution “specifying the mandate, roles, and duration of the forces that would enter Gaza,” saying, “We do not accept that these forces operate inside the Strip in a way that clashes with the Palestinian people and their resistance—we want them to be peacekeeping forces. We want clear wording linking the West Bank with Gaza, not ambiguously related to Palestinian Authority reforms, which Israel and the U.S. would control.”
While Hamas agreed to Phase 1 of Trump’s proposal, it said in a statement on October 3 that the other phases in Trump’s plan “shall be discussed within a unified Palestinian framework, in which Hamas will participate and contribute responsibly.”
“We said all matters of the second phase are national issues involving all factions and national forces that participate in proposing them,” Al-Hindi added.
In response to Hamas’s acceptance, Trump ignored the nuance of the Palestinian response and called it “a GREAT Day for the Arab and Muslim World, Israel, all surrounding Nations, and the United States of America.” Thus began a mini-victory tour of the Middle East, first to deliver an address to the Israeli Knesset and then to Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt for the performative signing of a symbolic agreement at a “Gaza Peace Summit”—an event that included neither Palestinians nor Israelis.
“This long and difficult war has now ended. You know, some people say 3,000 years, some people say 500 years—whatever it is, it’s the granddaddy of them all. And in an unprecedented achievement, virtually the entire region has endorsed the plan that Gaza will be immediately demilitarized, that Hamas will be disarmed, and Israel’s security will no longer be threatened in any way, shape, or form,” Trump told the Knesset on October 13. “So, Israel, with our help, has won all that they can by force of arms. You’ve won. I mean, you’ve won. Now it’s time to translate these victories against terrorists on the battlefield into the ultimate prize of peace and prosperity for the entire Middle East. It’s about time you were able to enjoy the fruits of your labor.”
Hamas upheld its side of the limited agreement and released all 20 living Israeli captives the day Trump landed in Israel. It also returned the bodies of most of the deceased and has been cooperating with international teams in locating the handful still buried under the rubble left by Israel’s bombing. “In Sharm El-Sheikh, we received clear commitment from the United States administration and were told directly by Witkoff and [Trump’s son-in-law Jared] Kushner that President Trump has a complete guarantee that all those arrangements and agreements will be implemented 100 hundred percent,” Hamdan recalled.
For its part, Israel has repeatedly violated the ceasefire, killing 340 Palestinians in Gaza since October 10 and refusing to allow the agreed-upon levels of life essentials to enter the enclave. Under the terms of the agreement, Israel freed nearly 2,000 Palestinians from Israeli captivity and returned the bodies of 330 deceased Palestinians. Many of them showed signs of torture and extrajudicial killing. Some, according to medical officials, had organs surgically removed. The freed Palestinians came out of Israel’s prisons and military sites emaciated, sick with disease—some with limbs or eyes amputated—and with stories of unspeakable torture.
Israel’s occupation forces remain entrenched in more than half of Gaza’s territory and its leaders continue to broadcast a message that its war of annihilation and conquest will continue until the Palestinians surrender. Israeli officials say they are erecting infrastructure in eastern Gaza and that they envision remaining there for the foreseeable future.
“There is a ceasefire, but Israel is still destroying the houses, the remains of the houses in Gaza. It means that they want to convert Gaza to a place that no one can live in,” Hamdan said. “Is that a sign of a chance for peace? I think they are showing the people that there is no way to continue living in your land unless you resist.”
Trump’s UN Coup: A Fabricated Stamp of International Legitimacy
Since the signing of the agreement, the Trump administration has scrambled to find a path to implementing its broader agenda, namely its pledge to disarm the Palestinian resistance and demilitarize Gaza. While Arab and Islamic countries publicly endorsed Trump’s efforts, none of them have committed to providing troops in a deployment that runs the risk of battling Palestinian resistance fighters. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian leaders have been clear that they are open to the presence of an international force under the auspices of the United Nations, but only if their sole mandate is to enforce the ceasefire.
“We have no objection to the presence of international forces, but for peacekeeping, like UNIFIL in Lebanon. Forces that maintain the peace in the region,” said Al-Hindi. “But if their role expands into internal matters inside the Gaza Strip—handling aid and its distribution, protecting civilians, or training the Palestinian police—these are all roles that open the door to interference and friction between these forces and the Palestinian people inside Gaza. To maintain stability in the region, these forces must be peacekeeping forces that stand between the Israelis and the Gaza Strip.”
