Negotiators in Cairo have reached a deal that will see Hamas’s weapons handed over in a phased process to the Palestinian technocratic committee tasked with governing the Gaza Strip under a ceasefire proposal put forward by the United States last year, an Egyptian official involved in the negotiations and a Hamas source told Mada Masr.
The deal, which is contingent on Israeli agreement to terms that it has so far been unwilling to implement, was finalized in talks in the Egyptian capital in recent days between a Hamas delegation, Egyptian officials and the Board of Peace high representative for Gaza, Nickolay Mladenov.
Alongside a phased handover of Hamas’s weapons, the agreement also makes provisions for a 20-25 year truce in Gaza and the reconstruction of the strip, the Egyptian official said.
“Nobody is willing to put up the money for the reconstruction and then have everything destroyed again. The donors want a commitment from both sides, Hamas and Israel, that there will be no further fighting,” they said.
Israel has yet to officially comment on the deal. However, in the past 24 hours as the deal began to take shape, the Israeli press has heavily criticized the prospect of one.
Even without Israeli agreement, US President Donald Trump announced the deal as a breakthrough on his social media account on Friday morning.
“Today, the Board of Peace reached a HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza. This is a monumental step toward lasting PEACE and SECURITY,” the US president wrote.
Speaking late on Thursday before the deal was announced, a Hamas official told Mada Masr that the movement has agreed to hand over its arms, beginning with heavy weapons and followed by light weapons. Furthermore, the movement has decided to disband its military wing, the Qassam Brigades.
The Egyptian official involved in the negotiations that led to the deal called the process “an intra-Palestinian management of Hamas’s arms.”
“It is not an abandonment of Hamas’s arms. It is what you could call the regulation of using arms within the Palestinian framework,” the official said, underlining that the weapons will not be transferred to Egypt nor will Egypt play a role in supervising the arms stores. The decision to hand over their arms to a Palestinian body is being taken of Hamas’s own volition, the source said, and no one will be forcibly removing weapons from the group.
After handing over its arms and disbanding its military wing, the movement will be “nothing more than a political faction,” the Hamas source said.
Speaking to this strictly political role, the Egyptian official said there are understandings outside the scope of the deal that Hamas will be allowed to take part in upcoming Palestinian legislative elections.
But no part of this process will go ahead without concessions from Israel, both sources agreed.
The weapons handover will begin, the Hamas source and Egyptian official said, only after the full implementation of the first phase of the ceasefire agreement, which went into force in October 2025 and should have seen increased aid deliveries and Israeli withdrawals to the so-called Yellow Line delineating 53 percent of Gaza’s territory.
Both sources said that the deal is also contingent on allowing the 15-member National Committee for the Administration of Gaza and an armed multinational peacekeeping force dubbed the International Stabilization Force, both of which were mandated by the United Nations Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict .
Israel has consistently flouted these terms, increasingly expanding its territorial control to over 70 percent of Gaza, barring the national committee from entering the strip and opposing the deployment of foreign forces in Gaza.
A second Egyptian official and an Arab diplomat briefed on the talks expressed skepticism that Israel will concede to the terms.
In a nod to the fact that the issues with implementing the agreement stem from the Israeli side as much as the Hamas side, Mladenov singled out Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza as a key demand that must take place in tandem with the handover of weapons.
“What the agreement says matters. What happens next matters even more. Implementation and verification have to be real. Withdrawal must move in lockstep with decommissioning,” the Board of Peace representative wrote.
Speaking after Trump’s announcement of the deal, the second Egyptian official said the onus is now on Israel to move the process forward: “We now put the ball in [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s court and it is now up to him to tell Trump that he is not going to implement the deal.”
“We are aware there is resistance within the Israeli Cabinet and the military toward the presence of the ISF in Gaza,” the official added.
As the deal neared completion on Thursday, the Israeli press carried comments from an Israeli official saying , “There will be no Israeli withdrawal from the Yellow Line in the Gaza Strip before Hamas is disarmed and the Strip is fully demilitarized.”
Behind the scenes, Egypt has been trying to push along the stalled ceasefire deal and secure access for the national committee to enter Gaza, but with little luck.
An informed Egyptian political source told Mada Masr this week that Cairo has been trying to convince Israel to allocate a small plot of land for the committee to enter and operate from Gaza for the last six weeks, but nothing has happened.
Israel’s Security Cabinet did vote on a legal framework that would allow the ISF to deploy to Gaza ahead of the meeting between Trump and Netanyahu in Washington, DC earlier this week.
But the informed political source said decision makers in Cairo read this as window dressing to placate Trump before Netanyahu’s visit.
On the opposite end, Hamas has grown increasingly concerned about the expansion of Israel’s territorial control of Gaza, the source in the movement said.
“The situation in the Gaza Strip does not currently allow negotiations to continue any further, especially with the occupation of more than 70 percent of the Gaza Strip,” the source said. “Mediators told the movement that the Occupation intends to begin the process of depopulating the areas in the west of the Gaza Strip toward the east.”
As Israel has expanded its control of the strip beyond the Yellow Line set by the October 2025 peace agreement, it has also been building a “humanitarian city” in the depopulated and Occupation-controlled Palestinian city of Rafah near the Egyptian border. Sources involved in the construction told Mada Masr that work on the camp has continued throughout 2026 as armed Gaza groups working with Israel have tried to entice Palestinians to relocate to the area.
For the Arab diplomat, Friday’s announcement will still face an uphill battle, especially given Israeli legislative elections slotted for October 27 in which the Israeli prime minister faces not just a fight for his political leadership but a contest that could see him lose an important political shield in an ongoing bribery, fraud and breach of trust trial.
“Netanyahu will not move on anything before the elections,” he said. “If you hear any of the Israeli diplomats talking behind closed doors, you will come to the same conclusion. Netanyahu’s life is what is at stake here. He cannot afford to lose the elections, and with [Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali] Bennet being in the game, he will have to prove he is the hardliner,” the diplomat said.
Beyond Netanyahu’s own political calculations, longstanding issues over the terminology and scope of any agreement will remain a sticking point.
“It is going to be a complicated process,” the Arab diplomat said. “There is so much to explain in the text: the definition of heavy weapons, the accurate definition of the first phase, the accurate assessment of the entry of the committee into Gaza. Would they go in and stay? Would they be able to operate? Would they be able to go in and out? It is very unpredictable. We don’t know what the Israeli military will do, what they will attack and what they will not attack.”
For both Egyptian officials, however, the deal creates “momentum” where it had otherwise been lacking.
“The fact that Trump himself came out to make this announcement is a clear indication of where the Americans stand on implementation,” the second Egyptian official said.
The first Egyptian official agreed: “I think something has to start happening on the ground, but it all depends on whether Trump will get Netanyahu to honor the commitment.”
The post In bid for ‘momentum’, Hamas agrees for weapons to be brought under Palestinian national committee first appeared on Mada Masr .
In bid for ‘momentum’, Hamas agrees for weapons to be brought under Palestinian national committee
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at MadaMasr.