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Israel and Hamas may have agreed to the first phase of a United States-backed ceasefire deal, but contentious differences between the two sides still remain, particularly when it comes to the fate of the Palestinian group’s weapons.

Israel has long insisted that Hamas surrender all of its weapons if its two-year war on Gaza is to end, as well as demanding that the group relinquish governance of the Palestinian enclave and dissolve itself as an organisation.

For its part, Hamas has publicly rejected calls to give up its weapons, but experts say that the group has expressed openness in private to hand over some of its arsenal.

“When it comes to disarmament, this is where you have seen the biggest shift in Hamas’s position,” said Hugh Lovatt, an expert on Israel-Palestine with the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).

“[Hamas officials] have said in private to interlocutors that the group may be open to a decommissioning process of Hamas’s offensive weapons,” he told Al Jazeera.

Shaky ceasefire

Negotiations over Hamas’s arsenal could torpedo the ceasefire and prompt Israel to resume its genocidal war on the destitute and beleaguered Palestinian population in Gaza, analysts said.

An armed group has the right to bear arms and resist an occupying power in line with international humanitarian law – the main framework referenced to protect civilians in times of war.

Yet, Israel and its Western allies have historically demanded that Palestinian factions give up armed resistance as a precondition to launching a peace process ostensibly aimed at ending Israel’s occupation over Palestinian territories.

This was the framework underpinning the Oslo Peace Accords in the 1990s, signed by then Palestinian and Israeli leaders.

Israel is likely to try and make similar demands this time around, but Hamas is unlikely to completely disarm, according to Azmi Keshawi, a Palestinian from Gaza and a researcher with the International Crisis Group (ICG).

He said that he could only envision Hamas surrendering some “offensive weapons” such as short-range and long-range missles.

However, he believes Hamas will never give up its small arms and light weapons, nor hand over a map of its sophisticated tunnel network, which it spent decades building to resist Israel.

“[Hamas] will only give up [light] weapons when there is no need for these weapons. This means they will only hand them over to a Palestinian leadership that assumes control of a state after Israel ends its occupation,” Keshawi told Al Jazeera.

Power vacuum?

Hamas was the largest of several armed groups in Gaza before Israel began its war on October 7, 2023, after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel.

Some of these groups include Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

These groups have long been committed to waging armed resistance against Israel, and it is unclear to what degree they have been degraded by Israel’s relentless carpet bombing over the last two years.

During Israel’s genocide – recognised as such by scholars, the United Nations and human rights groups –  Israel has also propped up notorious gangs to steal and profiteer off the little aid it has allowed into the Gaza Strip.

Many Palestinians in Gaza believe Hamas should preserve some military capabilities to stop these gangs from exploiting a possible power vacuum, Taghreed Khodary, an analyst on Israel-Palestine who is from Gaza, told Al Jazeera.

“Israel created gangs and gave them weapons and guns to kill their own people [in Gaza]. Now Israel wants to expel Hamas, but Hamas is needed to maintain internal security,” she said.

“Hamas is very good at providing security,” she stressed.

Lovatt, from ECFR, added that Hamas may be willing to cooperate with an interim task force deployed to provide security and oversee a partial decommissioning of its weapons.

However, he said that Hamas would only agree to coordinating with such a force if its mandate clearly stipulates that it will not counter “terrorism” in any way.

“I’m sure there is very little appetite in Western capitals to play that ‘counterterrorism’ role, and it certainly wouldn’t be acceptable to Hamas. It would expose the international task force as explicitly serving Israel’s goals,” Lovatt told Al Jazeera.

‘Hamas as an idea’

Throughout Israel’s genocide, Israel has claimed that its war aim is to ostensibly dismantle Hamas. But Keshawi, the ICG researcher, said Hamas will never be fully defeated.

He predicts the group will absorb thousands of destitute and vengeful young men into its ranks in the coming years. To many people, he said, Hamas is not merely an organisation, but an “idea” that symbolises resistance.

“The [group] has set an example for the whole Arab world. They fought a war that nobody thought they could fight, even though the cost was very high,” Keshawi told Al Jazeera.

Still, Lovatt said the group remains pragmatic and is willing to make concessions to extend the ceasefire for as long as possible.

He noted that the sustainability of the ceasefire ultimately hinges on US President Donald Trump and other Western leaders reining in Israel and its maximalist demands.

“There is a very high risk that Israel is able to win the argument in Western capitals … that Hamas must be fully demilitarised [before the occupation ends],” he said.

On November 7, 2023, children stood before cameras at al-Shifa Hospital and spoke in English, not their mother tongue, but in the language of those they thought might save them. “We want to live, we want peace, we want to judge the killers of children,” one boy said. “We want medicine, food and education. We want to live as other children live.” Even then, barely a month into the genocide, they had no clean drinking water, no food and no medicine. They begged in the colonisers’ language because they thought it might make their humanity legible.

I wonder how many of those children are dead now, how many never made it to this moment of “peace”, and whether they died still believing the world might answer their call.

Now, almost two years later, US President Donald Trump posts that he is “very proud” of the signing of the first phase of his “peace plan”. French President Emmanuel Macron praises and commends Trump’s initiative, while Israeli leader Yair Lapid calls on the Nobel Committee to award Trump a peace prize. Leaders have lined up to claim credit for ending a genocide they spent two years, and the previous 77, funding, arming and enabling.

