The next phase in President Trump’s Gaza peace plan is the disarming of Hamas. The terrorist group, perhaps feeling lucky, has proposed a counteroffer: What if they traded in their current weapons and in return be given new weapons?
Rather than disband, Hamas is hoping the Trump administration will let it simply change uniforms:
“In a letter to staff on Sunday, seen by Reuters, Gaza’s Hamas-run government urged its more than 40,000 civil servants and security personnel to cooperate with the” new Gaza administrative government. “It assured them it was working to incorporate them into the new government.
“That would include the roughly 10,000-strong Hamas-run police force, four sources familiar with the matter said, a demand that has not been previously reported.”
And what are those fellows doing at the moment? “Many of them have been patrolling the western half of Gaza as Hamas reasserts its grip in areas under its control.”
So Hamas wants to join the new government, almost certainly in some sort of security role. It’s 30,000 “civil servants,” in this arrangement, would also put on new uniforms. The Hamas government would become, magically, the non-Hamas transitional government.
One has to respect the level of chutzpah, I suppose.
To be clear, there is no element of Hamas that is outside its terrorism designation. There is no “political wing” of Hamas—unless perhaps you count Students for Justice in Palestine. So set aside the terms of the cease-fire for a moment: The question is whether we should allow 40,000 terrorists to run postwar Gaza. My vote is no.
The intent here seems to be to try to fool Steve Witkoff into selling this more convincingly to Trump. But let’s go back to the cease-fire terms: Hamas agreed to disarm, and the deal requires it.
Trump’s Mideast team surely wants a win, and they want to move on to attempting to build the Gaza dreamscape revealed by Jared Kushner last week. But if Hamas is permitted to fold 40,000 of its terrorists—including leadership and a 10,000-strong “police” force—into the new government, the dreamscape will be no closer now than it was before the war started.
Furthermore, where’s Europe on this? EU leaders should be outraged at Hamas. After all, Europe’s key demand is that whatever the specifics of the postwar process, they include a “path to Palestinian statehood.” Hamas opposes the two-state solution. Allowing Hamasniks to remain armed in Gaza is to foreclose a peace agreement.
Of course, they’ll pretend otherwise. Any relaxing of the requirements on the Palestinian side will be portrayed as “pro-Palestinian.” But in reality such maneuvers would be the opposite.
What does Hamas’s current “policing” look like? Is it images of Hamasniks rescuing kittens stuck in trees? Is it masked militiamen acting as crossing guards near elementary schools? Playing a charity softball game against the Gaza firemen?
Of course not. Hamas is cracking down on dissent and murdering civilians and rivals. After a few dozen were killed in October, CENTCOM Commander Brad Cooper warned Hamas “to immediately suspend violence and shooting at innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza.” Hamas was apparently unconvinced, so the next day Trump reiterated the message in his signature style: “If Hamas continues to kill people in Gaza, which was not the Deal, we will have no choice but to go in and kill them. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
Hamas hasn’t hid its crimes against Palestinian civilians; on the contrary, Hamas leaders know that they have to film themselves carrying out their barbaric acts because Western media won’t do it. At each pause in the Hamas-IDF fighting, videos of Hamasniks shooting civilians flooded social media. This is “policing”—and it is exactly what Hamas intends to do if given a green light.
So: Is it “pro-Palestinian” to leave Hamas in Gaza? Another way to word that question: Is it “pro-Palestinian” to shoot Palestinian civilians in the legs?
Trump has thus far held his ground on disarming Hamas. The terror group’s latest ploy should only reinforce the need to follow through on that.
