The IDF and Shin Bet carry out an average of two to three targeted operations every day against people in the Gaza Strip, even as US officials prepare a field survey on how Gaza’s armed groups would hand over their weapons. Israeli security officials told Walla they won’t allow reconstruction to begin until that process is finished.
The Occupation Continues
The daily operations are the plainest fact in the report. Some of those targeted, the account says, took part in the October 7 attacks. Others, it says, organize attacks or try to cross the Yellow Line, the boundary Israeli forces maintain inside the Strip. The report provides no names, casualty figures, or independent verification of who was hit or why. It relies entirely on statements from Israeli security officials.
Those officials say the Gaza Strip is closer to escalation than reconstruction. They cite what they describe as efforts by Hamas’s military wing to rebuild, ongoing training exercises, attempts to provoke confrontations with IDF troops along the Yellow Line, and intelligence warnings of planned attacks, including in the period leading up to Israel’s elections. One official said that if Hamas was still trying to create a false impression two months ago that it was willing to disarm, now it isn’t even doing that.
Reconstruction as Leverage
The terms are stark. According to the report, assessments in Jerusalem hold that Israel will oppose any reconstruction measures unless Hamas is disarmed in practice and the Gaza Strip is demilitarized, including the removal of what officials call terrorist infrastructure, weapons, and terrorists. Rebuilding a devastated territory depends on a security demand set by the occupying power.
The official who described an enormous gap between Hamas’s conduct and US aspirations was talking about a disagreement over sequencing. Washington wants reconstruction to move forward in exchange for weapons surrendered. Israeli defense officials, the report says, are confused by that approach and by Washington’s desire to speed up processes that appear to run counter to developments on the ground.
The US Plan
US officials and representatives of the Board of Peace are preparing a field survey and mapping operation inside Gaza to identify geographically suitable locations where Hamas members would surrender their weapons. The effort falls under US President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan. Walla learned of the preparations on Tuesday.
Hamas’s original position, as the report presents it, was that it would hand weapons to a third party that would safeguard them inside the Gaza Strip. The offer came with conditions: commitments on reconstruction and an Israeli withdrawal. The report doesn’t say whether either condition has been met, and it quotes no Hamas representative directly. Readers hear Hamas’s position only through Israeli officials and the report’s own summary.
The US sponsors the process, with the Board of Peace as its vehicle. Yet the same report shows Israeli officials treating that process as something to manage, resist, or outpace through events they describe as unfolding on the ground. People who live in Gaza don’t speak anywhere in the account. Neither does any Palestinian official, aid worker, or resident.
What the report documents, in Israeli security officials’ own words, is a sequence in which military strikes continue daily, reconstruction waits on disarmament, and the Yellow Line remains an active zone of confrontation. Whether the Board of Peace survey changes any of that remains unanswered.