Israel is the only country willing to defeat Hamas.
26 nations, $17 billion, and no one will disarm the ideology that produced October 7th. They pledged billions to rebuild Gaza, but not to defeat Hamas.
Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay by Mitch Schneider, who writes from Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The International Stabilization Force, the centerpiece of the entire Board of Peace framework, announced its first troop commitments this past week. Indonesia is sending 8,000 soldiers and taking the deputy commander role. Morocco, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, and Albania have also signed on. U.S. Major General Jasper Jeffers finally has forces on paper.
On paper.
Because the countries that committed troops have stipulated they will only deploy behind the Yellow Line, in Israeli-controlled territory, not in the Hamas-controlled areas where the stabilization is supposed to happen. Azerbaijan declined entirely. The United States confirmed it will not send combat troops. No deployment timeline has been set. No rules of engagement have been published.
Twenty-six nations gathered. Seventeen billion dollars was pledged. The world’s cameras were there. And the force designed to implement everything agreed upon still cannot operate where it is needed most.
Hamas noticed. The day after the meeting they issued a statement — not a surrender, not an apology, conditions. Any political process must begin, they said, with a total halt to Israeli aggression and the lifting of the blockade. Hamas has also formally confirmed that disarmament has never been discussed with them by any mediator. Their position remains what it has always been: They will not disarm until a state is established.
One wonders what the $17 billion is for, exactly.
But before we get to the mechanics of this framework, it’s worth asking a more fundamental question: not whether the structure will work, but whether it can. Because a diplomatic architecture that refuses to name the ideology it is trying to defeat is not a peace plan. It is a performance of one. And we have seen this performance before in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Lebanon. The West builds institutions, pledges money, trains local forces, and declines to confront the ideological root. Then it is surprised when the problem remains.
It is worth being precise about who sat around the table this past week, because the composition of this board is not a diplomatic oversight; it is a tell.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a founding member of the Board of Peace. He has repeatedly compared Israel’s prime minister to Adolf Hitler, including from the podium of the United Nations General Assembly and again at Antalya in April 2025 when he said Benjamin Netanyahu “surpassed Hitler.”
His foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, has accused “international Zionist circles” of helping Israel conceal its actions and submitted Turkey to the International Court of Justice’s genocide case against Israel. Erdoğan has said publicly, repeatedly, on camera, that Hamas is not a terrorist organization but a legitimate resistance movement. He is now a founding member of the body whose stated purpose is the dismantling of Hamas.
Qatar’s senior diplomat also sits on the Gaza Executive Board. For years, Qatar hosted Hamas leadership. Qatari money flowed into the tunnels beneath Gaza that made October 7th operationally possible. The Shin Bet concluded that Qatari funding led directly to the attack. Last September Qatar’s emir accused Israel of genocide at the United Nations General Assembly, and Qatar’s prime minister used the phrase “state terrorism” after the Israeli strike on Hamas leaders in Doha. Qatar has now pledged over a billion dollars for reconstruction and taken a seat at the table overseeing it.
Netanyahu said in January that there would be no Turkish or Qatari role in Gaza governance. That statement received almost no coverage given what has happened since.
It is worth noting the difference between these two actors. Erdoğan is at least consistent. He says what he thinks about Israel at the United Nations, to the press, and in front of whoever is listening. You know where Ankara stands. Qatar has turned strategic ambiguity into an art form, and Western institutions have rewarded it at every turn. Ceasefire broker in the morning, Hamas host in the afternoon, genocide accusation on Monday, peace pledge on Tuesday.
Neither country has ever once called for Hamas to disarm. Both are now central to a framework whose entire premise is that Hamas will be dismantled. The West calls this diplomacy. Hamas knows it is an opportunity.
What does it say about Washington and Brussels that they cannot tell the difference between an armed jihadist movement and a political stakeholder? This is not confusion. This is what happens when the West doubts its own right to win. Gaza is not a governance failure. It is the logical outcome of a worldview that treats grievance as justification and violence as authenticity.
Hamas was not sustained despite Western sympathy. It was sustained by it. Every institution that treated its rockets as negotiating tools, every government that distinguished between Hamas’ political and military wings as though they were separable, contributed to October 7th. Not intentionally, but consequentially — and consequence is what matters.
The countries that have committed troops are Indonesia, Morocco, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, and Albania. Jordan and Saudi Arabia, the two countries in the region with genuine military capability, declined. Egypt and Jordan committed instead to training the police force that will govern Gaza.
A police training mandate under international law is not a neutral technical arrangement. It creates a formal relationship of authority between the trainer and the trained force. The doctrine, command culture, political assumptions, and relationships with armed groups of the trainer become embedded in the institution being built. When Egypt and Jordan train police they are not simply teaching crowd control. They are shaping the security apparatus that will govern Gaza for a generation.
Countries that fought multiple wars against Israel are now training the police force that will operate on Israel’s border. Nobody appears to find this remarkable.
A senior U.S. official confirmed that most of the day-to-day governance inside Gaza will be carried out by local police trained by Egypt and Jordan, operating in a territory where Hamas still fields what Israeli officials estimate to be 30,000 armed men, under an International Stabilization Force mandate that does not include their proactive disarmament.
