A senior Hamas leader has said the group is willing to consider a temporary weapons “freeze” but will not accept full disarmament, a key condition laid out in the US-sponsored peace plan for Gaza.
Khaled Meshaal, speaking to Qatari news channel Al Jazeera in an interview aired Wednesday, said that while Hamas remains open to negotiations, surrendering its arsenal is non-negotiable.
“The idea of total disarmament is unacceptable to the resistance,” Meshaal said. “What is being proposed is a freeze, or storage of weapons, to provide guarantees against any military escalation from Gaza with the Israeli occupation.” He added that the concept is currently being discussed with mediators and that “with pragmatic American thinking… such a vision could be agreed upon with the US administration.”
The fragile ceasefire deal, brokered by the US and in effect since October 10, halted the war that began after Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. However, both Israel and Hamas continue to accuse each other of violating the truce almost daily.
The agreement consists of three phases, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently indicated that the process is close to moving into the second stage. Under this phase, Israeli troops would pull back further from positions across Gaza and be replaced by an international stabilisation force (ISF), while Hamas would be required to lay down its weapons.
Netanyahu is expected to meet US President Donald Trump later this month to discuss the next steps in the ceasefire implementation.
Hamas, however, remains firm in rejecting any expectation of permanent disarmament. “Disarmament for a Palestinian means stripping away his very soul. Let’s achieve that goal another way,” Meshaal said.
The first phase of the agreement required Palestinian militants to release the remaining 48 captives — both living and dead — held inside Gaza. All hostages have been released except for one body. In exchange, Israel has freed nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and returned the bodies of hundreds of Palestinians.
Regarding the proposed international peacekeeping mission, Meshaal said Hamas would accept the deployment of foreign forces along Gaza’s border with Israel but would not agree to their presence inside the territory. Such a deployment, he argued, would amount to “occupation.”
“We have no objection to international forces or international stabilisation forces being deployed along the border, like UNIFIL,” he said, referring to the UN force in southern Lebanon. “They would separate Gaza from the occupation.”
But any foreign troops inside Gaza, he insisted, would be unacceptable: “In Palestinian culture and consciousness, that means an occupying force.”
Meshaal suggested that mediators as well as Arab and Islamic nations could serve as “guarantors” to prevent escalation from inside Gaza, insisting that “the danger comes from the Zionist entity, not from Gaza.”