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By Ellie Cook
Senior Defense Reporter
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When U.S. President Donald Trump said his Board of Peace officials clinched a "historic" deal for Palestinian militant group Hamas to completely shed their weapons last week, and for Israel to pull back its forces in Gaza, he cast the agreement as a major step toward peace.
But Israel stayed quiet on the plan, many of its senior officials skeptical that Hamas and other militant groups embedded in Gaza, while far less powerful than they used to be, would finally consent to disarm.
High up in the plan published by the Board of Peace shortly after Trump's proclamation, Israel was urged to stop its military operations in Gaza "without delay."
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But after the announcement, Israel then launched fresh attacks across the Gaza Strip, killing at least 18 people on Sunday alone, according to medics in the territory, and dampening hopes of an end to the gruesome conflict.
Israel says its strikes over the weekend targeted Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups in several different areas of the small strip.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said late on Tuesday Israel "did not agree" to the deal.
Netanyahu is wary that he's facing elections in October, but he hasn't pulled through on his pledge to secure "total victory" over Hamas, Shalom Lipner, a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council who spent more than a quarter of a century serving in the Israeli prime minister's office, told Newsweek.
Many Israelis are still worried about the threat Hamas poses, and concerned that the international forces the Board of Peace says will be deployed in Gaza won't be as effective at protecting Israel as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops have been, he said.
"For those reasons, Netanyahu is putting his foot to the pedal against Hamas in Gaza, cognizant that Israel could find its hands tied once the Trump plan goes into effect," Lipner said.
But Netanyahu may also be under increasing pressure from Trump administration officials and the Board of Peace, said Michael Milshtein, a former senior official in Israeli military intelligence who now works as a researcher at the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University.
Israel had, by Tuesday, changed its policy on striking Gaza, meaning the head of the Israeli military, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, now needs to greenlight all attacks on the strip—potentially meant to be a sign of good faith from Israel in talks.
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A ceasefire, brokered by the United States, Egypt, Qatar and Turkey, has been technically in force in Gaza since October 2025. But Israeli strikes on the territory have continued in the nearly 10 months since.
Health officials in Gaza said on Monday that 1,250 people had been killed there since the ceasefire was agreed, with more than 4,000 others injured.
This brings the tally of people killed since the start of the war in October 2023 to 73,375. Israel attacked Gaza in response to the Hamas-led October 7 attacks in 2023, which killed roughly 1,200 people in Israel. Another 251 were taken as hostages into the strip.
But progress toward a second stage of a peace deal beyond this initial ceasefire has been slow and fraught with problems, exacerbated by continued Israeli attacks on Gaza.
Israel is "intensifying its raids on the Gaza Strip at an unprecedented rate," Mahmoud Basal, a spokesperson for the Civil Defense authorities in the territory, said on Sunday.
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The Israeli military said its weekend strikes killed a member of Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in the central Gaza area of Deir al-Balah and a Hamas member in the same area on Sunday. The previous day, the IDF said the country had killed two militants in Gaza City and a Hamas commander in the southern Gaza Strip.
Strikes on Saturday across the strip also targeted several Hamas weapons sites, including storage areas for bombs and Kalashnikov rifles, the IDF said. The Israeli military identified one of the sites as next to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah.
The mediating countries of Qatar, Egypt and Turkey urged Israel to stop its bombing campaign on Monday, stressing "the need for Israel to comply with all of its obligations under international law and to fully uphold its commitments under the ceasefire agreement."
"These violations threaten the path toward de-escalation and exacerbate the suffering of civilians in the Gaza Strip," the three countries said in a joint statement.
Israel has been accused by United Nations experts of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, and is facing a case brought to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) by South Africa for alleged genocide. Israel has vehemently denied the allegations.
Gaza has been plunged into a deep humanitarian crisis, with most of its just over 2 million residents repeatedly displaced, thousands of children wandering unaccompanied and little access to food or water. The blistering heat wave now rippling over Gaza had prompted fears the soaring temperatures would further harm Gaza's uprooted population.
Nickolay Mladenov, the high representative for Gaza on the Board of Peace, petitioned Netanyahu to stop Israeli strikes in Gaza during a meeting on Monday, the Associated Press reported, citing two people familiar with the matter. The Board of Peace confirmed a "constructive and detailed" meeting had taken place on Monday,
The board said the IDF would only pull back its forces to the so-called Yellow Line in Gaza once Hamas had given up all its weapons and its extensive tunnel network.
The Yellow Line, set out in the October 2025 ceasefire, divvied up Israeli and Hamas control of Gaza roughly equally. But since the ceasefire, Israel has moved further into Gaza and expanded its control to up to 70 percent of the strip.
Israel has refused to withdraw to the Yellow Line for now, Israel Hayom reported on Monday. Hamas, meanwhile, has said it won't disarm until Israel pulls back its troops.
Mladenov said on Sunday the violence over the weekend had "killed civilians" and destroyed medical supplies, warning it was undermining "intense efforts" to forge ahead with Hamas disarmament. "Both parties" should abide by agreements made last year, he said.
"If this stage of the disarmament and the withdrawal doesn't work, where do we go from here?" Yossi Mekelberg, a senior consulting fellow with the Chatham House think tank in London, told Newsweek.
"If you don't create even the minimum [level] of trust, that both sides are committed to this, then we stand no chance to move anywhere beyond this," he said.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Frances Mao and Sam Wilson.
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