Within hours of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announcing that Israel rejects the 15-point roadmap, Nikolay Mladenov—Director-General of the Board of Peace, the Trump-led body meant to oversee postwar Gaza—sat down with me to explain why Israel should want the very thing Bibi had just rejected.
His entire case reduces to one word: verification. Nobody is required to do anything, he insists, “last of all Israel,” before verified steps on the ground. The IDF sits at the yellow line agreed under the comprehensive plan; the Board’s ask is only that it hold there and not fire across unless troops face a real threat. The line moves back only after individual sectors are cleared and their weapons are certified, stored, and rendered unusable. If the next stage’s commitments go unmet, “the process stops.”
Why store the weapons in warehouses inside Gaza, where Hamas is “always one wall away from rearming”? Because they will be rendered unusable, he says, by the Board’s National Committee for the Administration of Gaza with backing from the international force. More a reassurance than an answer.
Who destroys the tunnels? Contractors, but at this rate it will take more than a decade, and, he adds, this is precisely why Israel needs the Board of Peace: together it will go faster.
What counts as the “personal arms” Gazans may keep—might that quietly include the Kalashnikovs that actually govern the Strip? No, he says; the framework covers everything, heavy weapons to personal ones. He acknowledges that Gaza is ruled from the barrel of a Kalashnikov—which is why, he insists, those rifles and every other weapon must pass to civilian authority.
And Turkey and Qatar—the two governments Israelis least want inside Gaza? Without Egypt, Turkey, and Qatar, he says flatly, Hamas would never have agreed to the roadmap at all; their role was critical. Told that letting them help dismantle Hamas is the fox guarding the henhouse, he answers: “If I have to speak to the devil, I will speak to the devil”—to make sure no second October 7 ever occurs. The verification mechanism, he stresses, is American-led, backed by the ISF and, on paper, by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Morocco.
Pressed on whether Hamas will really disarm itself—whether the whole thing is too good to be true—he offers the tell. “I’m not building any of this on the basis of trust. And none of us are.” Clear-eyed about the risks, he says, and building on verification instead. If it doesn’t work, the process stops.
Mladenov’s offer is difficult. On the one hand, Israel isn’t being asked to withdraw from anywhere at the moment; it only has to stop firing—unless it sees Hamas rearming. On the other, a withdrawal will eventually come before Hamas is entirely disarmed.
The Americans are stunned by one thing. How can a plan this good—by their lights—draw the opposition of the entire Israeli political system, without exception? It’s one of the rare questions on which Netanyahu, Naftali Bennett, Avigdor Lieberman, Gadi Eisenkot, and even Yair Golan answer in chorus. Their reason is the same: in 79 days Israel votes. Nobody wants to run as a Hamas sympathizer and a signer of pullouts—even when no pullout would come before the election. Some of them privately suspect this is the best deal Israel is going to get. But compromise is a post-election pastime.
My take: In contrast to the entire political establishment, I support this plan. It won’t dismantle Hamas—nothing will, not completely. But if it nets a third of the tunnels and half the Kalashnikovs, I’ll take it. Will 100,000 Kalashnikovs be handed in? Of course not. But 40,000 collected and another 300 kilometers of tunnel mapped is not nothing—and the next round, which everyone knows is coming, gets fought on considerably more favorable terms.
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