Obstacles Ahead: Assessing the Roadmap for Gaza

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Overview

After months of limited progress on reaching a deal to disarm Hamas, the Board of Peace (BoP) announced last month that Hamas had officially agreed to a plan for “relinquishing all of its weapons.” The prospect of advancing President Donald Trump’s “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict” reached in October 2025 (hereafter, the Comprehensive Plan), as further enshrined in UN Security Council Resolution 2803, could be coming within reach—but numerous, significant challenges will need to be resolved before the new agreement can move forward.

On July 30, President Trump announced that the BoP had reached “a HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza,” which he commended as a “monumental step toward lasting PEACE and SECURITY.” Shortly after, the BoP confirmed that Hamas had agreed to complete disarmament in a deal. The new agreement, called “A Roadmap for Completing the Implementation of President Trump’s Comprehensive Peace Plan in Gaza” (hereafter, the Roadmap), outlines a framework for the decommissioning of weapons held by Hamas and Palestinian factions and the transfer of governance and security control to Gaza’s interim technocratic government, the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG).

Less than two weeks after Hamas agreed to the Roadmap, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly rejected the document. The Roadmap calls for Israel’s “complete” military withdrawal from Gaza, and its provisions on the sequencing of Israeli withdrawal and Hamas disarmament are, at best, ambiguous. It also does not seem to require Hamas to turn in some light weapons classified as “personal arms.” Prime Minister Netanyahu affirmed that Israeli forces “will not carry out any withdrawal until Hamas is disarmed”—a long-standing Israeli position in months of negotiations—and stated that Hamas’s disarmament must include “heavy weaponry, lighter weaponry, all weaponry.” The issues of Israeli withdrawal and ensuring comprehensive, permanent weapons decommissioning, in addition to maintaining Israeli freedom of action to respond to Hamas threats, are among the most significant, unresolved issues impeding progress on the Roadmap.

This JINSA Analysis analyzes the parameters of the Roadmap, the shortcomings of its approach, and challenges to implementation, drawing on the text of the Roadmap itself and post-hoc modifications and interpretations offered by the BoP and the Board’s High Representative for Gaza, Nickolay Mladenov, who led diplomacy with Hamas on disarmament.

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