Decommission, not disarm: How Europe can help nudge Gaza toward peace
JVL Introduction
Muhammad Shehada provides an interesting analysis of debates within Hamas about a possible way forward, based on interviews with some of its militants.
Battered but unbroken, Hamas is adamantly opposed to Israel’s calls for it to disarm.
But as cracks emerge in Israel’s top security establishment with many recognising that total disarmament is neither realistic nor enforceable, so too within Hamas there are those who are open to decommissioning the group’s offensive military capabilities.
But it will clearly this cannot happen without a credible path to Palestinian self-determination or territorial sovereignty.
Theu author, Muhammad Shehada, was educated at Gaza’s Islamic University and then at universities in Sweden and Denmark. He is currently the chief of communications and programmes at the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor
RK
PS: An interesting snippet from the article:
Israel has dropped over 100,000 tonnes of explosives on Gaza, some 10%-15% of which did not explode. This constitutes Hamas’s main source of rearmament by recycling them into rockets, mortars and bombs.
This article was originally published by European Council on Foreign Relations on Mon 21 Jul 2025. Read the original here.
Decommission, not disarm: How Europe can help nudge Gaza toward peace
As Israel and Hamas edge toward a ceasefire, shifts are under way in both: Hamas is quietly opening up to decommissioning and Israel’s security elite is realising military victory is a myth. European leaders have a rare chance to help shift the Gaza war from attrition to political resolution
Loading article text…
Why on earth would anyone with an ounce of intelligence trust Israel. Imagine if the Nazis had insisted the Resistance in occupied Europe disarm.. THIS IS NO DIFFERENT. Stark REMINDER.. Israel has NEVER EVER Kept a ceasefire..