You cannot neutralize an organization with an estimated 30,000 armed men using a police force trained by countries that have never called for that organization to disarm, supervised by a board that includes that organization’s principal financial backers. This is not a structural flaw in an otherwise sound plan; this is the plan.
On the day the Board of Peace held its inaugural meeting, the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, the technocratic body designed to replace Hamas in governing Gaza, updated its logo. It has now redesigned its logo twice. The first version was nearly identical to the Palestinian Authority emblem. Israel objected. The United States spent an entire day of diplomatic effort negotiating over a logo. The National Committee for the Administration of Gaza said it was not final. On the day the Board of Peace met, a new version appeared: the Palestinian Authority eagle, the flag, and gold olive branches taken directly from the Board of Peace emblem.
Hamas officials are embedded inside the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza. The internal instruction is to continue as if nothing has changed. The economy portfolio is held by the former director of a bank that Israeli security services say facilitated Hamas-affiliated transactions.
They are showing you exactly what they are — in plain sight, on the day the world gathered to build something new. The logo is not an administrative detail. It is a statement of intent. And the statement is being made clearly, publicly, while the West looks at the ceremony and calls it progress.
In 2005, Israel withdrew every Jew from Gaza. American Jewish donors raised $14 million specifically to purchase the greenhouses and keep the agricultural infrastructure running because they wanted the transition to work. James Wolfensohn, the former World Bank president serving as Special Envoy, put up $500,000 of his own money. The greenhouses were looted within days of the handover. The money went underground, literally, into the first tunnels.
Hamas spent the next 20 years governing Gaza as an Islamist military project. Every aid dollar was taxed or diverted. Weapons were stored in schools. Command centers were built under hospitals. The people of Gaza were not Hamas’ citizens; they were its operational environment. Hamas did not build a state. It built a fortress on the backs of the people it claimed to represent, executing its own in the streets without trial, without due process, judge and jury at once.
And then it launched October 7th under an existing ceasefire, the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, after which it called Israel’s response aggression.
Any reconstruction effort that does not begin with the total moral delegitimization of the ideology that produced October 7th is cosmetic. Where, precisely, in this framework is the renunciation of genocidal intent? Where is the mechanism that ensures the ideology that produced the tunnels, the schools with weapons, the hospitals with command centers, does not simply rebuild itself underneath whatever governance structure is placed on top?
These are not technical questions. They are the only questions. And they are not being asked.
Hamas is issuing conditions because it understands something the Board of Peace appears not to: An ideology that has not been defeated has not been defeated. It is waiting. And it knows how to wait.
The framework being assembled is serious in its logistical ambition: a 350-acre American military base planned for Gaza, and the Civil-Military Coordination Center already operational in Kiryat Gat with 50 countries involved, $17 billion pledged, governance structures, reconstruction plans.
But seriousness of ambition is not the same thing as coherence of design. And this framework is not incoherent because of diplomatic missteps or troop shortfalls. It is incoherent because it refuses to acknowledge the nature of what it is dealing with.
Do you believe Hamas can be integrated into a political process without first being defeated militarily and ideologically? If the answer is no, the entire framework collapses. If the answer is yes, you must explain how. Hamas has made its own position clear: It will not disarm. It views armed resistance as permanent. Its conditions for any political process begin with the removal of the country it attacked.
That is not a negotiating position. It is a statement of ideology. And ideology is far harder to fix than troop deployments.
So what does ideological defeat actually look like? History offers some instruction. It requires removing the governing apparatus entirely, not managing around it. It requires the Arab states who fund civil society to attach conditions to that funding: no glorification of October 7th, no payments to families of attackers, no textbooks teaching children that Israel has no right to exist. It requires the Palestinian Authority, if it is to govern Gaza, to say plainly and without diplomatic qualification that what Hamas did on October 7th was wrong — not complicated by context, not balanced against grievance, wrong.
None of that is in this framework. None of it was discussed at the Board of Peace. Without it, whatever is built in Gaza will be built on the same foundation that produced Hamas in the first place.
Israel will not return to the reality of October 6, 2023. That is the one honest commitment in all of this. Everything else assembled this past week is ambition without architecture. Nobody at the Board of Peace appeared willing to say so.
The conditions Hamas issued the following day were not a negotiating position. They were a verdict on the room. And on the West itself.
Everything you write is correct and makes sense, but why is the Israeli government allowing this to happen? What are American troops doing in Kiryat Gat? Why does Israel not say the truth: The Palestinians have to go, out of Gaza, out of Judea and Samaria, and we will see to it that this is done because we are the people who have suffered at their hands and there is no living with them inside our country and the country is ours by virtue of our very long history and attachment to it and by virtue of international law since we conquered it from our enemies and we defend it against them. Period. Bingo. The money collected should go to the reconstruction of Israel which was destroyed by the recent war, not to Gaza inhabited by the criminal and depraved Palestinian population who are tooth and nail with Hamas and all the other pLO gangsters. The truth is simple. Selling a lie costs billions of dollars.
Board of Peace,🤔Why am I so sceptical about it. There is something off about it. Just a gut feeling.