I’d really like to think that the US Middle East peace team has gotten over Steve Witkoff’s previous delusion that Hamas is not ideologically intractable and that it can be persuaded to lay down its weapons and quietly slink away into history.

I’d like to believe that when Jared Kushner meets, as he did again in Egypt over the weekend, with Khalil al-Hayya, he is thoroughly aware that the current Hamas chief was one of the architects of the October 7, 2023, invasion and massacre in southern Israel, and remains laser-locked on the goal of destroying Israel.

In purportedly agreeing to the US-established Board of Peace’s plan for its own disarmament and Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas is manifestly playing the United States and playing for time: It is recruiting; it is training; it is awaiting a less intrusive, more anti-Israel American administration; it is awaiting a resumption of funding from the despicably resilient Iranian regime.

That does not mean that the US-led effort, via the Board, to marginalize Hamas and gradually change the face of Gaza is a lost cause. But success requires genuine Hamas disarmament; ongoing, relentless elimination of Hamas operatives preparing and attempting to carry out attacks… and a heightened focus on Hamas’s finances.

According to Yitzhak Gal, of the center-left Mitvim advocacy think tank, Hamas retains broad leverage over aid entering the near-50% of Gaza where it retains control, and is able to tax (at entry and in the markets), obstruct and loot supplies to the tune of some $2 million a day. (A Board of Peace official acknowledged to The Times of Israel that diversion of aid continues, but did not confirm Gal’s figure, and said the scale of Hamas intervention has been going down.) It is essential, therefore, urged Gal, that the Board’s yet-to-be-deployed International Stabilization Force fully control the entire aid distribution process.

In an Army Radio interview on Monday, Gal further argued that Hamas, in purportedly agreeing to relinquish civilian governance to the Board’s National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, the intended interim technocratic government, is, again, playing the US, the Board et al for fools, since it has ensured that the hierarchies through which this committee would seek to operate are staffed by Hamas and its loyalists.

Finally, Gal urged the establishment of a kind of economic police force — to oversee taxation, money-changing, cryptocurrency dealings and every other aspect of finance in Gaza, an effort that he acknowledged would likely trigger open conflict with Hamas.

Common to these proposals is the imperative to ensure not only the disarming of Hamas but also the draining of........

© The Times of Israel