Israel and Hamas may have agreed to the first phase of a United States-backed ceasefire deal, but contentious differences between the two sides still remain, particularly when it comes to the fate of the Palestinian group’s weapons.
Israel has long insisted that Hamas surrender all of its weapons if its two-year war on Gaza is to end, as well as demanding that the group relinquish governance of the Palestinian enclave and dissolve itself as an organisation.
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For its part, Hamas has publicly rejected calls to give up its weapons, but experts say that the group has expressed openness in private to hand over some of its arsenal.
“When it comes to disarmament, this is where you have seen the biggest shift in Hamas’s position,” said Hugh Lovatt, an expert on Israel-Palestine with the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).
“[Hamas officials] have said in private to interlocutors that the group may be open to a decommissioning process of Hamas’s offensive weapons,” he told Al Jazeera.
Shaky ceasefire
Negotiations over Hamas’s arsenal could torpedo the ceasefire and prompt Israel to resume its genocidal war on the destitute and beleaguered Palestinian population in Gaza, analysts said.
An armed group has the right to bear arms and resist an occupying power in line with international humanitarian law – the main framework referenced to protect civilians in times of war.
Yet, Israel and its Western allies have historically demanded that Palestinian factions give up armed resistance as a precondition to launching a peace process ostensibly aimed at ending Israel’s occupation over Palestinian territories.
This was the framework underpinning the Oslo Peace Accords in the 1990s, signed by then Palestinian and Israeli leaders.
Israel is likely to try and make similar demands this time around, but Hamas is unlikely to completely disarm, according to Azmi Keshawi, a Palestinian from Gaza and a researcher with the International Crisis Group (ICG).
He said that he could only envision Hamas surrendering some “offensive weapons” such as short-range and long-range missles.
However, he believes Hamas will never give up its small arms and light weapons, nor hand over a map of its sophisticated tunnel network, which it spent decades building to resist Israel.
“[Hamas] will only give up [light] weapons when there is no need for these weapons. This means they will only hand them over to a Palestinian leadership that assumes control of a state after Israel ends its occupation,” Keshawi told Al Jazeera.
Power vacuum?
Hamas was the l