Netanyahu wants Hamas disarmed first. Washington had said the two things went together
The deal announced by the Trump administration paired Hamas handing over weapons with an Israeli pullback from most of Gaza. Israel's prime minister says he never agreed to that sequence.
The deal the Trump administration presented as the breakthrough that would end the war in Gaza lasted a few days before it hit a wall in Jerusalem. Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel will not move off its current lines until Hamas is completely disarmed, and that he signed nothing tying those two steps together.
Washington’s announcement described a process running in parallel. Hamas would begin handing over weapons, Israel would halt its strikes and start pulling back from the roughly 60 per cent of Gaza it controls. That simultaneity was what made it a deal rather than a demand.
Netanyahu reordered it. Disarmament comes first, and withdrawal is a conversation for afterwards. In a video posted to his own channels he said flatly that this is Israel’s position, and added that Israel had not agreed to the terms put forward by the so-called Board of Peace.
A rare public split with the White House
The politics here matter as much as the sequencing. Netanyahu has spent two years staying publicly in step with Trump’s White House, and contradicting a presidential announcement is not something he has done. He also faces an election in October, with a right flank that would treat any pullback as a concession.
On the other side, Hamas had accepted handing over its weapons under the plan Washington set out a week ago, which at the time looked like the missing unlock. Once the order of operations becomes a dispute between Israel and its closest ally, there is no timetable left to speak of.
For Portugal and the rest of the EU the near-term consequences are humanitarian access and energy prices, which have already climbed on the back of the wider Middle East conflict. None of that improves while the first question on the table is still who moves first.
Photo: Dan Scavino / The White House (public domain)
