A condition without an instrument
At Sunday's cabinet meeting Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the 15-point document and said Israeli forces would carry out no withdrawal until Hamas is disarmed. The document he rejected asks for no such order. It pairs disarmament with a phased withdrawal, which makes the argument one about sequence.[1]
The same day, Egypt's foreign minister Badr Abdelatty asked Nikolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace's high representative for Gaza, to deploy the International Stabilization Force to monitor the ceasefire and to let the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza begin work inside the territory. The roadmap carries its own instrument of verification. That instrument has not arrived.[2]
Each condition waits on the other
Hamas ties its own disarmament to a complete Israeli withdrawal and the establishment of a Palestinian state. Netanyahu ties withdrawal to disarmament and repeats that no Palestinian state will be established while he is prime minister. Each side has made its move conditional on the move it refuses to take first, and the call by the Hamas official Basim Naeem for mediators to press Netanyahu leaves that structure intact.[1]
Without a deployed monitor, the word disarmed applied to Hamas has no observable meaning that either party could be held to. A militia's disarmament is measured by declared inventories, handover counts, verified storage sites and the freedom of an inspection force to enter them. None of that exists in Gaza while the stabilisation force stays undeployed, so under the present arrangement both sequences stall for the same reason. A competing reading is available: the deadlock may turn on political timing rather than on a missing instrument, since Israelis vote in October. The two readings do not exclude each other, and the evidence here does not separate them.[1], [2]
The signal to watch
The order of operations that decides this sits earlier than the one being argued over. Before either sequence can start, the International Stabilization Force has to be on the ground and the National Committee has to be functioning inside Gaza, because both are the machinery through which any disarmament claim would be checked. Egypt's request names exactly those two steps, which indicates that neither has yet happened.[2]
That gives a testable signal. If the stabilisation force begins deploying inside Gaza and the National Committee takes up its interim duties before the Israeli election in October, the dispute over sequence becomes one that can be settled by counting. If neither happens by then, the argument between a phased handover and a prior surrender of weapons stays rhetorical, whichever government comes out of that vote.[2], [1]