U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan for the Strip allows for a disarmed Hamas to participate in elections following the establishment of a Palestinian state, High Representative for Gaza Nickolay Mladenov said on Wednesday.
Trump’s 20-point peace plan “offers ultimately a political horizon to Palestinians to self-determination and statehood,” Mladenov told reporters at a press conference hosted by the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem.
“This is the foundation for reuniting Gaza in the West Bank under a reformed Palestinian Authority,” he said. “This is in the plan.”
Trump’s Board of Peace—which oversees the Oct. 10, 2025, ceasefire between Israel and Hamas—is not asking the Iranian-backed terrorist organization “to disappear as a political movement,” the top official stressed.
“A political party that disavows armed activity can compete in national Palestinian elections,” he said.
“What is not negotiable, however, is that armed factions or militias with their own military command and control systems, with their own arsenals or tunnel networks, can exist alongside a transitional Palestinian authority,” according to Mladenov.
Under Trump’s Sept. 29, 2025, “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict,” Hamas and other terrorist factions formally agreed “to not have any role in the governance of Gaza, directly, indirectly, or in any form.”
Hamas-led terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023, murdered some 1,200 people—primarily Israeli civilians—while wounding thousands of others and taking 251 hostages to Gaza, in the deadliest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Mladenov on Wednesday reiterated demands that Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and others lay down arms, emphasizing that disarmament was “not negotiable.”
“You cannot build a future with armed groups running the streets, hiding in tunnels and stockpiling weapons. You cannot deliver reconstruction with militias on every corner,” he told journalists.
Seven months after the truce took effect, “the door to the future of Gaza is still closed,” Mladenov continued.
“We have a ceasefire. It is holding. It is not perfect. It is far from perfect—there are violations every day, and some of them are very serious,” he added.
Hamas has continued to violate the terms of the truce’s first phase, launching near-daily attacks on Israeli forces stationed along the Yellow Line in the coastal enclave.
“It is not what the Palestinians were promised and it is not what they deserve. And it is not giving Israel the security to move forward, as the Israeli people also want,” the high representative said.
Earlier on Wednesday, Mladenov met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem.
Mladenov last met with Netanyahu on May 5, during which the premier reaffirmed Jerusalem’s commitment to Trump’s peace plan.
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a founding member of the Board of Peace, told the U.N Security Council last month that the organization had made “substantial progress” in implementing the plan.
Blair pointed at the formation of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) and the International Stabilization Force (ISF), which he said recently completed its “pre-deployment assessment mission,” as key milestones in implementing the plan that ended two years of war.
“The critical demilitarization talks with Hamas are continuing, led with immense effort by the mediators Egypt, Qatar and Turkey together with Mladenov and representatives of the Board of Peace,” he said.
Senior Hamas leaders including Khaled Mashaal and Musa Abu Marzouk have rejected key parts of Washington’s peace plan in recent months, including disarmament, despite having agreed to the proposal in October.
The Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s “military wing,” on April 6 denounced calls for its disarmament under the ceasefire plan as “extremely dangerous.”
