Board of Peace envoy: Hamas tightening its grip on Gaza, taxing those with nothing left

Jacob Magid is The Times of Israel's US bureau chief The Board of Peace’s Gaza envoy said Wednesday that Hamas is consolidating its power in the Strip, while dragging its feet in agreeing to a US-backed framework for handing over its weapons that has led to the stalling of plans to rebuild the war-damaged enclave. “Hamas is consolidating its grip on the population. It is taxing people in the street who have nothing left to give,” Nickolay Mladenov said during a briefing with foreign reporters in Jerusalem. Mladenov held the rare media engagement as the Board of Peace struggles to determine how best to proceed after Hamas again bucked its disarmament proposal at the start of May. Since then, the Board of Peace’s high representative for the Gaza Strip has traveled twice for meetings with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior officials in Jerusalem, using the opportunities to press Israel to adhere to its own commitments in the October 2025 ceasefire deal, which established the Board of Peace to oversee the postwar management of Gaza. Dismissing a questions about Israel resuming military operations to disarm Hamas, which it was unable to do through two-plus years of war sparked by the terror group’s attack on October 7, 2023, Mladenov asserted the only options on the table are continuing the status quo or for Hamas to accept the disarmament framework, which he asserted for the first time offers Gazans a future. “Diplomacy remains open, but the people of Gaza cannot be asked to wait indefinitely while the same questions are being discussed a second, third, fourth and fifth time,” he said, indicating that negotiations with Hamas have not ceased completely. https://t.co/HmhIeqYtQG — Nickolay E. MLADENOV (@nmladenov)May 13, 2026 The Board of Peace envoy insisted that he was committed to moving forward, but did not specify how he planned to do so in light of Hamas’s intransigence. A US official told The Times of Israel that Washington — which wields significant power within the Board of Peace chaired by President Donald Trump — is considering shifting from an all-or-nothing approach on reconstruction to focusing on first rebuilding the eastern half of the Strip still controlled by Israel. Trump’s 20-point plan for ending the Gaza war envisions Israel gradually withdrawing from that part of the territory, but conditions that pullback on Hamas disarming. The US initially explored the framework that prioritized construction in the IDF-controlled “green zone” over the Hamas-controlled “red zone,” hoping to entice the vast majority of the Strip’s 2 million Palestinians living in the coastal zone to move there by offering housing solutions and jobs. However, Washington abandoned the strategy after facing massive pushback from potential Arab donor countries, which warned it would ingrain the division of the Strip. While the US may be reconsidering, Mladenov revealed Wednesday that returning to the original plan would not be simple either. He confirmed during the briefing a Tuesday report in the Kan public broadcaster that Hamas recently blocked Palestinian workers from reaching the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where they were contracted by the Board of Peace to build the first new community on the Israeli side of the yellow ceasefire line. However, Mladenov did not go as far as the US official, appearing to reject the idea of concentrating reconstruction efforts to a part of Gaza rather than the whole Strip. “We have not designated any color zones in Gaza,” he said. Mladenov tried to frame the Board of Peace’s disarmament proposal as something that Hamas need not view as a concession. “This is not a message of coercion. It offers the Palestinians in Gaza, for the first time in a very long while, a real choice,” he said, highlighting the reconstruction projects that are ready for implementation if Hamas agrees, adding that tens of thousands of public sector jobs will be created for Palestinians within the first year. “Nothing in this framework asks you to give up your identity, your faith, your history, your dignity — in fact, it asks exactly the opposite,” Mladenov argued. “We’re not asking Hamas to disappear as a political movement. A political party that disavows armed activity can compete in national Palestinian elections, and the [disarmament] roadmap preserves that possibility,” Mladenov added. It’s unclear whether Israel would be on board with Hamas’s continued participation in Palestinian politics, though the Trump administration has managed to curb some of Jerusalem’s veto power. Israel had demanded an immediate handover of all Hamas weapons, but theframeworkthat the US-led Board of Peace adopted