Hamas will be given an ultimatum to disarm “in the coming days,” and if it refuses, Israel will receive international legitimacy and U.S. backing to act on its own, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Monday.
The Israel Defense Forces “is already preparing for this and drawing up plans,” Smotrich told the Kan Reshet Bet radio station. He added: “At the political level, we have held several discussions to refine those plans.”
Smotrich said that if Hamas fails to accept the ultimatum, the IDF would reconquer Gaza beyond the ceasefire-instituted Yellow Line, under which the Israeli military already controls around half of the Strip.
“There are currently two or three alternatives that we are examining to determine which is the most appropriate,” the Cabinet minister said.
Israel has “not given up on destroying Hamas,” he said, explaining that the Jerusalem is merely giving U.S. President Donald Trump “a chance to do it his way” before returning to fighting in the enclave.
Asked about Trump’s intention to deploy an International Stabilization Force to Gaza, Smotrich said the foreign troops would if necessary leave “very quickly and allow the IDF to enter,” adding that the move would only be taken in full coordination with the Trump administration.
However, the minister emphasized, the Jewish state is not expecting foreign soldiers to be deployed to the Gaza Strip anytime soon.
“In the end,” Smotrich predicted, the Israel Defense Forces “will conquer the Gaza Strip and establish Jewish settlement there.”
Trump told the inaugural meeting of his Board of Peace on Thursday he believes Hamas will lay down its weapons under his plan, warning that the terrorist organization will be “very harshly met” if it refuses to do so.
Several senior Hamas leaders, including Khaled Mashaal and Musa Abu Marzouk, have rejected key parts of Trump’s peace plan in recent weeks, including disarmament, despite having agreed to the terms in October.
“The war in Gaza is over,” the U.S. president said. “Hamas has been, I think, they’re going to give up their weapons, which is what they promised. If they don’t, it’ll be, you know, they’ll be harshly met, very harshly met.”
A new Palestinian police force
The Board of Peace’s high representative for the Gaza Strip, Nickolay Mladenov, told the meeting that a new Palestinian police force will “ensure that all [terrorist] factions in Gaza are dismantled and all weapons are put under the control of one civilian authority.”
Mladenov, who is set to meet with the European Union’s top diplomats on Monday, stressed that reconstruction would only begin after the “demilitarization and decommissioning of all weapons in Gaza.”
Under Trump’s plan, reconstruction is envisioned to start in the Strip’s southernmost city of Rafah, where 100,000 homes are to be built for 500,000 people, in addition to $5 billion in infrastructure.
Soldiers from the IDF’s 7th Armored Brigade completed operations to secure the area along the Yellow Line in Rafah following some three months of continuous counter-terror raids in the area, the army said on Monday.
The troops, working with the Yahalom elite combat engineering unit, killed “dozens” of terrorists hiding underground while dismantling “hundreds” of infrastructure sites, including a terror tunnel complex approximately 0.6 miles long that contained hideouts and weapons.
The IDF is “operating in the area in accordance with the ceasefire framework and will continue to operate to secure the area along the Yellow Line and remove any immediate threat,” the military added.
On Sunday, the 188th Armored Brigade’s combat team killed a terrorist who crossed the Yellow Line in southern Gaza and approached them “in a manner that posed an immediate threat,” the IDF said on Monday.
“Immediately after the identification, the soldiers eliminated the terrorist in order to remove the threat,” according to the army, which described the attempt to cross the truce line as “yet another violation.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Fox News on Dec. 30 that a different future for the Gaza Strip was still possible “if we disarm Hamas, whether with an international force or by any other means, adding, “If it can be done the easy way, fine. And if not, it’ll be done another way.”
The Palestinian terrorist organization, which murdered some 1,200 people, primarily Jewish civilians, during its Oct. 7, 2023, cross-border assault, still has around 20,000 operatives and 60,000 rifles, Netanyahu revealed.
“That’s what disarmament means—got to take all these rifles, take them away from them, and break up those terror tunnels that they have, still hundreds of kilometers of terror tunnels,” the premier told Fox News.
Mashaal, during a speech at an anti-Israel conference in Istanbul on Dec. 6, said that Hamas would not lay down arms, declaring that “a thousand statements are not worth a single projectile of iron.”
