Benjamin Netanyahu finally, after six days of Hamas agreeing to the Board of Peace's disarmament plan, admitted out loud what his aides had been telling reporters all the week: Israel didn't agree to it. The prime minister says in a video posted on Facebook on Tuesday evening that the Israel Defense Forces will not pull back “from our current lines” in Gaza until Hamas hands over all its weapons. He is at variance with the document that Hamas has accepted, with the powers who have spent months working on the plan, and coming across as unnatural with a White House that has been claiming the plan was on schedule.

The issue is one of sequence and is not a technical one but has a huge impact here. The Board of Peace's proposal, which was hammered out between Hamas and the Trump-appointed board and the governments of Egypt, Qatar and Turkey, calls for Israeli forces to withdraw to the so-called "Yellow Line," where they stood after signing a ceasefire and hostage-release agreement in October 2025. Israeli troops have since moved further and further away from the Strip, and by the latest estimates are now in control of more than 60% of the territory, compared to 53% when the truce was declared. The board's position, reiterated in a statement this week, is that the withdrawal only occurs after Hamas has physically dismantled its arsenal, both light and heavy weapons and the tunnel network. Netanyahu's version is upside down: Disarmament will not begin until there is no movement, not even back to the line that his government has already agreed to.

He deliberately portrayed this as a paperwork issue and not a general refusal. They offered us a draft, we did not agree to it, it was not our draft, we wrote back our comments," he said, explaining that Israel had submitted its comments before the disarmament framework was known. The framing is important politically, as the draft was never supposed to be one Israel had to redline. It was a result of separate talks the mediating countries conducted directly with Hamas. Trump's own administration has talked about Israel's function here being “confirming” the 20-point plan it accepted last autumn, while a senior American official told reporters last week that the ongoing refusal to comply with his requests would leave Trump "very disappointed" in his closest regional ally, at least until it gets its way.

It wasn't a reversal that the warning brought. On Monday, Board of Peace representatives including the mission's Gaza point man traveled to Jerusalem in an effort to bridge the divide on the ground. They left without any progress and the board's public statement afterwards seemed to imply something more akin to Israel's wishes: that the withdrawal conditions could be renegotiated, in Jerusalem's favour. The hazard is evident. The terms are the terms that Hamas agreed to after months of arm twisting by mediators, rewrite them and Hamas will have every reason to walk away. Another twist: It is reported that Israel has informally agreed to be more stringent on the rules of engagement in the Gaza Strip, meaning that the IDF chief of staff's approval for an individual strike is required. Netanyahu didn't say Tuesday that the change had occurred, but instead issued a pointed order to soldiers to “do whatever is necessary” to protect themselves and Israeli territory, which does not exclude further operations based on the paperwork just prepared by Washington.

The diplomatic maneuvering is dwarfed by the amount of money at stake. This spring, a joint World Bank, United Nations and European Union damage assessment estimated the value of physical damage at $35.2 billion and the total economic damage, including lost income and displacement costs, at $22.7 billion. The total reconstruction cost has now been estimated at $71.4 billion for 10 years, of which $26.3 billion would cost just in the first 18 months for basic services and infrastructure to be restored. By contrast, the pledges that have been made to date are scanty: some $17 billion through the Board of Peace, of which only around $1 billion has been received, so far, from the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The disarmament stand-off is not a simple sequencing issue but one that has come to a halt after each of the Strip's previous wars and has resulted in unemployment rates nearing 92 percent. As the sides spend every week haggling over who shall play first, reconstruction funds remain unused and the economy of Gaza continues to languish.

This is enhanced and accentuated by timing. Netanyahu is going into an election campaign, and so far he's got the current lines to play. Hamas, meanwhile, was on the wrong side of its own spotlight this week, with a senior official being interviewed by an international television outlet, denying its outfit targeted civilians on October 7 despite the taking of hostages and the documentation of atrocities that left Israel with a propaganda coup as a Nigerian official and a UN rights report were building a case for disarmament. None of that addresses whether or how Hamas will surrender its weapons before or after Israeli soldiers have retreated. But what it does make clear is that a plan that was heralded with a lot of fanfare as a diplomatic breakthrough now depends on a disagreement that neither side has admitted publicly until this week and one where the distance between the two sides has not narrowed but widened.