Dr Bilawal Kamran
Hamas has made a decision that carries the shape of a challenge rather than a concession. After ruling the Gaza Strip for nearly two decades, the group announced this week that it stands ready to hand over the duties of governance to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, the technocratic body created under Donald Trump’s Board of Peace. On the surface, this looks like retreat. Read more carefully, it looks like a calculated move designed to place the burden of advancing the peace process squarely on the shoulders of the United States and Israel.
A Hamas spokesman explained the reasoning behind the step: it is meant to remove any excuse the Israeli occupation might use to continue what he rightly described as a war of extermination. The words are harsh, but the record since the ceasefire took effect in October 2025 does little to soften them. Gaza has not become a cradle of peace in the months since that truce was signed. More than a thousand people, including children, have been killed by Israeli forces during a period that was supposed to represent the end of hostilities. And this figure sits atop a far larger tragedy: since Israel launched its assault on Gaza following the Hamas operation of October 7, 2023, over seventy three thousand people have been killed, nearly two million have been displaced, and countless families have been left without adequate shelter, food, or healthcare.
Israel has dismissed the Hamas announcement as a trick. There are already signs that Tel Aviv may use Hamas’s refusal to disarm as justification to resume large scale military operations, framing the Palestinian group as the party that failed to honour its commitments. Yet a simple question follows from this framing: why is it always the Palestinian side that must prove good faith, while Israel is permitted to violate the same agreement without consequence. The continued killing of non-combatants during a supposed ceasefire answers that question on its own. So does the fact that Israel has, by most accounts, tightened rather than loosened its grip on the territory, with estimates suggesting the Zionist state now controls roughly seventy percent of the Strip. A ceasefire that leaves the occupying power in firmer control than before it began is not a ceasefire in any meaningful sense. It is a pause designed to serve one side only.
This asymmetry runs through the entire architecture of how the conflict is discussed internationally. Israel’s allies are quick to issue warnings to its adversaries, demanding strict adherence to every clause of every agreement. Yet Israel itself is granted a standing exemption, allowed to break rules whenever it invokes the language of self-defence, even when that self-defence takes the form of killing children, the elderly, and the sick in large numbers. A system of accountability that applies to only one party is not accountability at all. It is licence. And if this double standard persists unchallenged, the next cycle of violence in Gaza will not be a surprise. It will simply be the predictable consequence of a peace process that never demanded balanced obligations from both sides.
What is happening in Gaza deserves to be named plainly. It is a genocide, and it stands as a blot on the conscience of humanity. Israel has been able to continue this campaign with such impunity largely because of the political, military, and diplomatic cover provided by its Western backers. If the architects of the Board of Peace genuinely want Hamas to surrender its weapons, then intellectual honesty demands they place an equal and unambiguous condition on Israel: that its occupation must end, fully and without delay. So far, there is little evidence that Tel Aviv has any intention of moving in that direction. On the contrary, Israeli officials have made clear their intent to retain occupied Arab territory not only in Gaza but in Lebanon and Syria as well, treating conquest as a permanent fact rather than a temporary circumstance subject to negotiation.
There should be no ambiguity in how the international community responds to this. Israel must be told, clearly and without diplomatic softening, that it is required to vacate all occupied Arab land without further delay. The habit of accusing others of breaking agreements while respecting no law itself is a form of sophistry that has gone unchallenged for far too long, and it deserves to be named for what it is. The people of Gaza, who have already endured a scale of suffering that defies ordinary description, cannot be left exposed to yet another wave of Israeli aggression simply because the world has grown accustomed to looking away. A peace process that asks sacrifice of only one side is not peace. It is surrender dressed in diplomatic language, and history will not judge it kindly.
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