On November 3, the Trump administration began circulating a draft UN resolution that it hoped would provide Trump with a hammer of international legitimacy that could be used to implement his agenda. At the center of this effort was the securing of a formal UN endorsement for Trump’s “Board of Peace,” making him the de facto viceroy of the territory. The U.S., however, did not want an international force to fall under UN command or oversight. In the ensuing days, the Trump administration worked behind the scenes to pressure Arab and other Islamic countries to join his campaign. Palestinian leaders saw this as a perilous situation.
“There are three principles that we all agreed about as Palestinian forces, with the Egyptian side and with the mediators,” said Barghouti. “One is that Gaza will be run by Palestinians by themselves, not by a foreign authority. Second, that Gaza should not be separated from the West Bank. And third, the international force that they speak about should be a UN peacekeeping force to observe the ceasefire—to separate us from the Israelis and to guarantee the Israeli complete withdrawal from Gaza. These are the principles that should govern any proposal in the United Nations.” Barghouti added, “We should never accept any kind of foreign rule over us again. We don’t need colonialism again, and especially we don’t need Tony Blair to come and govern us.”
In the lead-up to the vote, Trump pulled off a diplomatic victory when the resolution was endorsed by a coalition of Islamic countries—Qatar, Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Jordan, and Turkey. He also secured a pyrrhic endorsement from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s administration, which nominally governs parts of the occupied West Bank and is immensely unpopular among Palestinians. Abbas also controls the non-member, observer seat of the “State of Palestine” at the UN. Now Trump could claim that “the Palestinians” and Israel were on the same side.
Israel, which failed to defeat or disarm the Palestinian resistance in Gaza over two years of genocide, wanted the delivery of aid or any Israeli withdrawal linked to Palestinian disarmament—a term enshrined in the vague language of Trump’s plan. Netanyahu has made no secret of his loathing of the UN, which has passed hundreds of resolutions over the decades condemning Israel’s apartheid regime. In September, at the General Assembly, he called the UN a “swamp of antisemitic bile.” Netanyahu nevertheless saw strategic opportunity in the UN endorsing the disarmament of the Palestinian resistance and the demilitarization of Gaza, especially if it came with no actual involvement of the UN.
On November 17, the Security Council convened to vote on the resolution. The U.S. envoy to the UN, Mike Waltz, told the member states that the genocide would resume if the council did not bend to Trump’s demands, saying that, “A vote against this resolution was a vote to return to war.”
In an unprecedented move, the council endorsed the deployment of an international force that would not operate under the banner of the UN, but would instead be commanded and controlled by Trump and his so-called Board of Peace. The UN effectively co-signed Trump’s position that the Palestinians should be stripped of their right to armed resistance against occupation and apartheid. The resolution states that Trump’s occupation forces would be authorized to operate with UN backing until the end of 2027, at which point its mandate could be renewed.
“We have experience with such matters. Anything ‘renewable’ can continue indefinitely and not remain temporary. It can last for long periods,” said Al-Hindi, the deputy leader of Islamic Jihad and a co-founder of the movement. “With Oslo, they said it was extendable for five years, but it has now been more than 30 years, and we are still living under Oslo.”
The resolution, which passed without objection, contained no enforceable instructions or detailed map for the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces, further solidifying indefinite Israeli occupation of large parts of Gaza. It states that Israel would work alongside Egypt and the international troops to “stabilize the security environment in Gaza” by disarming Hamas and other Palestinian resistance forces.
While Trump achieved victory at the UN, implementing his plan may prove complicated. In late October, Trump claimed on Truth Social that several Arab states “have explicitly and strongly, with great enthusiasm, informed me that they would welcome the opportunity, at my request, to go into GAZA with a heavy force and ‘straighten out Hamas,’ if Hamas continues to act badly, in violation of their agreement with us.”
