In a bold declaration, Hamas leader Khaled Mashal insisted that “the resistance and its weapons are our honor and glory,” signaling that “the battle is not over.” He emphasized that rights are secured “at the recruitment office, not the U.N. Security Council,” a statement that starkly opposes former President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan. Mashal hailed the October 7 “Al-Aqsa Flood” massacre as a pivotal moment to challenge Israel’s presence in Gaza and on the global stage.
Addressing the “Pledge to Jerusalem” conference via video from Istanbul, Mashal delivered a keynote speech broadcast by Al Jazeera. He outlined an uncompromising stance that completely dismisses the main aspects of Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace proposal, which calls for disarmament, an international stabilization force, and the removal of Hamas from power. This comes even as Hamas seemingly agrees to Phase Two of a U.S.-facilitated ceasefire, accepted two months prior.
Mashal reassured supporters that while what he referred to as the most severe phase of a “genocidal war” in Gaza has ended, the broader conflict with Israel persists.
He urged the global Islamic community, or “ummah,” to commit to “the liberation of Jerusalem as the banner and symbol of freeing Palestine.” This includes the “cleansing” of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the “reclaiming” of Islamic and Christian holy sites, portraying Gaza as the forefront of the 2023 “Al-Aqsa Flood” massacre which he claims has become a source of national pride and global conscience.
In statements covered by various Israeli media, Mashal firmly rejected any form of “guardianship, mandate and re-occupation” over Gaza, the West Bank, or “all of Palestine.” He stressed that Palestinians “need protection, not guardians,” asserting that “the Palestinian is the one who governs himself and decides for himself.”
He made it clear that this rejection extends to the Trump-supported International Stabilization Force (ISF) and the Board of Peace, which are intended to oversee demilitarization and reconstruction in the second phase of the agreement.
He made clear that this extends to the Trump-backed International Stabilization Force (ISF) and the Board of Peace that are supposed to oversee demilitarization and reconstruction in Phase Two of the deal.
“Attempts to place our causes, our national principles and rights into misleading frameworks are rejected,” he said, reiterating that any external presence would not be allowed to control Gaza.
Above all, Mashal doubled down on Hamas’s refusal to disarm.
“The resistance project and its weapons must be protected. It is the right of our people to defend themselves,” he said, adding that “the resistance and its weapons are the honor and strength of the nation” and scoffing that “a thousand statements are not worth a single projectile of iron.”
He promised supporters that Gaza, which he called “mighty,” would ultimately “drive out invaders,” presenting the current moment as an “opportunity” to “remove this entity [Israel] from our homeland and exclude it from the international stage.”
Even the strongly pro-Palestinian outlet Palestine Chronicle, which summarized the address under the banner “Covenant for Jerusalem,” highlighted how central Jerusalem, the “arms of resistance,” and rejection of foreign oversight were to Mashal’s message.
Its write-up framed the speech as a strategic roadmap for the next phase, centered on Jerusalem, armed “resistance,” and Palestinian unity at home and in the diaspora.
Israel Warns: Mashal Speech ‘Mocks’ Trump Peace Deal
Israel’s Foreign Ministry quickly posted video of Mashal’s address, warning that Hamas was “making a mockery of President Trump’s peace plan” and stressing that the terror chief had publicly declared that Hamas has “no intention of disarming, giving up its weapons, its rule, or its path.”
The ministry added that Mashal “rejected any form of external oversight in Gaza – including the idea of an international force,” calling his speech “a direct contradiction of the core terms of the peace plan itself.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar amplified the ministry’s warning, underscoring that Hamas’s top external leader was repudiating precisely the conditions that allowed the ceasefire and hostage-release framework to move forward.
HonestReporting, a media watchdog that monitors coverage of Israel, noted that not a single major Western news outlet reported the speech, even though it amounted to what one researcher called a “strategic declaration” of Hamas’s real intentions.
Idit Bar, a researcher of the Arab and Islamic world cited by the organization, said Mashal had “put all the cards on the table: no to disarmament, no to relinquishing Hamas’ rule, yes to the annihilation of Israel, yes to the liberation of Jerusalem.”
She pointed to his language about “cleansing” Al-Aqsa of “impure Jews” and his call for freeing prisoners — which she argued effectively incentivizes more hostage-taking after what Hamas learned on October 7.
Mashal’s speech also set out other priorities, including preventing what he called the “Judaization” of Judea and Samaria and building Arab unity against Israel.
He further called for “pursuing” Israeli leaders in international forums and stepping up campaigns against Israel on campuses, in media, and in politics.
Within pro-Hamas circles, the address circulated widely as a clear roadmap placing Jerusalem, “resistance,” and rejection of foreign oversight at the center of the next phase.
Mashal’s comments came just one day before markedly different messaging from another senior Hamas figure — and underlined the internal contradictions now playing out as the movement tries to navigate Trump’s deal.
On Sunday, Bassem Naim, another member of Hamas’s political bureau, told the Associated Press in Doha that the group was “very open minded” to a “comprehensive approach” that might include “freezing or storing” its weapons for five to ten years as part of a long-term truce aimed at eventually establishing a Palestinian state.
