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In his first public comments on the matter, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that Israel has not agreed to the Board of Peace’s Hamas disarmament plan, which was accepted by the terror group last week.

Reiterating comments from recent days attributed to “senior Israeli officials,” Netanyahu said in a video posted to Facebook that Israel will not withdraw “from our current lines” in Gaza “until Hamas is completely disarmed.”

This would appear to go against the disarmament plan, which requires Israel to pull back to the original Yellow Line in Gaza. Israel withdrew to that line as part of the October 2025 ceasefire-hostage release deal with Hamas, but has since expanded its control of the Strip from 53 percent to over 60%.

While the Board of Peace indicated that Israel would not have to carry out withdrawals beyond the original Yellow Line until Hamas at least begins to hand over its weapons, Netanyahu asserted that Israeli forces will not move at all, as his election campaign kicks into gear.

“[US] President [Donald] Trump thinks — or his team thinks — that they can get Hamas to disarm and demilitarize Gaza. We are looking into it. They sent us a draft. We did not agree to it. It was not our draft. We sent back our comments,” Netanyahu said in the video statement.

The Times of Israel | Aug 5, 2026

On February 20, 2015, an official of the United Nations Population Fund sent two Israeli diplomats an email containing a confidential report about a trip two weeks earlier to Washington, D.C. by Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein, then the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“For your eyes only. Do not forward,” Yahav Lichner wrote to then-Israeli Ambassador to the UN Ron Prosor and diplomat Ronny Leshno-Yaar in a message sent from Lichner’s personal email account, describing the report as a “classified internal summary of Zeid’s meetings in Washington.”

The meetings came at a time when Israel was facing an independent commission inquiry by the UN Human Rights Council over its conduct during the 2014 military offensive against the Gaza Strip.

The document recorded private meetings that Al-Hussein held with White House officials, senators, congressional appropriations staff, AIPAC, J Street, and human rights organizations. It also revealed a concern inside Al-Hussein’s office: that congressional anger over the UN inquiry could threaten American funding for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Lichner added that Al-Hussein had met with members of Congress including “our friend,” the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, adding that Al-Hussein was “trying to do damage control and distance himself from the report.”

Leshno-Yaar responded that he intended to act on the intelligence that Lichner had provided. “Thank you Yahav. I have no choice and of course without addressing this information I must act with members of Congress to make them understand,” before listing the arguments he planned to make about Al-Hussein and the Gaza commission’s secretariat.

“Absolutely,” Lichner replied. “You are right.”

The exchange was far from a one-off: Over a two-year period between 2014 and 2015, emails show, Lichner repeatedly supplied Israeli officials with internal UN documents, private meeting accounts, pre-release material, and other political intelligence—including documentation marked as “strictly confidential”—which was later used by Israeli officials to help shape their own efforts to both proactively lobby the U.S. government and undercut UN initiatives they viewed as unfavorable to Israel.

Drop Site News | Aug 4, 2026