As the second phase of President Trump’s war-ending blueprint for Gaza is set to begin, a feud erupts over what the plan entails.

The body of one murdered Israeli hostage must be returned before the plan’s second phase begins. According to the plan, that phase includes the disarmament of Hamas, ending its rule in Gaza, and a withdrawal of the Israel Defense Force from the strip. The sequence, though, is in dispute. 

“We cannot consider it yet a cease-fire,” Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani of Qatar, said during an international conference at Doha over the weekend. “A cease-fire cannot be completed unless there is a full withdrawal of the Israeli forces.” He omitted any reference to Hamas disarmament.

Israel is adamant to remain in about 53 percent of Gaza territory that it now controls. Under the plan, Israel is to leave that “yellow line” once Arab and Muslim troops, as part of an International Stabilization Force, verify the Hamas disarmament.

The ISF, though, is yet to form. Potential contributors, including from Azerbaijan, Indonesia, and Jordan, publicly declined to forcibly disarm the terror group. Israeli officials say therefore that the IDF will remain in Gaza until Hamas disarms, and perhaps long after that. 

“We will not allow Hamas to reestablish itself,” the IDF chief of staff, Lieutenant General, Eyal Zamir, told troops over the weekend. “The yellow line is a new border line, a forward defensive line for the communities and an offensive line.”

Last week the Mossad chief, David Barnea, reportedly flew to Doha for a first meeting with a Qatari official since Israel struck Hamas’s headquarters there. An American official also attended in the effort to advance the second phase. Israelis, though, oppose Qatar’s and Turkey’s presence in Gaza. 

“The international force will not enter Gaza as long as Hamas is there,” a former national security adviser under Prime Minister Benjamin Netnayahu, Yaakov Amidror, tells the Sun. “The only ones willing to enter Gaza are the Qataris and the Turks, because they want Hamas to remain there even as other Arab states — the Saudis, the Emiraties, the Egyptians — don’t.”

The weekend’s Doha conference was mostly designed to enhance Qatar’s influence at Washington. A former American ambassador to Israel under President Obama, Daniel Shapiro says though that he went there to impress on Qatari officials that they need to lean on Hamas to disarm. 

“Without Hamas disarmament, everything else in the 20 point plan — the deployment of an international stabilization force, funds for reconstruction, getting a Palestinian technocratic committee ready to govern Gaza, and even beginning conversations eventually between Israelis and Palestinians about their political future and a Palestinian state — none of that’s going to happen,” Mr. Shapiro said in a video statement posted on X. 

“Hamas has to be disarmed, Hamas has to be removed from power, and Qatar has to use its influence to make that happen,” Mr. Shapiro added.

One Hamas spokesman is hinting that the terror group might agree to “freezing or storing” its weapons. “We are open to a comprehensive approach in order to avoid further escalations or in order to avoid any further clashes or explosions,” Hamas’s Bassem Naim told the Associated Press on Sunday. 

At the same time a more senior official, Khaled Mshaal, told a conference at Istanbul last week that Hamas will “not disarm, give up its weapons, its rule of the Gaza Strip, or permit external oversight in Gaza.”

As far as Israel is concerned, though, any progress on the second phase of Mr. Trump’s plan hinges on Hamas relinquishing its guns, rockets, and terror tunnels from where armed men could plot the next attack on towns and Kibbutzim near the Gaza border.    

Jerusalem and Washington officials say Hamas will either disarm voluntarily, or be disarmed by force. While many Israelis doubt the former can occur, Mr. Amidror, now with the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, says it is not impossible.

“I was very skeptical that Hamas would release all hostages before the IDF leaves Gaza,” he says. It happened, though, under American pressure, so “I’m more careful about making categorical statements.” Hamas could decide to disarm, he says, “if they understand that the IDF stays in the yellow line, and from there it will attack and kill them. Hamas knows that without the hostages they have no way to stop the IDF from doing so.”