Netanyahu Rejects Gaza Plan, Deepening Israel's Rift With Trump

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has placed his government in open conflict with Washington over the future of the war in Gaza, telling his cabinet that Israel will not accept the 15-point document drawn up by President Donald Trump's Board of Peace. 

"Israel rejects the 15-point document," Netanyahu said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday, adding that he was stating the position plainly because some had questioned whether he had ever done so. The comment settled several days of ambiguity and set Israel directly against the Gaza plan that the United States has promoted over the past week as the route to ending more than two years of fighting.

Trump had presented the framework as a historic breakthrough, saying it would deliver the complete disarmament of Hamas and every other armed group in the territory, and describing it as a decisive move towards lasting security. Netanyahu's choice to reject the Gaza plan in such unqualified language therefore carries consequences that reach well beyond the cabinet room. It leaves the central diplomatic project of the Trump administration in the Middle East without the backing of Israel, its closest regional partner, and it suggests that the fragile calm in place since last October could remain frozen for months to come. For the population of Gaza, the rejection narrows an already thin route towards a halt in Israeli military operations, and it raises the risk that a stalled process slides back towards open confrontation.

Netanyahu was precise about the condition on which he was insisting. He said the Israeli military would carry out no withdrawal from the Gaza Strip until Hamas had been genuinely disarmed, a standard he defined as covering heavy weapons, light weapons and everything in between. He contrasted what he called genuine disarmament with what he described as fictitious disarmament, and he repeated his long-held position that there would be no Palestinian state for as long as he remained in office.

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That sequencing puts Trump in an awkward position, because the Gaza plan the president has championed treats disarmament and withdrawal as parallel, phased steps rather than as a single Israeli precondition to be met before anything else can move. Netanyahu is also under steady pressure from the right of his coalition, where ministers including Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have condemned any concession over the enclave, and that pressure goes some way to explaining why the prime minister has sharpened his stance in recent days.

What Trump's Gaza Plan Set Out

The latest 15-point roadmap at the heart of the dispute emerged from the implementation process around Trump's Gaza plan in late July. On 30 July, Trump announced what he described as a historic agreement providing for the disarmament of Hamas and the other armed factions in the territory, presenting it as a significant step towards peace and stability.

The following day, his Board of Peace published a detailed 15-point roadmap explaining how the agreement was intended to be implemented in structured phases. At the time, officials briefed reporters that Israel remained sceptical and had not committed to the terms, an early indication of the disagreement that has now been confirmed in public.

Under the terms of the Gaza plan, Israel would end its military operations, Hamas and the other groups would surrender their weapons, and civilian and security authority in the territory would pass to a new Palestinian committee supported by an international stabilisation force. The roadmap linked an Israeli withdrawal to the pace of disarmament, so that the two processes would move forward together rather than one being completed before the other could begin. Reconstruction of the territory would follow under the supervision of the board and the new administrative body, with financing and timetables set out in later stages. The framework rested on the ceasefire agreed last October and on the United Nations Security Council resolution that endorsed the wider settlement in November.

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The Board of Peace was proposed in September 2025 as part of the framework of the broader ceasefire, and it was formally established when Trump ratified its charter in Davos on 22 January 2026, with the president serving as its inaugural chairman. The body held its first meeting in Washington on 19 February 2026, with dozens of countries taking part. In the days after the roadmap was published, the board itself appeared to move some way towards Israel's stated concerns, saying on 3 August that Israeli forces would not pull back beyond the so-called Yellow Line, the demarcation that has divided the territory since the ceasefire, until the disarmament of Hamas was complete. Netanyahu's statement on Sunday went considerably further by withholding Israel's consent from the Gaza plan as a whole, rather than seeking to adjust particular provisions within it.

Why the Rejection Strains Israel's Ties With Washington

The immediate effect on the ground in the enclave is that the prospect of a further Israeli pullback has receded. Israel still holds more than half of the Gaza Strip, and its forces have carried out near-daily strikes despite the ceasefire that has held since the middle of October, with the territory's health authorities reporting well over a thousand people killed in that period.

For Israel, the rejection deepens an estrangement from an American administration that had provided it with consistent diplomatic cover, and it tests Netanyahu's long-cultivated claim that he alone can manage the relationship with Washington to Israel's advantage. Regional observers have warned that the standoff complicates efforts to reduce tension across several fronts at once.

Trump has shown before that he is prepared to criticise the Israeli PM in public whenever the latter has angered him. Earlier this year the president used a blunt expletive to describe Netanyahu during a leaked telephone call that he later confirmed, and on other occasions he has said the Israeli leader needs to behave more rationally, including pointed remarks at an international summit. The two men also diverged over the timing of a ceasefire with Iran. That record matters now, because it indicates the president has both the willingness and the political room to distance himself from the Israeli PM should the rejection of the Gaza plan come to be seen in Washington as the main obstacle to a settlement on which he has staked his own standing. Analysts have described Netanyahu's approach as a considerable gamble at a time when support for Israel among American voters, and within the Democratic Party in particular, has been softening.

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Hamas Holds to the Roadmap

Hamas, which had accepted the roadmap, responded by reaffirming its commitment to the Gaza plan and pressing the outside powers overseeing it to hold Israel to the agreed terms. In a statement, the group said it remained ready to implement the agreement in full and urged the mediators and guarantor states to prevent any breach that might derail the process.

A member of its political bureau said the mediators and the American guarantor should press the Israeli PM and his government to follow the roadmap rather than obstruct it for internal political and electoral reasons. The group, which recently confirmed Khalil al-Hayya as its new leader, has maintained that it will proceed only if Israel halts its strikes and pulls its troops back to the Yellow Line set out in the October ceasefire.

Netanyahu's Eye on the October Election

Much of Netanyahu's calculation appears to be shaped by the Israeli election scheduled this October. Opinion polls have repeatedly suggested that his coalition, the most right-wing in the country's history, is at risk of losing its majority, and he will need his hardline partners if he is to build another government after the vote.

A firm line on Gaza allows Netanyahu to answer the demands of that base, even at the cost of friction with Trump, whose endorsement he may still hope to secure as polling day approaches. Whether the Gaza plan can survive Israel's rejection now turns on how hard Washington decides to push, and on whether the calculations in Jerusalem shift once the votes in Israel have been counted.