Israel has rejected US president Donald Trump’s Board of Peace 15-point plan for Gaza, and will not withdraw until Hamas fully disarms, prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu said on Sunday.
“Israel rejects the 15-point document,” Netanyahu said, referring to a plan endorsed in late July by Hamas.
The Israeli military “will not carry out any withdrawal until Hamas is genuinely disarmed and will continue to thwart threats against our forces and our citizens,” Netanyahu said at a cabinet meeting.
The document, the latest stage in a US-led ceasefire announced in October that has reduced but not ended Israeli operations in Gaza, said Hamas would surrender weapons to a nascent Palestinian governing body.
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The plan said Israel would begin pulling out forces in tandem with the disarmament, an idea adamantly rejected by Israel which also wants Hamas to destroy its weapons.
Netanyahu said Israel was speaking with the US about its objections. “They have ideas; some of them are acceptable to us and some are not, and we know how to stand our ground on these matters,” he said.
Netanyahu said Hamas must give up all of its weapons, a goal that Board of Peace members say is not realistically achievable. “We are talking about real disarmament, not fictitious disarmament,” Netanyahu said.
Trump announced last month there had been a breakthrough in his plan to end the war, which both Israel and Hamas agreed to last year and which started with the ceasefire.
Israel has continued to carry out strikes on Gaza since agreeing to the ceasefire last October.
Trump said that Hamas, which ruled Gaza for nearly two decades before carrying out the October 7th, 2023, attack on Israel that triggered the Gaza war, had agreed to lay down its weapons.
Israel’s military on Sunday closed the West Bank village of Taybeh to non-residents, saying it aimed to prevent growing attacks on Palestinians by Israeli settlers across the West Bank.
The order, the military said, only applies to Israelis and not Palestinians. A spokesperson said turning Taybeh into a closed military zone was “due to some violent attacks by Israelis in the region.”
“Upon receiving any report of violations of the order, IDF soldiers are dispatched to the area and operate to disperse the gatherings and detain suspects in order to protect the citizens of the area and to maintain order,” the military said in a statement.
Taybeh is one of the only Christian villages remaining in the West Bank and was visited last year by the Greek Orthodox patriarch and the Roman Catholic cardinal of Jerusalem.
It is also home to the Taybeh Brewing Co, widely considered the Middle East’s oldest microbrewery.
Some western countries have announced sanctions on settler groups over violent Israeli attacks on Palestinians.
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In June, Israeli settlers obstructed Palestinians putting out a large blaze near Taybeh in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, according to Palestinian civil defence firefighters and a local priest who described an “ongoing pattern of intimidation and unjustified violence” that undermined the residents’ fundamental rights.
A UN inquiry released on Tuesday found that Israeli authorities were directly involved in settler attacks that have killed, injured and displaced Palestinians in the West Bank.
Parts of Taybeh are located in Area B, where the PA runs civil administration but where security control must be co-ordinated with Israeli authorities.
The West Bank and Jerusalem are home to around 50,000 Palestinian Christians, members of a religious community there stretching back to antiquity in a region that is home to many of the faith’s most important holy sites. – Guardian, Reuters
