Hamas agrees to disarm, but only if Israel leaves Gaza

How the BBC and Reuters reported the claim that Hamas has agreed to disarm in Gaza.

My new article on my website, Hamas Agrees to Disarm, But Only If Israel Leaves Gaza, is my response to today’s claim, trumpeted by Donald Trump, that the Board of Peace — the body set up under his administration last October to implement a ceasefire and supervise the future of Gaza — has “reached a HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT of Hamas and all the other armed groups in Gaza.”

Typically for Trump, this was a simplistic reading of an agreement made by Hamas to hand over its weapons to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), the Palestinian committee that was supposed to take over the day-to-day running of Gaza, but whose entry has been prevented by Israel, but only if Israel honors its unfulfilled commitments under last October’s ceasefire deal — to bring to an end its military activities, to stop seizing ever more land in Gaza, and to ensure adequate deliveries of humanitarian aid.

As Netanyahu sought to dismiss the deal, a US official working with the Board of Peace publicly rebuked him for his intervention, and for failing to fulfil Israel’s obligations under the existing deal, but it remains to be seen if the US will do anything meaningful to restrain Israel if they fail to cooperate.

Of course, all of this is dispiriting. It fails to recognize Israel as the aggressor, and it fails to recognize that Israel’s entire occupation is illegal, and, although there are some within the Board of Peace who are seeking to secure a viable future for the Palestinians, it must never be forgotten that, at its upper levels, the Board of Peace contains investors and real estate developers including Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who, in January, unveiled a plan for a techno-futuristic “New Gaza.”

In that plan, as I explain, “the Palestinians themselves would, presumably, occupy nothing but the lowliest positions, servicing new super-rich colonizers on their own land, from which they would still be dispossessed — not through sickening religiously-inspired slaughter drawn from the Iron Age, but through the demeaning marginalization of service personnel in 21st century capitalism.”

As I conclude, “For now, the Board of Peace’s route to the future is less horrific than Israel’s, but neither route offers what the Palestinians need and deserve and are entitled to, which is autonomy on their own land, and permanent peace from the genocidal monsters living next door to them.”

Read the whole article here.

Please also read my Substack Notes

Just a reminder that, in between posts, I regularly post Notes here on Substack, which you can find here.

Over the last week, I amplified a Novara Media interview with Ellie and Lottie of the Filton 4, shared a post from Gaza about the “complete collapse” of the means of survival, wrote about How Israel and the US drove the fake scandal that toppled ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan KC, wrote about the disgraceful proposal to add a “terrorism connection” to the sentences for five activists who took direct action against a provincial branch of Barclays Bank, wrote about climate collapse via a 1950s UK heat map, and wrote about the latest shameful mass arrests of Palestine Action supporters at Westminster Magistrates Court.

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