Netanyahu rejects US 15-point plan on Gaza

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has officially rejected the fifteen-point document drawn up by the Board of Peace, the body backed by the US administration led by Donald Trump to define the future arrangement of Gaza. The statement came at the opening of the Israeli Cabinet meeting.

The plan envisaged a gradual mechanism: the handover of Hamas weapons to a new Committee for the administration of Gaza, in exchange for the progressive withdrawal of Israeli forces from the territory. A sequence conceived as a negotiating basis to close the most acute phase of the conflict and launch a civilian management of the Strip.

Netanyahu rejected this framework, making any Idf withdrawal conditional on a complete and verifiable disarmament of Hamas before any other step. “Israel rejects the 15-point document,” he stated, adding a clarification on the type of disarmament he sets as a condition: “We are talking about real disarmament, not a farce.”

The premier also ruled out, for the duration of his mandate, any prospect of a Palestinian State, both in Gaza and in the West Bank. This is a position that closes the door not only to the American plan in its current formulation, but also to one of the diplomatic cornerstones on which attempts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been measured for years: the two-state formula, which the Board of Peace document did not address directly but which remained in the background as the political horizon of the stabilization process.

On the Palestinian side, the reaction came from Bassem Naim, a Hamas official, who called for Washington to intervene so that the Israeli government respects the roadmap agreed through American mediation, explicitly asking the mediators and the United States, as guarantors, to exert pressure on Netanyahu. Naim thus highlighted the role Washington has taken on as guarantor of the agreement.

The Israeli refusal thus exposes a rift between Netanyahu’s line and the negotiating framework promoted by the Trump administration, which had invested its diplomatic weight in building the Board of Peace as a mediation platform. It remains to be seen whether Washington will choose to exert direct pressure on Jerusalem, as requested by Hamas, or whether the fifteen-point plan will be renegotiated to include the conditions set by the Israeli government on total disarmament as a precondition, rather than as the final outcome of the process.

The distance between the two positions concerns not only the sequence of operations — disarmament before or after the withdrawal — but the very nature of the agreement: for Netanyahu, disarmament must be complete and verified before any territorial concession, while the Board of Peace plan treated it as part of a gradual exchange simultaneous with the Idf withdrawal.