But several key Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, and Jordan—along with the Arab League—have suggested they would not send any troops on a mission to disarm the Palestinians. U.S. officials have quietly acknowledged they are, for now, struggling to convince them to shift positions. Some of these players, however, have not entirely ruled out participating in an international force and have asked for more clarity on the scope of the mission. The administration has been in talks with non-Arab Islamic countries—including Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan, and Azerbaijan—but no country has yet publicly pledged to participate under the current scheme. Even if some nations do offer troops, it is likely Trump will need to employ private military contractors to stand up his force.
“I believe that the Arab and Islamic states that were supposedly going to participate in such forces all reject entering the Gaza Strip for the purpose of disarming the Palestinian resistance,” said Al-Hindi. “That is Israel’s task—a task it has failed to achieve for two years. Should such forces come to do the dirty work on Israel’s behalf?” He added, “Any plan that talks about taking away the weapons of the Palestinian people—meaning taking away their will, because weapons are essentially [an expression of] will—and bringing them to a point where they believe resistance is useless will be a failed plan.”
Both Trump and Netanyahu have portrayed the issue of Palestinian disarmament as a fait accompli in their agendas for Gaza, as though the Palestinians have surrendered. Accordingly, Israel continues its threat to continue the war if Gaza is not demilitarized.
“Frankly, statements of this kind are often rhetoric that does not reflect reality,” said Mousa Abu Marzouk, a founding member of Hamas, in an interview with Drop Site. “If you fought for two years against a resistance movement and still could not decisively end it, is it possible that you will get what you want at the negotiating table on this issue? I think that is very difficult. Therefore they need to lower their expectations a lot in this regard.”
While the resolution mentions the establishment of an apolitical Palestinian technocratic committee in Gaza, it would operate under the supervision of Trump’s hand-picked committee, effectively putting Gaza’s governance under foreign rule. “The United Nations is subordinated to the interests of the United States and ‘Israel’ alone—due to American dominance—and anything that is not in the interest of the U.S. or ‘Israel’ cannot pass in the Security Council,” said Ihsan Ataya, a member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s political bureau. “It is unacceptable to impose the Israeli-American vision, wrapped in a UN cover, on our people.”
Trump has also spoken of his Gaza plans as a business deal, boasting of all the investment commitments he has already received. Since he first floated his idea of transforming Gaza into a U.S.-owned “Middle East Riviera” in February, he has frequently spoken of Gaza’s “ocean front” real estate potential. His current “reconstruction” plan centers around a multi-billion dollar private and public for-profit investment scheme.
“The problem also lies in Trump’s presidency of the ‘Board of Peace,’ whose first mission is to establish a fund for raising money and rebuilding Gaza. This means that all funds collected worldwide will go into this fund, which will be controlled by Trump himself,” Ataya told Drop Site. “Out of the American president’s cunning and deceit, he has tied his name to this board in a way that gives him the authority to remain its head even after leaving the U.S. presidency. Thus, Gaza would effectively become Trump’s own economic project.”
Russia and China, which proposed an alternative resolution but quickly backed off, decided not to veto Trump’s plan and instead abstained—sealing its passage.
“Congratulations to the World on the incredible Vote of the United Nations Security Council, just moments ago, acknowledging and endorsing the BOARD OF PEACE, which will be chaired by me, and include the most powerful and respected Leaders throughout the World,” Trump wrote on Truth Social after the vote. “This will go down as one of the biggest approvals in the History of the United Nations, will lead to further Peace all over the World, and is a moment of true Historic proportion!”
Netanyahu welcomed the resolution, saying in a statement, “We believe that President Trump‘s plan will lead to peace and prosperity, because it insists upon full demilitarization, disarmament, and the deradicalization of Gaza.” He predicted that Trump’s plan, with the UN endorsement, would “lead to further integration of Israel and its neighbors as well as expansion of Abraham Accords.”
Netanyahu spokesperson Shosh Bedrosian declared, “Gaza will be demilitarized and Hamas will be disarmed. Either this will happen the easy way or the hard way. Now, in terms of a Palestinian state, our opposition towards one stands firm, valid, and has not changed one bit.”
A broad coalition of Palestinian factions, which includes nearly every political organization and resistance movement except Abbas’s Fatah, released a joint statement denouncing the resolution, calling it “a US-backed decision that violates international security frameworks and paves the way for Israeli actions on the ground against the will of the Palestinian people.” They affirmed the right of the Palestinian people to armed resistance and characterized the deployment of a foreign force as “a new tool for aggression against our people and the continuation of their genocide.”