was a gradual one that starts with the handover of heavy weapons and maps of Gaza tunnel networks, followed by the decommissioning of all remaining personal weapons over an eight-month period. Offering some new details on the disarmament framework presented to Hamas earlier this year, Mladenov said it is “based on the principle of reciprocity.” “Each step that we suggest be taken by one side triggers a step to be taken by the other, and each step is confirmed by an independent monitoring mechanism before the next step is taken,” he explained, adding the process doesn’t require trust between Israelis and Palestinians in the absence of any. The framework includes a voluntary buy-back option for armed Palestinians to be compensated for returning their weapons, offering “conditional amnesty” for those who participate and agree to live as law-abiding citizens moving forward. “We’re not interested in retribution. We’re interested in transition,” Mladenov said. Hamas officials who will lose their jobs as a result of their replacement by the new technocratic government called the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) will be offered reintegration support, including direct financial provisions. Members of armed groups unwilling to accept the framework will be given the opportunity to relocate to third countries, Mladenov said. Framing the disarmament proposal as being in line with a long-held Palestinian Authority principle, Mladenov summarized it as, “one authority, one law, one weapon” and insisted that all weapons in Gaza be under the control of the NCAG. “We’re not asking Palestinians to surrender their weapons to Israel. We’re asking them to consolidate institutions on which their future depends,” he continued. “This is what reconstruction, Israeli withdrawal and the political horizon depend on.” The 12-member NCAG has yet to enter Gaza since being established in January, with the Board of Peace hoping that Hamas accepts the disarmament proposal first. Hamas has argued that it shouldn’t be expected to implement the second phase disarmament portion of Trump’s 20-point plan, accusing Israel of violating first phase commitments, with daily strikes deep into the Hamas-controlled side of Gaza, routinely missed humanitarian aid benchmarks, the unilateral expansion of the side of Gaza it controls and the limited operation of the Rafah Crossing. Israel says it maintains the right to target Palestinians posing a threat to troops. The Israel Defense Forces announced on Wednesday that it killed a Hamas terrorist last week who participated in the raid on the military’s Nahal Oz base during the October 7, 2023 onslaught. The IDF said the strike targeted Hamza Sharbasi, a commander in Hamas’s Shejaiya Battalion, who had posed a threat to Israeli troops in Gaza. While not the target, the strike also killed Azzam al-Hayya, the 23-year-old son of Hamas’s chief negotiator Khalil al-Hayya. According to the military, Azzam al-Hayya was a member of Hamas’s elite Nukhba Force, “who recently held a central role in the organization.” “Recently, Sharbasi operated near the Yellow Line and, in the framework of his role, worked to advance terror plots against IDF troops operating in the area,” the IDF said. Pressed on the alleged Israeli ceasefire violations, Mladenov acknowledged them without explicitly naming Israel but said the Board of Peace does not divide the 20-point plan into phases the way Hamas does. “You can talk about phase one and phase two, but there is one 20-point plan, and we cannot pick and choose what we implement,” he said. Last week, The Times of Israel obtained alettershowing that the Board of Peace does not intend to hold Israel to the terms of the October 2025 Gaza ceasefire if Hamas does not accept the disarmament proposal. Mladenov’s increasingly tougher approach in dealing with Hamas has sparked criticism from the terror group, which was again voiced on Wednesday. “Mladenov is not worthy of being responsible for even one day of transitional management for our Palestinian people,” senior Hamas official Bassem Naim said in a statement. THIS MONTH ONLY:Join our reader support group for as little as$6/monthand receive an exclusive tote bag featuring one of Israel’s native birds. Choose between theDuchifat(orange), Israel's national bird, or theShaldag(blue), a beloved symbol of the Israeli landscape. As a member of the Times of Israel Community,you'll also enjoy: We’re really pleased that you’ve readXTimes of Israel articlesin the past month. That’s why we started the Times of Israel - to provide discerning readers like you with must-read coverage of Israel and the Jewish world. So now we have a request.Unlike other news outlets, we haven’t put up a paywall. 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