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Sunday, May 10, 2026
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Netanyahu Tells Trump's Board of Peace to Pound Sand: No Withdrawal Until Hamas Disarms Completely

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood in front of his Cabinet on Sunday and said what the entire 15-point Gaza peace plan apparently forgot to account for: the other side has to actually stop shooting first.

"I want to clarify this: Israel rejects the 15-point document," Netanyahu said.

The 15-point roadmap, published by President Trump's Board of Peace, envisioned a phased process — Israeli troops gradually pulling out of Gaza while Hamas simultaneously disarmed. The plan would eventually transfer Gaza's day-to-day administration to a technocratic Palestinian committee operating under the Board of Peace's oversight. On paper, it's the kind of framework that wins applause at Davos. In practice, it asks Israel to vacate territory while trusting a terrorist organization to voluntarily hand over its weapons on a parallel timeline.

Netanyahu wasn't having it. "The IDF will not carry out any withdrawal until Hamas is disarmed," he told his Cabinet. And he wasn't leaving room for creative interpretation: "When I say Hamas must be disarmed, I mean heavy weapons, lighter weapons, all weapons." He added that what Israel demands is "genuine disarmament, not a fictitious one."

The word "fictitious" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Because Hamas's own position, stated publicly, is that it will only lay down heavy weapons after Israel completely withdraws and a Palestinian state is established. Which means the 15-point plan was essentially asking both sides to go first.

Netanyahu went further, as reported by Blaze News: "They have ideas, some of which are acceptable to us and some are not acceptable to us, and we know how to stand firm on these things." He also reiterated a position that predates this particular dispute by years: "As long as I am prime minister, there will be no Palestinian state."

Hamas senior official Basim Naeem responded by calling on mediators and the United States to "exert pressure on Netanyahu and his government to abide by the road map." Palestinian Legislative Council member Mohammad Dahlan characterized Netanyahu's stance as representing "a challenge, contempt, and deception of the American administration." Which is one way to describe a sovereign nation declining to withdraw its military from a war zone on someone else's schedule.

The political backdrop matters here. Netanyahu faces elections in October 2026. Ronni Shaked, a research fellow at Hebrew University's Truman Institute, suggested the rejection is partly theater — that "after three years, he is without any victory, and he just wants to show now to the people of Israel, before the election, that look at me, I have victory." Maybe. Politicians do political things before elections. But the underlying logic of Netanyahu's objection doesn't require electoral motivation to make sense.

Over 73,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, according to enclave health officials. More than 1,200 have died since the ceasefire began last October. The original Hamas-led attack killed approximately 1,200 Israelis and saw 251 hostages taken. This is the math that any peace plan has to reckon with — not as talking points, but as the actual stakes of getting the sequencing wrong.

The fundamental problem with phased disarmament timelines is that they assume good faith from an organization whose founding charter calls for the destruction of the country it's negotiating with. Netanyahu is betting that the American public — and particularly the conservative base that elected Trump — understands the difference between a peace plan and a withdrawal plan dressed up with diplomatic language.

President Trump's Board of Peace put a serious framework on the table. Netanyahu just told them the framework skips the part where the enemy stops being the enemy. Whether that makes him an obstacle to peace or the only adult reading the fine print depends entirely on whether you think Hamas keeps its promises.

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