Hamas released a separate statement saying that the resolution seeks to impose an “international guardianship mechanism on Gaza,” adding that the deployment of a force with a mandate to disarm the Palestinians “turns it from a neutral actor into a partner in executing the occupation’s agenda.” It charged that the resolution codifies a structure where the delivery of food, medicine, and other life essentials as well as reconstruction efforts “remain subject to politicization, blackmail, and subjugation.”
With this resolution, the Palestinians now find themselves at a historic moment: a battle for survival and liberation against a U.S.-Israeli axis that has been formally endorsed by many Arab nations and rubber-stamped by the Palestinian Authority, which operates without a popular mandate. It amounts to an effort to disarm the entire cause of Palestinian liberation and outsource its future to a nebulous foreign committee chaired by Trump.
“No one—especially the Americans, and the Europeans as well, and unfortunately some Arabs—no one wants there to be resistance to Israel in the region. The resistance embarrasses them,” said Al-Hindi. “So the ultimate goal is for the Palestinian people to lose its resistance. If we lose the resistance and the ability to resist, the Palestinian cause is finished. What protects the Palestinian people is its resistance. The issue is not about the names Hamas or Islamic Jihad—the Palestinian people resist because the enemy, Israel, continuously attacks.”
The Disarmament Trap
In a November 6 speech to a business conference in Miami, Witkoff said the U.S. was “in the middle of standing up a decommissioning process [for] weapons—a demilitarization and amnesty program.” He also claimed Hamas had committed to disarmament and handing its weapons over to Trump’s international force. “Hamas has always indicated that they would disarm. They’ve said so; they said it to us directly during that famous meeting that Jared had with them,” Witkoff said. “Hamas has always said that we’re going to need the international security force to come in here and be the layer [that] they give the weapons to.”
In the interview with Drop Site, Hamdan emphatically denied Hamas had made any such pledge. “No. What he’s saying, I don’t know, but we didn’t say that, because the whole delegation was there and no one said that,” Hamdan asserted. “If you want to negotiate, that will take time, more than the four days of the negotiations” leading up to the Sharm El-Sheikh agreement. “We have to talk with our brothers and other factions. And when we have a national understanding for that, we will start to talk to the mediators and the Americans.” The State Department did not respond to a request for comment on Witkoff’s claims and Hamas’s denial.
Among Palestinian resistance factions, there is a broad consensus that Netanyahu wants to use the issue of disarmament to justify a continuation of the war of annihilation in Gaza. Despite the ceasefire, Israel will exploit it to extend its attacks on Gaza, as it has done repeatedly in Lebanon. The Palestinians argue that disarmament is not really about the actual weapons, but an attempt to gain legitimacy for imposing a surrender that Israel could neither achieve through more than two years of massive bombing and ground operations, nor through 77 years of occupation and ethnic cleansing. The UN resolution, they say, effectively codifies this project.
“We reject this resolution and any resolution that labels the resistance as terrorism, grants the Zionist enemy the right to target the Palestinian people in Gaza under flimsy pretexts, and gives it the absolute security authority that this resolution provides,” said Ataya. “It is natural for the United States to seek to offer a service to the Zionist enemy, because it was unable to eliminate the resistance during the war. Therefore, it is working to disarm the resistance and eliminate its sources of strength.”
If you listen only to the Israeli narrative about the weapons possessed by the Palestinian resistance in Gaza, you would likely conclude they possess a sophisticated array of advanced arms capable of threatening the very existence of Israel. As it has been since the imposition of the siege on Gaza in 2006, the reality is that Hamas and Islamic Jihad overwhelmingly operate with homemade weapons manufactured clandestinely inside Gaza. Nearly the entirety of the supply of rockets fired at Israel have been depleted during the past two years of war, with resistance fighters operating small arms, homemade improvised explosive devices, repurposed Israeli ordnance and rocket propelled grenade launchers.
Israel’s attempt to portray weapons held by the Palestinian resistance as anything other than defense against invasion and occupation is baseless, Abu Marzouk said.
