The Board of Peace’s Gaza envoy said Wednesday that Hamas is consolidating its power in the Strip, while dragging its feet in agreeing to a US-backed framework for handing over its weapons that has led to the stalling of plans to rebuild the war-damaged enclave.

“Hamas is consolidating its grip on the population. It is taxing people in the street who have nothing left to give,” Nickolay Mladenov said during a briefing with foreign reporters in Jerusalem.

Mladenov held the rare media engagement as the Board of Peace struggles to determine how best to proceed after Hamas again bucked its disarmament proposal at the start of May.

Since then, the Board of Peace’s high representative for the Gaza Strip has traveled twice for meetings with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior officials in Jerusalem, using the opportunities to press Israel to adhere to its own commitments in the October 2025 ceasefire deal, which established the Board of Peace to oversee the postwar management of Gaza.

Dismissing a questions about Israel resuming military operations to disarm Hamas, which it was unable to do through two-plus years of war sparked by the terror group’s attack on October 7, 2023, Mladenov asserted the only options on the table are continuing the status quo or for Hamas to accept the disarmament framework, which he asserted for the first time offers Gazans a future.

“Diplomacy remains open, but the people of Gaza cannot be asked to wait indefinitely while the same questions are being discussed a second, third, fourth and fifth time,” he said, indicating that negotiations with Hamas have not ceased completely.

https://t.co/HmhIeqYtQG — Nickolay E. MLADENOV (@nmladenov) May 13, 2026

https://t.co/HmhIeqYtQG

— Nickolay E. MLADENOV (@nmladenov) May 13, 2026

The Board of Peace envoy insisted that he was committed to moving forward, but did not specify how he planned to do so in light of Hamas’s intransigence.

A US official told The Times of Israel that Washington — which wields significant power within the Board of Peace chaired by President Donald Trump — is considering shifting from an all-or-nothing approach on reconstruction to focusing on first rebuilding the eastern half of the Strip still controlled by Israel.

Trump’s 20-point plan for ending the Gaza war envisions Israel gradually withdrawing from that part of the territory, but conditions that pullback on Hamas disarming.

The US initially explored the framework that prioritized construction in the IDF-controlled “green zone” over the Hamas-controlled “red zone,” hoping to entice the vast majority of the Strip’s 2 million Palestinians living in the coastal zone to move there by offering housing solutions and jobs.

However, Washington abandoned the........

© The Times of Israel