Gaza mediators have presented Hamas with disarmament proposals under US President Donald Trump's Gaza plan, providing for the group's weapons to be yielded under their supervision and that of the UN-mandated International Stabilisation Force.
Sources familiar with talks between Hamas and mediators from Egypt, Qatar and Turkey told The National on Tuesday the proposals stipulate that a “Palestinian party” carry out an initial inventory of the weapons, without specifying which one.
The next step is for that party to take delivery of the arms as well as of detailed maps of the group's underground tunnels and location of its weapon manufacturing facilities, the sources said.
The transfer and storage of the weapons, they explained, will be supervised by representatives of the mediators and the International Stabilisation Force, which has yet to be fully formed and deployed in Gaza.
In return, Israel must announce a time frame for its withdrawal from Gaza, in tandem with the stages of Hamas's disarmament.
The mediators are also proposing that in return for Hamas's disarmament, Israel allows adequate humanitarian aid to enter Gaza and lifts its ban on the entry of the commission of non-partisan Palestinian technocrats, mandated to run Gaza's day-to-day affairs. Since its formation in January, commission members have been denied entry to the territory.
The proposal is part of a larger “compromise” document hammered out by the mediators after they received a separate set of ideas from Hamas and officials from several other Palestinian groups. The groups have been meeting in Egypt to explore ways to push forward with the implementation of the Trump plan.
The war on Iran by the US and its ally Israel, coupled with the negotiations with Tehran to end the conflict, have moved the Trump administration's focus away from Gaza.
That has, in turn, stagnated Mr Trump's plan, which the mediators have been striving to revive as signs grow that all-out hostilities could resume in Gaza. A US-sponsored truce brought two years of war to a halt last October.
Chief among those signs are recent comments by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordering his military to expand its control of Gaza to 70 per cent and potentially more. Another major signal is that Israel has recently stepped up strikes on Gaza despite the October ceasefire.
The Israeli military has killed nearly 1,000 Palestinians since the ceasefire came into effect, raising the death toll in the enclave to just short of 73,000 since the war began in October 2023.
The mediators' blueprint, according to the sources, has been relayed to officials of Hamas and the Palestinian groups, the Trump administration and Nickolay Mladenov, the veteran Bulgarian diplomat who is chief envoy of the Board of Peace set up under Mr Trump's Gaza plan to oversee the territory's postwar future.
“Everything in the proposals is interlinked, with each party taking a step then pausing to wait for the other to take one,” said one of the sources. “They also merge the first and second phases of the Trump plan as a way to get things moving again.”
Hamas had already signalled readiness to surrender heavy weapons under the terms of the Trump plan, but wants to keep its firearms for personal protection, a proposal Israel has already rejected, insisting the militant group must give up all its arsenal.
Besides the October ceasefire and the exchange of hostages held by Hamas for thousands of Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons, the first phase of the plan involved Israel's military withdrawal behind the so-called yellow line.
However, Israel is now believed to control about 64 per cent of the Palestinian territory, according to maps presented by the military to aid agencies in March and April.
The second phase provides for further Israeli withdrawal, the disarmament of Hamas, the deployment of a stabilisation force and for the Palestinian technocrats to start running Gaza in place of the Hamas administration that managed the enclave since 2007.
