Israeli airstrikes in Gaza killed at least 15 Palestinians on Sunday, even as President Donald Trump announced an advance in efforts to implement a ceasefire agreement and Israeli officials said they still had serious security concerns about a proposed Hamas disarmament deal.
The bombs kept falling. The ceasefire talk kept floating upward through the usual channels of power. And on the ground, Palestinians kept dying while officials in Washington and Jerusalem argued over who gets to control the wreckage.
Who Pays for Their Deals
Local Gaza hospitals said at least 17 people were killed in the latest Israeli strikes, including children. A strike on a residential apartment in southern Gaza killed three family members, including their 4-year-old child, according to Nasser hospital, where the bodies arrived. The Israeli military said the strikes targeted militant operatives.
The Gaza Health Ministry said more than 73,000 people have been killed in Israel’s offensive since Hamas-led militants attacked Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 others hostage. The ministry said women and children make up around half of all fatalities and that its records are generally reliable, according to U.N. agencies and international organizations. It does not distinguish between civilians and militants. The Hamas-run government has recently been dissolved.
Most of Gaza’s 2 million Palestinians are in the other part of the territory, where hundreds of thousands live in squalid tent camps and destroyed neighborhoods. The areas Israel controls in Gaza have been mostly destroyed and depopulated. That’s the human cost of decisions made far above the people living under the fire.
Who Holds the Guns, Who Holds the Paper
The Israeli minister of energy, Eli Cohen, said there was no agreement to halt the strikes on Gaza and said Israel needed to take full control of the territory, which he said it already controlled 70% of. Cohen is a member of the security cabinet of Prime Minister Netanyahu, a small circle of ministers that oversees security and diplomatic policy. Doron Spielman, spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, said Israel had shared “serious security concerns” with the White House about the proposed disarmament deal with Hamas.
Spielman said Israel’s intelligence assessment was that Hamas remained committed to rebuilding its military rather than genuinely demilitarizing. “Our assessment is that if we redeploy before Hamas is truly disarmed, it will quickly expand its presence throughout Gaza, rebuild its terrorist infrastructure, once again threaten Israeli communities, and seek to carry out another Oct. 7-style attack,” he said, referring to the Hamas militant attack on Israel in 2023 that triggered the war in the Gaza Strip. He added, “Disarming means physically giving up the weapons. Nothing less.”
Trump said on Thursday that there had been a breakthrough after Hamas agreed to disarm under a U.S.-backed initiative to implement the ceasefire agreement reached last year in Egypt. The Trump-led Council of Peace, which oversees the ceasefire, published a 15-point roadmap on Friday setting out the final steps for implementation. The roadmap has not yet been carried out.
What the Roadmap Demands
The AP said a copy of the agreement it obtained and verified called for all weapons held by the Hamas-run police to be transferred to the U.S.-backed Palestinian technocratic committee, known as the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, when it arrives in the enclave. The agreement also said a process to decommission and store heavy weapons and dismantle military production sites and tunnels would begin after the arrival of the Palestinian committee and the deployment of international forces, and that the process would be linked to a phased Israeli withdrawal. It was not clear when the committee would arrive because that depended on other steps.
Hamas said it would hand over its weapons for storage only after Israel stopped military operations and withdrew its forces, in line with the agreement reached last year. An Israeli official told Reuters that Israel would not withdraw from its current military positions unless Hamas carried out a “genuine disarmament.”
U.S. officials said Israel had been consulted at every step of the negotiations and was not being asked to do anything beyond what it had already committed to in the ceasefire and hostage release agreement signed last October. It was unclear what Israel had conveyed to the White House. Two people with knowledge of the deal said Israel had raised its concerns with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is part of the Trump-led Board of Peace. One of them said Israel wanted freedom to conduct military operations in Gaza. Another person familiar with the deal said Israel also wanted Qatar and Turkey excluded from verifying the stages of the agreement and wanted Hamas’ weapons destroyed after confiscation.
The White House did not provide additional comment on Sunday when asked about Israel’s assessment that Hamas remained committed to rebuilding its military. Netanyahu did not comment publicly on the initiative. The minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, called it unacceptable and said Israel should continue killing Hamas leaders.
The People Under the Bombs
Mohammed Dahlan, the ex-high-ranking Fatah official who is in the United Arab Emirates, said in a Facebook post that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser involved in the initiative, had told him he was working with the Israeli side to stop the attacks on Gaza. Dahlan said contacts with the U.S. were continuing to ensure the agreement was fully implemented and said its success now depended on Israel ending its daily attacks on Gaza. The Reuters news agency sought comment from the U.S. State Department on Dahlan’s remarks, and there was no immediate comment from Israel.
So the machinery keeps turning. Trump announces progress. The Council of Peace publishes its roadmap. Israeli officials demand more control, more verification, more room to keep bombing. And in Gaza, where the territory has been carved up, flattened, and depopulated, people keep burying their dead while the powerful argue over the terms of surrender.