In fits and starts, President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza is progressing. After months of inertia over Hamas’s refusal to disarm, the White House announced a breakthrough on July 30. Hamas agreed on paper to surrender its weapons. The agreement, which Trump touted as “a monumental step toward lasting peace and security,” lays out a 15-step “roadmap” by which Hamas will disarm, Israeli troops will withdraw from Gaza, and the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), a 13-member technocratic body that is currently based in Egypt, will assume control of the strip.
While the phased roadmap is a step in the right direction, it is too soon to pop the champagne. Securing an agreement is one thing; implementing and enforcing it is another.
Almost immediately after announcing the disarmament plan, Hamas began quibbling over its terms. Senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad told the Wall Street Journal that the group “didn’t say disarmament, we didn’t say handing over the weapons, and we didn’t agree on any Israeli involvement.” Hamad further added that Hamas “will not take any steps regarding disarmament before Israel withdraws from the Gaza Strip.”
Hamad’s comments contradict NCAG chairman Ali Shaath, who declared that the strip will operate under “one authority, one law, and one weapon.” In practice, that requires the NCAG to control every weapon in Gaza. Hamas, however, has offered only to place its heavy weapons and weapons-production facilities under Palestinian control, instead of full disarmament as the framework stipulates. That formulation leaves the status of small arms and personal weapons unresolved and rejects any transfer of Hamas’s arsenal to Israel or another foreign actor. The new roadmap seeks to prevent Hamas from operating as an independent military force, but it never explains how the parties will achieve that outcome.
The roadmap does not define heavy weapons, identify who will inventory Hamas’s arsenal, designate storage sites, or determine who will control access to the weapons. The roadmap also assigns responsibility without giving the NCAG the means to enforce it. It charges the committee with maintaining internal security but bars the International Stabilization Force, a multinational peacekeeping force, from “conducting police operations involving Palestinian society.” The new Palestinian police force must therefore confront any faction that refuses to disarm. Yet the NCAG has not established that force, much less shown that it can operate throughout Gaza or withstand an organized challenge from Hamas or other armed groups.
More importantly, placing Hamas’s weapons in storage will not end the group’s grip on Gaza. Hamas may formally transfer governing authority to the NCAG, but the committee will still depend on Gaza’s existing bureaucracy to keep the territory functioning. Hamas has spent nearly two decades embedding loyalists throughout that bureaucracy, from government ministries to local municipalities.
Hamas has already demonstrated how it can relinquish formal authority while continuing to govern from behind the scenes. On July 6, the group announced that it had disbanded its government. Yet Reuters reported that Gaza’s ministries and their Hamas-appointed personnel would remain in place. Signs of continued control soon appeared across the territory. Hamas-run police continued to make arrests and confiscate firearms.
The clearest confrontation occurred at a World Food Program facility on July 12. The United Nations said armed personnel linked to the “de-facto authorities” forced their way into a distribution site and assaulted aid-truck drivers. Between July 6 and July 26, the UN documented eight searches of humanitarian warehouses by people who identified themselves as agents of the Hamas-run ministry. Elsewhere, the Hamas-run Labor Ministry continued paying hundreds of lifeguards, while municipalities regulated Gaza’s beaches and deployed sanitation crews.
These responsibilities may appear mundane, but they reveal how Hamas approaches both political authority and disarmament. There is little reason to assume that Hamas will surrender its weapons simply because it claims to have placed them under someone else’s control.
Hamas’s latest leadership decision provides ample reason to fear that this is precisely its objective. Only a week before the roadmap emerged, the group elevated one of its most committed hard-liners.
On July 20, Hamas announced the election of Khalil al-Hayya as the new head of its political bureau, filling a position that had been vacant since Israel eliminated October 7-mastermind Yahya Sinwar in October 2024. Al-Hayya was serving as the head of Hamas in Gaza and sat on the five-member leadership council that assumed control of the group after Sinwar’s death. He defeated senior Hamas envoy and fellow councilmember Khaled Meshal in the race for the top job.
Al-Hayya, who is curiously not sanctioned in the United States as a Specially Designated National, is one of Hamas’s founding members. He was the head of Hamas’ parliamentary bloc in the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006 before rising through the ranks to become Sinwar’s deputy in 2017. In the interim, al-Hayya served on Hamas negotiating teams in 2011, 2012, and 2014. When Hamas elevated al-Hayya as its leader in Gaza, he was living abroad in Qatar. Al-Hayya was one of the Hamas leaders that Israel targeted in its September 2025 strike in Doha. He survived the attack, but his son was killed.
Al-Hayya was reportedly also a key planner of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel, and met with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Lebanon beforehand to persuade the Iranians and their Lebanese proxy Hezbollah to participate in the attacks. His election over Meshal indicates that Hamas intends for its Gaza wing, rather than its external leadership, to dominate. Hamas, in other words, is calcifying at precisely the time the White House is projecting improvement.
It is not certain that those projections will bear out. Hamas has not indicated that it will surrender its weapons in any meaningful way, nor is the NCAG inherently capable of preventing Hamas from regenerating its capabilities if it does.
Gaza Board of Peace Director-General Nickolay Mladenov noted on X that “what the agreement says matters,” but “what happens next matters even more.” That must be the Trump administration’s mindset. Oversight and verification of each step will be key to ensuring that the roadmap succeeds. Israel learned on October 7, 2023, just how costly it can be to trust that Hamas will moderate.
Ahmad Sharawi and Natalie Ecanow are senior research analysts at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow Ahmad on X @AhmadA_Sharawi. Follow Natalie on X @NatalieEcanow. Follow FDD on X @FDD.
