Who will bell the cat? Like the mice in the Aesop fable, many kibitzers are supporting the idea of disarming Hamas in Gaza, but none dare risk their troops to make it happen. President Trump’s 20-point plan calls for “all military, terror, and offensive infrastructure” of Hamas to be “destroyed and not rebuilt.” “Independent monitors” are to supervise the defanging of the terrorists, but the plan is hazy about the actual disarming process. 

“What is the mandate of security forces inside of Gaza? We hope that it is peacekeeping, because if it’s peace enforcing, nobody will want to touch that,” King Abdullah II of Jordan told the British Broadcasting Corporation on Monday. Translation: Sure, we will monitor, but don’t expect us to confront Hamas and force it to dismantle the military infrastructure it had amassed for more than two decades. What a recipe for disaster. 

Back in 2006, the United Nations beefed up its Interim Force in Lebanon to better assist the Lebanese Armed Forces in disarming Hezbollah. Unifil, though, did no such thing. Instead, Hezbollah used the UN positions to beef up its military presence on Israel’s border. Last winter Israel attacked the Iran-backed group, and now the UN Security Council is finally telling the hapless observers to leave Lebanon by the end of next year.

Unifil, rather than helping end hostilities, hindered Israel’s attacks on the threat that underlined them: the presence of an armed force answerable to no one other than Tehran, and whose calling was the destruction of the Jewish state. Even yesterday the UN force downed an Israeli drone observing Hezbollah’s efforts to rearm. Will “independent monitors,” dispatched to Gaza to supervise Hamas’s disarmament, be any different than Unifil?

The Hashemite kingdom is an American ally. It has a peace treaty with Israel. King Abdullah’s reluctance to disarm Hamas is reflective of the other candidates ready to participate in an International Stabilization Force, as envisioned in the cease-fire plan. Some countries that itch to go to Gaza might even hope to revive Hamas’s military might. Fearing a new October 7, Israel opposes Qatar’s and Turkey’s deployment in the Strip.

The terrorists, needless to say, are unlikely to lay down their weapons voluntarily in a kumbaya moment. “The disarmament project you’re talking about, what does it mean? To whom will the weapons be handed over?” a Doha-based Hamas politburo member, Mohammed Nazzal, asks via Reuters. The 200 American troops stationed at the Israeli town of Kiryat Gat are not expected to enter the Strip, so to whom does the “project” fall?

As of now, Gaza is divided in two. Israel maintains control over a little more than half of the Strip, while armed Hamas thugs are forcing themselves on the population of Gaza City and beyond. While Israel is erecting a wall around its “yellow line,” this division is unsustainable. Above-ground structure will not stop hostile movement underneath, in tunnels stretching hundreds of miles. The Trump plan calls to dismantle that Gaza “metro.”   

With no Mr. Gorbachev around, though, a “tear down these tunnels” makes little sense. “Israel didn’t surrender its right to self-defense,” Secretary Marco Rubio said Monday, after the Israelis killed Gaza terrorists that threatened its troops. The Israeli army is fatigued, but sooner or later it will be called to end Hamas as a military force, which is the only way the Gaza war can end. Without that, Mr. Trump’s plan is a fable in search of a moral.