Gaza Board of Peace ‘influenced by Qatar and Turkey’

Israel is quietly reducing the pace of its strikes in Gaza, even as it publicly rejects any diplomatic framework that would allow Hamas to retain influence over its own disarmament process.

Senior former Israeli security officials told JNS in recent days that Hamas’s “acceptance” of the Board of Peace’s 15-point roadmap is a calculated deception designed to preserve both its weapons and its grip on the territory over the long term.

Col. (ret.) Amit Assa, a former senior Shin Bet official with more than 30 years of experience in the security agency, told JNS that the Board of Peace, established by U.S. President Donald Trump, is structurally compromised from the outset.

Board seen as structurally flawed

“The Board of Peace, as it was established by Trump, already constitutes a problem for Israel. It’s ostensibly meant to be an objective body, but in practice it isn’t. Those actually driving developments there are Qatar and Turkey, Erdogan, of course, assisted by the Egyptians. For us, this means the Muslim Brotherhood,” Assa said.

He argued that the entire structure serves as cover for preserving Hamas rather than dismantling it.

“This is essentially a non-violent façade for an organization that is actually working to preserve Hamas’s power by every possible means, in a way that isn’t visible to the eye, and this whole matter, from the moment this Peace Board is established, constitutes a problem for Israel,” he said.

Assa said the plan’s central flaw lies in how it defines disarmament.

“To disarm Hamas of its weapons doesn’t mean leaving heavy or light weapons in Hamas’s possession,” he said, adding that it also cannot mean allowing the terrorist organization to retain any policing capability.

“It means disarming Hamas of its weapons and dismantling Hamas,” Assa argued, warning that any arrangement preserving a Hamas-linked administrative structure would leave the organization intact.

“Hamas is a murderous terrorist organization that cannot continue to exist after Oct. 7, and therefore any action taken today that constitutes dialogue with Hamas, or the creation of some internal body meant only to manage administration, with ostensible officials who continue to run Hamas’s control of Gaza, means Hamas continues to exist as it is. This is something we must not agree to,” he warned.

Pushing for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza before any actual disarmament is part of Hamas’s survival strategy, he added.

“This entire effort is essentially about planting an idea in the minds of Europeans and Americans that it’s logical for the IDF to be replaced by some other, ostensibly neutral security body established from within the Peace Board, which would replace Israel at the points where Israel is supposed to withdraw to something resembling the pre-Oct. 7 international lines, while they handle security,” he said.

Assa said the approach mirrors past failures.

“We know from our own experience that every time we handed responsibility to an international organization, like the U.N. or other organizations on other borders of ours, when there was some kind of buffer zone, our enemy eventually just entrenched itself there. The best example of this is Hezbollah, which settled in regardless of whatever procedures or understandings existed under which an international organization was supposed to preserve it. Israel cannot live with someone else guarding its security. That, of course, is not going to happen,” he said.

He added that Israel’s intelligence grip on Gaza is now significantly stronger because of the sustained IDF and Shin Bet presence on the ground.

“We now have access to the territory, something we didn’t have when the Oslo Accords led to us not being present at all inside the Gaza Strip and behind the border lines. This relative advantage immediately shows we have greater ability today to locate terror operatives and act against them operationally.”

Assa said Israel’s pursuit of the Oct. 7 perpetrators will continue regardless of any ceasefire or diplomatic arrangement.

‘Germany 1945’ model for Gaza

Maj. Gen. (res.) Uzi Dayan, a former IDF deputy chief of staff and former Israeli national security adviser, told JNS that Israel’s campaign objective in Gaza should be full military occupation followed by Israeli administration, rather than a negotiated arrangement with intermediaries.

“The campaign objective in Gaza has double significance, both because this is Hamas, an Iranian forward outpost, and also because it opened this war on Oct. 7. The campaign objective of the military in Gaza needs to be the occupation of Gaza and the imposition of military and civilian government—in one phrase, Germany 1945,” Dayan said.

He argued that most Gazans support Hamas and that defeating one iteration of the group without sustained control would simply allow successors to emerge.

“If you don’t control it for at least a certain period, and afterward a higher authority, then even if you dismantle Hamas A, there will be a Hamas B and a Hamas C,” he said.

Dayan said the current international process, while fundamentally flawed, should nevertheless be used to Israel’s advantage.

“The international process we’re facing today is a sterile process and, in my opinion, doomed to fail, but we need to leverage it to achieve additional gains for ourselves. First, we can’t reject it outright, because we already agreed to the 20-point plan. So since it already exists, let’s see how we can make use of it,” he said.

He cited Israel’s operational advantages, including sole possession of a large ground force in Gaza, control of 60% to 70% of the territory, and superior intelligence capabilities.

“In short, to disarm Gaza you need to plow through Gaza. It’s not just tunnels—anyone can be hiding, say, five rockets,” Dayan said.

He argued that Israel must insist on the demilitarization of the entire Gaza Strip, not merely Hamas’s declared arsenal, noting that rockets, RPGs and explosives remain buried throughout the territory.

Competing visions for disarmament

On operational steps, Dayan proposed tying the IDF’s rules of engagement directly to verified territorial disarmament.

“From now on, since the idea is that they’re supposed to disarm Hamas of its weapons as a starting point, we need to tell them: you do this territorially, not in general terms. You clear a neighborhood—you go through it—and afterward, if there’s someone armed there who isn’t from the international force, we eliminate him, and we expand this in stages over more and more territory in Gaza,” he said.

He also suggested Israel demonstrate its disarmament methodology using areas already under its control.

“We could do demonstrations in Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley—take a refugee camp, not one we’ve already handled, and show them, here’s how we do it. This also serves us in Judea and Samaria and the Jordan Valley, but it also shows them the achievement that’s being demanded,” he said.

Asked about Hamas’s proposal to place its weapons under a Palestinian body’s supervision, Dayan dismissed the idea outright.

“It seems delusional to me that this would even succeed. We should be saying: the point is demilitarization, not placing weapons somewhere so someone else can pick them up later.”

“This weaponry needs to be destroyed, in principle. And we can do that, because we also need to remember that in Gaza today, aside from tunnels, there are already weapons underground, rockets, RPGs, anti-tank missiles, and even just unexploded ordnance. All of it must be located and, in principle, destroyed. There’s no reason to collect these weapons for someone else,” he said.

The Board of Peace released its 15-point roadmap on July 31 after President Donald Trump announced that Hamas had accepted a disarmament framework. The plan calls for heavy weapons, tunnels and weapons-production sites to be decommissioned and placed under the control of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza once the International Stabilization Force deploys and Israel completes a phased withdrawal.

Senior Hamas foreign leadership member Ghazi Hamad told Arab media outlets, including TRT Arabic, on Tuesday that heavy weaponry would be stored under NCAG supervision and remain in Palestinian hands, explicitly ruling out Israeli involvement in enforcement. He said the arrangement depended on four conditions: completion of Phase 1 commitments, a phased IDF withdrawal according to schedule, deployment of the NCAG and the international force, and the dismantling of local Israeli-backed Palestinian militias.

Residents of Gaza Envelope communities issued a public warning on Tuesday, demanding three non-negotiable conditions: that disarmament be conducted solely by Israel rather than by a Palestinian or international body; that no IDF withdrawal occur before disarmament is complete; and that any eventual withdrawal be limited to the strategic Ridge 70 line, which rises about 70 meters above eastern Gaza City and lies some 2 kilometers from the Gaza-Israel border.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement released on July 31 that Israel demands “the full disarmament of Hamas, including removal of the weaponry from Gaza and the complete demilitarization of the Strip as a condition for any process” of withdrawal.

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