Naim said Hamas retains its “right to resist,” but floated the idea of placing weapons under Palestinian guarantees “not to use it at all during this ceasefire time or truce,” while firmly rejecting any mandate for international forces “inside the Palestinian territories” and insisting that a U.N. deployment would be limited to monitoring along Gaza’s borders.
Trump’s Phase Two: Disarmament, ISF, and Hamas’s Test
The new ceasefire framework — based on Trump’s 20-point plan endorsed by the U.N. Security Council — envisions exactly what Mashal rejected: an International Stabilization Force to take over territory from the IDF, a technocratic Palestinian committee to run Gaza’s civil affairs, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Strip, and the full disarmament and decommissioning of Hamas’s arsenal.
Under one key clause, Hamas and other factions agree to “not have any role in the governance of Gaza, directly, indirectly, or in any form,” and commit to seeing “all military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapon production facilities” destroyed and not rebuilt.
Point 15 of the plan states that the United States “will work with Arab and international partners to develop a temporary International Stabilization Force (ISF) to immediately deploy in Gaza,” with the force tasked to train and support vetted Palestinian police units, act as the long-term internal security solution, work with Israel and Egypt to secure Gaza’s borders, prevent munitions from entering, and facilitate the “rapid and secure flow of goods” needed to rebuild the Strip, under an agreed deconfliction mechanism.
Point 17 specifies that if Hamas “delays or rejects this proposal,” reconstruction and the scaled-up aid operation “will proceed in the terror-free areas handed over from the IDF to the ISF” — effectively allowing Israel and its partners to move ahead area by area while holdout pockets are dealt with separately.
Retired U.S. Army Major John Spencer, one of the world’s leading experts on urban and subterranean warfare and chair of War Studies at the Madison Policy Forum, seized on that clause in his own reaction on X.
Citing point 17, Spencer wrote that Hamas “does not have the leverage, international support, [or] monopoly over the aid or population it once did,” and argued that the IDF can continue “high intensity operations against Hamas to kill, capture, disarm Hamas one area at a time while other forces create bubbles of stability for ever increasing size of the population.”
His reading treats Mashal’s rejectionist stance as a scenario the plan anticipated — in which international forces and local partners begin implementing Trump’s framework in “terror-free” zones while Israeli forces keep pressure on remaining Hamas strongholds.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, has signaled that while he is prepared to “give an international force a chance,” he does not believe the ISF will be capable of handling the most difficult tasks in Gaza on its own.
“Our friends in America want to set up an international force to do the work,” he told a conference of Israeli ambassadors in Jerusalem, according to Israel’s Ynet news site. “I said, ‘Please, are there volunteers? Go ahead.’ We know there are certain tasks this force can do, but not everything — perhaps not even the main tasks.”
Netanyahu said that in the “second phase, we move toward disarmament and demilitarization,” and vowed that Israel would not allow Hamas to reconstitute itself, even if that means Israel — rather than the ISF — ultimately has to carry out the core mission.
He also echoed language he used standing alongside Trump at the White House when the Gaza peace plan was first unveiled, after the president said that if Hamas refused to accept the terms, Netanyahu would have the freedom to “do what you have to do.”
“This can be done the easy way, or it can be done the hard way,” Netanyahu said at that earlier joint press conference. “But it will be done. We prefer the easy way.”
On Sunday, Netanyahu told reporters at a joint press conference with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz that the second phase of Trump’s plan was “close,” and said he would meet President Trump later this month to discuss how to complete Hamas’s disarmament, deploy the multinational force, and bring an end to Hamas rule in Gaza.
Netanyahu noted that talks on the next stage are already underway and that the first phase — including Hamas’s release of all 20 living hostages and 27 bodies in exchange for roughly 2,000 Palestinian detainees — is almost complete, with only the remains of one slain Israeli hostage still in Gaza.
Taken together, Mashal’s Istanbul address and Naim’s Doha comments show that Hamas’s leadership continues to frame its strategy around “armed resistance” and a long struggle, even as some officials test language about “freezing or storing” weapons over a multi-year truce.
Mashal, one of the movement’s most prominent figures, used the Istanbul stage to restate core positions — including opposition to disarmament, insistence on Hamas’s continued role, and the goal of eventually “removing” Israel — in front of an Arabic-speaking audience and without the qualifiers sometimes heard in English-language messaging.
Analysts like Bar and watchdogs such as HonestReporting have pointed to the contrast between those statements and the way some Western coverage has focused on more cautious remarks by other Hamas officials, arguing that Mashal’s address offers a direct look at how Hamas views the ceasefire and the Trump plan.
At the same time, international diplomacy is now converging on Phase Two, with Trump, Netanyahu, and Arab and European leaders debating how much the plan can realistically achieve if senior Hamas leaders abroad are openly rejecting its disarmament and international-oversight provisions.
While Mashal told supporters that “the battle is not over” and that weapons remain “our honor and glory,” Israel’s prime minister is preparing to sit down with the U.S. president to try to turn Hamas’s arsenal into the centerpiece of Gaza’s next disarmament phase.