“The Israelis themselves said they eliminated most of the Qassam brigades in Gaza—in the north, in Khan Younis, and in Rafah—and that there is essentially no one left from Qassam Brigades. President Trump said 25,000 members of Qassam were killed, and their numbers are roughly of that order,” he added. “Israel also recently announced that most of Hamas’s military capabilities were destroyed—they said 90% of Hamas’s capabilities were wiped out. So if they destroyed 90% of Hamas’s military capabilities and killed most of Qassam’s fighters, as President Trump says, whose weapons are you going to disarm and where are the weapons you claim you’ll remove when you already destroyed them?”
“I tell you, there is no heavy weaponry. Even anti-armor munitions are made by young Palestinians inside Gaza. As for talk about smuggling and the like—this is all talk that Israel spreads in the media to make Gaza appear as if it possesses great [military] power,” said Al-Hindi. “For example, the Yassin 105 [rocket-propelled grenades]: these are manufactured inside the Gaza Strip by the youth, and they can make them at any time. Mortars are manufactured inside Gaza, and then there are explosive devices—IEDs—which are also made inside the Gaza envelope.”
Throughout the negotiations for a deal to end the Gaza war, Palestinian negotiators have repeatedly articulated their position on the issue of the weapons and have made clear they were open to a long-term, internationally-enforced truce during which resistance forces would not engage in any offensive operations.
“The weapons present in Gaza are primarily weapons of willpower,” said Al-Hindi. “Whenever there is a need for weapons, the young people will immediately manufacture them, and their determination is strong. Therefore, talk about handing over weapons is impractical, unrealistic, and meaningless, because at any time, if there is will and if there is aggression—and the Palestinian people want to defend themselves—weapons can easily be manufactured inside Gaza.”
While Hamas denies it has made any agreements on weapons, there is nuance within the position of the Palestinian resistance. Throughout the negotiations to end the genocide, Israel has demanded total disarmament and the dismantling of Hamas. The resistance groups have said this is a red line and would amount to a surrender of the cause of liberation and self determination. At the same time, they have told mediators—as well as U.S. officials in direct talks—that they are open to internationally-certified, monitored agreements that would involve weapons held by the resistance being effectively decommissioned, though not surrendered. But, they caution, the resistance would only do this in the context of a long-term truce with Israel and a total cessation of military attacks against Palestinians.
“When the negotiating delegation discusses the clause regarding surrendering weapons, the question becomes: To whom would we hand over these weapons?” said Ataya. “Is there a Palestinian state or a Palestinian government that defends our people in Gaza so that we may hand our weapons over to it? Or should we hand our weapons to our enemy and surrender? Is it conceivable that the resistance—which was not defeated in the war, and which the enemy failed to eradicate, and which the enemy was forced to negotiate with its leadership for a prisoner exchange deal—would now raise the white flag, surrender, and place the noose around its own neck?”
Al-Hindi, for his part, said that “The matter of weapons is not up for discussion, meaning that handing over the weapons is not negotiable, but the appearance of weapons or the use of weapons—this is something that can be discussed. Meaning, no form of weapon would appear in the Palestinian streets, and the Palestinian police and security forces would have full control over the streets. Training sites for resistance fighters would disappear, the weapons would be stored, and we would enter into a truce with its duration defined. But the idea that we would go out and hand over our weapons—what weapons are even in Gaza to begin with?”
Hamdan reiterated a position consistently articulated by Hamas that armed resistance groups will become obsolete if a Palestinian state is established that includes a national military capable of defending itself. “Among the Palestinians, including the resistance, there is a very simple and clear idea: We are a nation under occupation. If getting rid of the occupation can happen peacefully, that will be good for the Palestinians,” he said. “We do not want more of the Palestinian people being killed. In fact, we don’t want anyone to be killed. Not today, not yesterday, from the first day in 1948. But the history of the occupation shows you clearly that Israel is not willing to give up. If you want us to surrender the weapons, what’s next? There is no answer. It means that either they will kill you or they will kick you out.”
An Israeli official recently suggested to CNN that Israel is concerned the Trump administration may ultimately move forward with reconstruction—and other aspects of the U.S. plan—without conclusively addressing disarmament.
