Netanyahu's Gaza rejection seen as negotiating posture, not final stance

Benjamin Netanyahu stood before his cabinet on a Sunday in August and made his position unmistakable: Israel would not accept the fifteen-point peace roadmap that the Trump administration had spent months negotiating. The document, which outlined a phased disarmament of Hamas and a staged Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, was unacceptable to him. He wanted no ambiguity. The Israeli Defense Forces would not leave Gaza, he said, until Hamas was stripped of every weapon—heavy, light, all of it. And it had to be real disarmament, not what he called the fictitious kind.

But in Washington, the rejection barely registered as a setback. Senior Trump administration officials, according to reporting from Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, were unmoved. They understood Netanyahu's position not as a final answer but as the sound of a politician fighting for his political life. "We understand Bibi's political needs," one senior US official told Ravid. "We have no problem with it as long as he continues to do what we ask—especially regarding restraining attacks in Gaza." The White House, in other words, was reading Netanyahu's public stance as campaign theater, not as a genuine shift in negotiating position.

The context for this reading was not hard to find. Netanyahu faces an Israeli general election on October 27th, the first since the October 7th, 2023 Hamas attacks that killed thousands and triggered the Gaza war. Three years on, he has failed to deliver the "absolute victory" he promised. His political survival depends on appearing strong to his right-wing coalition partners and to an Israeli public traumatized by the October 7th assault. A former American diplomat and Middle East negotiator named Aaron David Miller told the BBC that Netanyahu was navigating "the most consequential election" of his political life, walking a line between keeping his constituents satisfied and not enraging President Trump. For now, Miller said, the White House was giving him "a pass."

Yet beneath the public rejection, the machinery of the peace process continued to turn. In recent days, Israel had apparently paused its strikes on Gaza—a key demand Hamas had made when it agreed to the roadmap in July. The International Stabilization Force, a multinational contingent meant to work alongside a new Palestinian police force to secure Gaza, remained on schedule to begin construction of its first base in the ruins of Rafah by month's end. This would allow reconstruction to finally begin. The roadmap itself, announced by Trump in July as a "major milestone," had been welcomed by the UK and the European Union as a crucial step forward. Hamas had confirmed its agreement, conditioning it on Israeli compliance.

The roadmap's architecture was straightforward in theory: a step-by-step process in which Hamas would decommission weapons, which would be stored by a new Palestinian administration and rendered unusable, and only then would Israeli forces withdraw from the more than sixty percent of Gaza they currently occupied. Nickolay Mladenov, the High Commissioner for Gaza who had led the months of delicate negotiations with Hamas, gave an interview to Israeli television just hours after Netanyahu's rejection. He emphasized that the entire framework rested not on trust but on verification. If weapons were genuinely decommissioned and removed from the factions, Israel would withdraw. The goal, he said, was to ensure Gaza never again became a threat to Israeli security and that October 7th never happened again.

Israeli skepticism about Hamas's intentions ran deep. The Islamist movement had long held "armed struggle" as a core principle, its ideological response to Israeli occupation. In recent months, there had been signs of Hamas reasserting control in Gaza. Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, an Israeli commentator and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, told the BBC that Israel could never agree to withdraw from territory where the group that carried out the October 7th massacres still held power. She stressed the depth of Israeli trauma from those attacks—a wound that would not heal quickly or easily.

But Trump himself faced his own electoral pressures. The midterm elections for Congress were coming in November, and his Republican party faced the prospect of significant losses. His approval rating had fallen, in part because of an unpopular five-month war in Iran that had pushed up petrol and grocery prices. A foreign policy victory in Gaza could help him politically. Heavy pressure from Washington on Netanyahu was likely to increase as the months wore on. The Israeli prime minister had confirmed that talks with the Americans were continuing. For now, the public rejection and the private negotiations existed in an uneasy tension—Netanyahu saying no while the machinery of peace kept moving forward.