Gaza’s Endgame Has Left Jerusalem
The most consequential thing to happen to Gaza this month happened in Egypt, at a negotiating table where the question of whether the territory is ever disarmed — the question Israel spent the war answering with the IDF — now belongs to a Trump-chaired board, a Bulgarian envoy, and the governments of Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey. Israel won the war. The settlement of that war is moving to rooms where Israel has no seat.
Since the fighting wound down under the October ceasefire, the “disarmament” of Gaza has been run out of Cairo, by people who do not answer to Jerusalem. The body in charge is the Board of Peace, the Gaza oversight board President Trump created and the UN Security Council blessed in Resolution 2803 last November. Trump chairs it. Its daily work belongs to Nickolay Mladenov, a former UN peace envoy now carrying the title High Representative for Gaza, who runs the negotiations alongside Egyptian, Qatari, and Turkish mediators. The direct line to Hamas runs through Egypt’s intelligence chief, Hassan Rashad, who has hosted the faction delegations in Cairo and has met Netanyahu directly. Israel is one party in a process it does not run.
What sits on that table is the exact thing Israel said it would secure by force. The fight is over Clause 8 of the October plan, the section that sets the terms of disarmament. After four days of meetings, the Palestinian factions agreed on June 12 to inventory their heavy weapons and place them in storage, gradually, on a timetable.
To his credit, Mladenov pushed back and asked for more. He wants all of it: Hamas disarmed completely, the tunnel maps handed over, the manufacturing workshops surrendered, and the weapons in private Palestinian hands collected as well.
In May he called Hamas’s disarmament “not negotiable” and said you “cannot build a future with armed groups running the streets, hiding in tunnels and stockpiling weapons.” By the account a Hamas official gave Al Jazeera, he is demanding that Gaza be left without a single bullet. As of yesterday, the factions were still weighing his harder terms, with no deal on Clause 8.
Tehran has a vote too. On June 1, Iran suspended its nuclear talks with Washington and named its condition for resuming them: an end to Israeli operations in Gaza and Lebanon. Lebanon did more than Gaza to stall those talks, but Gaza rode in on the same demand. On June 17, Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed the Pakistan-brokered Islamabad Memorandum, a sixty-day ceasefire that halted this year’s Iran war. For now.
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, called it a ceasefire “on all fronts, including in Lebanon.” Israel never signed it, and rejects the claim that the “all fronts” language binds its forces. But Iran has folded Israel’s freedom to act in Gaza and Lebanon into a bargain it is striking with Washington, and pushed the question into a room where Tehran and the United States weigh it between them.
The reconstruction of Gaza is Egypt’s plan to run. President el-Sisi unveiled the $53 billion blueprint and the Arab League adopted it in March 2025, built around a six-month opening phase to clear the rubble, raise temporary housing for more than a million displaced Gazans, and turn the water and power back on. Whoever pays to rebuild Gaza, and decides who lives where, will shape who governs it. That plan has Egypt’s name on it.
Put the three together and you can see what has changed. A year ago, whether Hamas kept its weapons was a question Israel answered itself, with troops and aircraft and a target list. Today other people answer it — Mladenov’s board, Egyptian intelligence, the fine print of a ceasefire signed in Islamabad.
The Cairo talks and their grind over Clause 8 are facts you can read off the wire. The change they add up to is larger: whether Gaza is ever disarmed has become a question third parties negotiate, with Israel one voice amongst them.
Winning a war and ending it are different acts. The maximal terms on the table — total disarmament, every tunnel mapped, every rifle collected — sound like Israel’s own. But they are Mladenov’s to hold and Mladenov’s to trade, and the mediators who carry them answer to Cairo, Doha, and Ankara, each with its own stake in how much of Hamas survives and who supervises what is left. Israel can still object at the margins. Mladenov decides which objections move the terms.
Watch whether the weapons get destroyed or only counted and stored, because counted-and-stored weapons can be back in service in an afternoon. Watch whether the “all fronts” language out of Islamabad gets read back onto Israeli operations in Lebanon and Gaza, and by whom. And ask whose money rebuilds Gaza, because the government that funds the rebuilding will be the one Gaza answers to. The war was settled where Israel was strongest. Its aftermath is being settled where Israel is barely in the room.