Al-Hindi, a pediatrician who has spent his life building the Palestinian resistance and has negotiated previous deals with Israel, believes that Israel will eventually be forced to accept a compromise on the issue of disarmament as part of Trump’s plan. “What they want is a symbolic and psychological message so that they can tell the world that they defeated the Palestinian resistance and that resistance is useless,” Al-Hindi said. “That is something they will never get.”
Israel Unmasked
Trump’s Gaza plan, in many ways, saved Israel from itself. While Israel succeeded in killing 70,000 Palestinians—an official figure of confirmed dead that is likely magnitudes higher—and razing large swaths of Gaza, it was unable to achieve the military victory Netanyahu promised. Israel failed to retrieve its captives held in Gaza by force and needed to sign a negotiated agreement with an insurgency largely composed of guerrilla fighters wearing sandals and attacking occupation troops with homemade weapons.
Trump’s plan offered Israel the chance to preserve its agenda of annihilation against the Palestinians under a banner of legitimacy offered by the coalition of Arab and Islamic states that Trump corralled into supporting his agenda. This culminated in securing the recent UN resolution with no strings attached. With Israel’s reputation wrecked by its genocidal war, Trump stepped in to dishonestly rebrand the entire operation as a momentous precursor to historic peace in the region.
“These past two years of genocide have revealed that Israel is not as strong as it claims to the world. Without American and Western support—arms, intelligence, and all these resources—Israel could not have withstood small factions in Gaza. Israel could not hold on by itself, it needs the West,” said Al-Hindi. “Israel has become known as a racist state, committing crimes openly in front of the entire world, and is being pursued in international courts. This is the new Israel. The Israel that once aligned its ideology and the beliefs of its people with its self-image, its view of the world, and its global policies—[this Israel] has now become a state plagued by internal divisions.”
Hamdan said that, while Trump’s agenda largely aligns with Israel’s, Netanyahu remains concerned that an end to the Gaza war could ultimately threaten his own grip on power. “The Israelis are still trying to undermine the agreement. Netanyahu understands that if the war is stopped, things will turn against him. He will go to court for his criminal problems. The international community will talk about the ICJ [International Court of Justice] issue and the warrant from the ICC [International Criminal Court],” Hamdan said. “He understands that this will backfire on him on the political level. So he wants to keep the situation unstable for his personal reasons and also for political reasons, because we cannot forget that, for the last two years, he was talking clearly about a ‘greater Israel.’ And greater Israel cannot be created through peace. It must be created through war.”
Al-Hindi believes that the world has awakened to the true nature of Israel’s position in the region, and the multi-decade propaganda campaign to portray Palestinians as terrorists is being dismantled as a direct result of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, he said.
“The Palestinian resistance consists of national liberation movements in a phase of national liberation—that is the correct reading and the core definition. We are national resistance movements, and our struggle is inside Palestine, only inside Palestine, and from Palestine,” he said. “The one that poses a political danger is Israel, because it is a hegemonic project seeking to weaken everyone,” he added. “Our struggle is against Israel and inside Palestine, and we are defending ourselves. We are national liberation movements, and we are ready to establish relations with everyone on that basis.”
The arc of history did not begin on October 7, and it will not end with Trump’s colonial plan. Hamdan recognizes that the path ahead is filled with risk and peril, but he also believes that the past two years of genocide have sent a message to the world that the Palestinians will never abandon their fight for independence.
“According to our history, there were moments where everyone thought that the Palestinians were defeated and they rose up again,” he said. “If anyone believes that he can force the Palestinian people to give up their rights, he is thinking wrong. We are not defeated. And we are not very far from seeing a Palestinian independent sovereign state, inshallah.”
Great, in-depth reporting, Mr. Ahmad, Mr. Scahill. Thank you. Most westerners are incapable of digesting the true nature of this conflict, so your efforts to delineate the details of this struggle for liberation is invaluable.
Trump can't help himself: He sees the enormous profits of the private prison complex in this country, and with Gaza being the largest open-air prison in world history, he sees the opportunity to turn occupied Palestine into the largest open-air private prison -- his, of course -- in the world's history.
What befalls Gaza will come to us all.
Resistance is essential, not optional.
Thank you, so much, for your commitment to truth.