Palestinian terror groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad refused to commit to disarmament this week – brazenly defying the peace plan negotiated by President Donald Trump and both terror groups agreed – and a senior Hamas official told Reuters he could not say “yes or no” to handing over weapons. At the same time, an Islamic Jihad leader stated in Al Jazeera That disarmament was not even discussed and Trump is “negotiating with himself.”
The consecutive rejections expose the fragility of the week-long ceasefire and reveal that both terrorist groups are positioning themselves to remain armed indefinitely while demanding political concessions that Israel has rejected for decades.
In an interview with Reuters published on Friday, Hamas politburo member Mohammed Nazzal was asked directly whether Hamas would give up its weapons. “I can’t answer yes or no,” Nazzal responded, a surprising refusal given that disarmament is the central requirement of Trump’s 20-point peace plan that Hamas agreed to sign just days earlier.
When asked what disarmament would mean, Nazzal questioned the very concept. “The disarmament project you speak of, what does it mean? Who will the weapons be delivered to?” he asked Reuters, making clear that Hamas considers giving up weapons not an obligation but a hypothetical topic for future debate.
Speaking Wednesday from Doha, where Hamas’s political leadership has resided for years, Nazzal went further: He declared that Hamas intends to maintain armed control over Gaza indefinitely. “On the ground, Hamas will be present,” he said, directly contradicting Trump’s plan that calls for the terrorist group to cede all security functions to a technocratic civilian administration overseen by international observers.
Nazzal also revealed that Hamas is conditioning any long-term peace on first achieving statehood, the opposite of Trump’s framework. The Hamas official said the group would accept a ceasefire of up to five years, but only if the Palestinians are given “horizons and hope” to become a state, positioning disarmament as something to be negotiated only after major political concessions rather than an immediate requirement to end the war.
Just a day before Nazzal’s interview, Palestinian Islamic Jihad went even further: it flatly denied that disarmament was ever part of the negotiations.
“Hamas and the resistance have not agreed to disarm. On the contrary, they stated before, during and after the negotiations that this issue had not been discussed at all,” said Islamic Jihad Undersecretary General Muhammad Al-Hindi. Al Jazeeraaccording to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute.
Al-Hindi’s claim directly contradicts Trump’s repeated public statements that Hamas committed to disarming as a condition of the ceasefire. The Islamic Jihad undersecretary general stated flatly that the weapons “belong to the Palestinian people and will not be handed over before a Palestinian state exists,” making statehood a precondition for even considering disarmament.
The Islamic Jihad leader then personally mocked Trump, accusing him of conducting phony negotiations. “[Trump] “He’s negotiating with himself, it seems,” Al-Hindi said. “Negotiations were going on between the Americans and the Israelis all the time, and then the mediators were informed, and they passed the information on to Hamas and the resistance factions.”
Al-Hindi dismissed Trump as fundamentally ignorant of the region. “He doesn’t understand the history, beliefs and culture of the region,” the Islamic Jihad official said, adding that Trump only cares about “deals and investments.” Al-Hindi also rewrote history entirely, stating that “Islam has been in the region for less than 1,400 years. Where was Israel 3,000 years ago? It existed for just over 70 years,” erasing millennia of Jewish civilization in the land of Israel.
The double negatives go directly against the peace agreement that Trump announced on Monday at the signing ceremony in Egypt. “The reconstruction of Gaza requires its demilitarization and that a new and honest civilian police force must be allowed to create safe conditions for the people of Gaza,” Trump declared, making disarmament an explicit precondition for reconstruction. The 20-point plan calls for Hamas to return all accommodation (including all bodies of those killed in captivity) before disarming and handing over all government to an internationally supervised technocratic committee.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office responded to Nazzal’s denial by making clear that compliance is mandatory. “Hamas is supposed to release all hostages in stage 1. It has not done so. Hamas knows where the bodies of our hostages are,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement to Reuters. “Hamas must be disarmed under this agreement. No ifs ands or buts. They are running out of time.”
On the same day that Al-Hindi claimed that disarmament was never discussed, Trump warned terrorist groups that handing over their weapons is non-negotiable. “They will disarm, and if they don’t disarm, we will disarm them, and it will happen quickly and perhaps violently,” Trump said Tuesday.
Even as both terrorist groups refused to commit to disarming, Hamas has been executing Palestinians and brutally consolidating its power throughout Gaza, actions that Nazzal defended in his interview with Reuters while also arguing that Hamas should remain armed.
Within hours of the ceasefire taking effect on Monday, Hamas executed suspected collaborators on the streets of Gaza City, blindfolding men accused of working with Israel, forcing them to kneel and shooting them at point-blank range in broad daylight. Nazzal dismissed the killings as “exceptional measures” taken during wartime.
But the executions were only the beginning. Reuters reported, citing Palestinian security sources, that Hamas killed more than 30 people it called “gang” members as the terrorist group reasserts its control across Gaza. Hamas’s so-called “internal security forces” have been carrying out what the group describes as a “large-scale field campaign in all areas of the Gaza Strip, from north to south, to locate and arrest collaborators and informants” – a reign of terror targeting anyone suspected of cooperating with Israel.
Hamas has also been fighting violent battles with the Doghmush clan and other rival factions vying for control as Israeli forces withdraw. A pro-Hamas social media influencer known as “Mr. Fafo” was killed by his rivals in the chaos.
Beyond the killings, Hamas has blatantly violated the ceasefire by delivering the wrong bodies to Israel instead of returning the hosts as necessary.
Israel reacted with fury on Wednesday after forensic tests revealed that a body handed over by Hamas through the Red Cross was not an Israeli hostage at all but a dead Palestinian from Gaza. Under the ceasefire agreement, Hamas pledged to return the bodies of 28 hosts who died or were killed during captivity. As of Thursday, Hamas had handed over only ten bodies, including the misidentified Palestinian corpse posed as an Israeli hostage, leaving 19 bodies still in the terrorist group’s custody.
“It has been confirmed that the body is not that of a hostage,” said Shosh Bedrosian, spokesman for Netanyahu’s office. “Hamas is required to fulfill its commitments and return all our accommodation. We will not compromise on this.”
Hamas pulled the same trick before: it handed over a Palestinian corpse in February instead of the body of Shiri Bibas, mother of the Bibas children who were also killed in Hamas captivity.
Nazzal told Reuters that Hamas has no interest in keeping the bodies and claimed the group is experiencing “technical problems” in recovering them, saying Hamas needs specialized equipment to locate the remains. The hostages’ families have demanded that Israel suspend the next phase of the ceasefire until Hamas returns all the bodies as agreed.
On Thursday, one day after Nazzal’s interview and two days after Al-Hindi’s rejection, Trump escalated his ultimatum in response to Hamas’ continued killings and rapes.
“If Hamas continues to kill people in Gaza, which was not the agreement, we will have no choice but to go in and kill them,” Trump wrote in Truth Social after a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The president also told reporters Thursday that he hopes Hamas keeps its word. “We have a commitment from them and I assume they are going to keep their commitment,” Trump said.
Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad have made explicit that they will not disarm until a Palestinian state is achieved, completely reversing Trump’s framework by demanding political concessions before security guarantees rather than the opposite.
That position is fundamentally irreconcilable with both Israel’s basic security requirements and Trump’s peace plan, which makes immediate disarmament a precondition for any reconstruction or governance transition. Their defiance now threatens to collapse the deal entirely, and Trump has made clear that further violations will be responded to with force.
Joshua Klein is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jklein@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaKlein.