But Gaza never needed saving. Gaza needed the world to stop killing it. Gaza needed the world to simply let its people live on their land, free of occupation, apartheid and genocide. Gaza’s people merely needed the objective, legal and moral standard generously afforded to those who murdered them. Gaza’s genocide exposed a world that preaches justice yet funds oppression, and a people who turned survival itself into defiance.

All that to say, glory to the Palestinian people, to their steadfastness and to their collective power. Palestinians refused to submit to a narrative imposed upon them, that they were beggars seeking aid, “terrorists” who needed to pay, or anything less than a people whose dignity deserved to be upheld without reservation or degradation.

Gaza did not fail. We did. Gaza resisted when the world expected it to break. Gaza stood alone when it should never have had to stand alone. Gaza endured despite international abandonment, despite governments that funded its destruction and now celebrate themselves as peacemakers.

As a man of faith, I am reminded of this:

“When they are told, ‘Do not spread corruption in the land,’ they reply, ‘We are only peacemakers!’” (Quran 2:11)

Nothing says peace like two years of starvation, bombardment and mass graves, when, instead of delivering food, they delivered shrouds.

And while Gaza bled, the powerful perfected the art of denial. And when I see the people of Gaza celebrating in the streets, I know that this celebration belongs to them alone, not to Donald Trump, who has announced he will visit the region to take credit for what he calls a “historic occasion”, and not to Western leaders who profited from Gaza’s devastation while pretending neutrality. The people rushing to cameras to claim credit are the same ones who made the genocide possible, who funded it with billions in military aid, armed it with precision-guided missiles and provided diplomatic cover at the United Nations while repeatedly vetoing UN Security Council ceasefire resolutions. The United States approved an additional $14.3bn in military aid during the genocide, bypassing congressional oversight multiple times to rush Apache helicopter missiles, 155mm artillery shells, night-vision equipment and bunker-busting bombs that landed on the heads of families as they slept.

Those of us sitting in the comfort of the West should feel shame. Americans like to imagine themselves on the right side of history. We tell ourselves that had we lived during Jim Crow or the Holocaust, we would have done anything to stop it. But we have 340 million people in America, and we could not stop our tax dollars from funding extermination. We could not even deliver baby formula, as we watched babies’ bodies waste away. Many sat in complicity, made excuses for the inexcusable, blamed Palestinians for their own deaths, and turned away from the horror because acknowledging it would have meant confronting our own government’s role in funding it. Our failure did not eclipse Palestinian agency; it made it more visible.

The only pressure that mattered came from the people Israel could not silence, Palestinians who livestreamed their own deaths so the world could not claim ignorance or accept Israel’s falsehoods as truth. Gaza survived because of its own resistance, a resistance to which its people are entitled. The ceasefire came because Palestinian steadfastness broke something the bombs could not touch, because the facade of Israeli victimhood crumbled under the weight of livestreamed atrocity, and because global public opinion turned against Israel despite every effort to manufacture consent for genocide. What it accomplished is written in civilian death rolls, not in security. That is what forced this ceasefire.

Palestine’s most celebrated poet, Mahmoud Darwish, knew how this would go: “The war will end. The leaders will shake hands. The old woman will keep waiting for her martyred son. That girl will wait for her beloved husband. And those children will wait for their heroic father. I don’t know who sold our homeland. But I saw who paid the price.” Now they broker peace between the killer and the killed, the butcher and the slain, and call it progress. The price was paid in Palestinian blood. And somewhere, an old woman, a new bride or an orphaned daughter is still waiting for their loved ones to come home.

There must be full accountability, not just for Israel but for every government and corporation that made this genocide possible. There must be a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel immediately, economic sanctions until there is complete withdrawal from occupied territory, freedom for the more than 10,000 Palestinian hostages, and reparations for reconstruction determined and distributed by Palestinians themselves. War criminals must be prosecuted at The Hague, regardless of which nation objects. This is just the start. Justice is not a diplomatic option; it is the minimum measure of our shared humanity.

The “peace” Trump’s plan promises died with every child in Gaza, every displaced family, and every day the world called genocide “self-defence”, ignoring the International Court of Justice’s 2004 ruling that an occupier cannot claim self-defence against the occupied.

The only just future is complete liberation — one democratic state with equal rights for all, beginning with Gaza’s right to determine its own fate without siege, without occupation and without foreign control disguised as peacekeeping. But first, the people of Gaza have earned the right to mourn, to count their dead and bury them properly, and above all, to feel this small moment of joy. Palestinians have earned, through unimaginable suffering, the right to define what freedom looks like. The rest of the world has no standing to tell them otherwise.

For those of us in the West, we must make sure that the world does not return to normal. We cannot be lulled back to sleep by the temporary cessation of air strikes while the occupation continues. Israel cannot continue as if it did not commit the gravest crime of our generation. The hundreds of thousands of martyred and maimed Palestinians demand justice that cannot be denied.

We cannot rest until the entire system of occupation and apartheid is dismantled and replaced with liberation. This is only the beginning. Free Palestine, from the river to the sea.