Israel strikes Gaza a day after Hamas agrees to disarm
The Board of Peace published the full roadmap: a 14-day weapons inventory and 200 to 350 days to disarm Hamas. A day later, Israeli strikes killed two Palestinians across the Strip.
Israeli strikes across Gaza killed at least two Palestinians and wounded at least 10 on Saturday, hours after Hamas signed off on a draft deal to give up its weapons. Disarmament sits at the centre of the roadmap the Board of Peace released a day earlier, on July 31, and the document met its first practical test before anyone had signed it.
We reported on the Hamas decision when the White House announced it and Israel pushed back. What is new is the text itself: deadlines counted in days, named bodies to carry the work out, and a force meant to keep it in place.
What the roadmap actually says
Implementation starts 14 days after all parties formally accept the document. Within that same window, an inventory of weapons has to be drawn up, and it goes well beyond small arms: it covers heavy weaponry, production sites, storage depots and the tunnel network under the Strip.
Disarmament as a whole is estimated at 200 to 350 days, broken into phases that follow a fixed order:
- police weapons are handed over first, once the Palestinian technocratic committee arrives
- heavy weapons are then surrendered and the tunnel network demolished
- each of those steps is tied to a staged Israeli pullback
If both sides hold to the schedule, the process runs deep into 2027.
Who runs it
Donald Trump chairs the Board of Peace for life. A seven-member founding executive board is led by Tony Blair. Security falls to an international stabilisation force of roughly 5,000 troops under an American general. Civil administration goes to the Palestinian National Committee, a technocratic body from which Hamas is explicitly excluded.
Trump announced the deal on social media:
Today, the Board of Peace reached a HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza.
Hamas framed it far more conditionally. Negotiator Ghazi Hamad tied every step to the other side’s behaviour:
Hamas will not implement any step of the Gaza peace agreement if the Israeli occupation forces do not fulfil their obligations.
Two statements describe the same document and disagree on what has to happen first.
Why Israel has said nothing
Israel currently controls about 60 percent of Gaza’s territory and has not publicly confirmed that it accepts the proposal. An unnamed Israeli official told reporters there would be “no Israeli withdrawal before that group disarms”, inverting the sequence Hamas is insisting on.
Opposition inside the government is open. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir rejected the agreement outright and wants targeted killings of Hamas members to resume. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces an election in October and resistance from part of his own cabinet, which is why his silence has become the story.
Neil Quilliam of Chatham House said Netanyahu’s silence speaks volumes and that the Israeli prime minister has an enormous decision to make. Analysts broadly set expectations low on both counts: that Hamas will genuinely disarm, and that Israel will pull out.
The numbers behind the deal
This is not the first time the fighting in Gaza has been declared over. A US-brokered ceasefire took effect on October 10, 2025, and Gaza’s Health Ministry says Israeli attacks have killed at least 1,100 people since then. Since the war began on October 7, 2023, the same ministry counts more than 73,000 Palestinians killed.
That record is why the 14-day clock reads as more than paperwork. It does not start running until both sides accept the text, and by Saturday evening one of them had said nothing at all. The strikes that day followed the same pattern the October ceasefire followed before it.
