The events since the publication of United States President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan on September 29, 2025 point to a process that risks hardening into a partition of Gaza. Israel must prevent this bloody outcome at all costs and insist that Hamas be disarmed—as stipulated by the agreement— as a precondition for establishing local governance and rehabilitating Gaza.

The Oslo process three decades ago attempted to settle the conflict by dividing the Land of Israel between Israelis and Palestinians. Some Israelis expected that division to produce two states; others believed the Palestinian entity should be “less than a state.” In retrospect, instead of a division between two peoples—Israeli and Palestinian—the process and its consequences produced an internal Palestinian division between two “governments” hostile to one another: Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria.

President Trump, whose plan is far more ambitious than the Oslo process, repeatedly emphasizes that Gaza and the Hamas problem are small components standing in the way of a far broader vision of Middle Eastern peace. However that vision may well yield an volatile and explosive outcome and not the calm it seeks to bring about. That outcome is partition of Gaza between Israel and Hamas—a bloody result that is the furtherst thing imaginable from a vision of peace.

Israel must do everything in its power to prevent such an outcome.

Three factors that could lead to the Strip’s de facto partition:

The most important is that no country is willing to shoulder the task of disarming Hamas in any international constellation—and that is the basic condition for stabilizing and shaping the area. In a BBC interview, King Abdullah II of Jordan categorically rejected the possibility that Jordanian or other forces would “enforce” peace between the sides. What, then, might they be willing to do? They will likely settle for “peacekeeping” and not “peace enforcing.” In the King’s words, “to help the local, Palestinian police that Jordan and Egypt are willing to train in substantial numbers.” Even accomplishing that task, he added, “will take time.”

It is important to note that the “imposition of peace” between the two sides, which the king rejected, speaking for all the countries that will possibly be involved, is far removed from active military operations to disarm Hamas—that is, the elimination of any possibility that Hamas will be a political or military actor in Gaza’s future. Repeated statements from Egypt and Saudi Arabia lend weight to the king’s assessment that “parading patrols through Gaza with weapons is not a situation any country would be willing to be involved in,” let alone dismantling Hamas’s weapons.

In this situation, it is clear that only the IDF will be able, over time, to disarm Hamas and neutralize it as a political factor.

The second reason we may see a de facto partitioning of Gaza relates to Trump’s decisions—will the president be satisfied with a bloody cease-fire, or will he seek to recreate Gaza as a stable, prosperous zone? To the extent that he preserves the cease-fire, despite Hamas’s blatant violations, he will entrench a reality of Hamas rule and the bloody partition of Gaza between the IDF, which holds roughly half the territory, and Hamas, which controls the western part of Gaza except for the southern and northern edges and rules the vast majority of the population. So long as Hamas’s military power is not eliminated, the structures planned under Trump’s plan—the technocratic Palestinian administrative committee, the international stabilization force meant to oversee dismantling of its weapons, and even the international supervisory headquarters to be headed by Trump himself—will merely serve to entrench the partition. Clearly, those mechanisms will focus on the area controlled by Hamas, not on the territory under IDF control.

The deep enmity between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (PA) also increases the likelihood that the partition will become entrenched. The PA vehemently opposes even any sign of partition. Accordingly, in meetings between the factions in Cairo to staff the technocratic administrative committee, the Fatah representative—an official of the PA—conditioned his agreement to staffing the committee on its being chaired by the Palestinian Authority prime minister or another senior Authority official. Hamas did not make do with an outright refusal of the proposal; it approved, with the majority of the other factions, a slate of candidates the bulk of which it had proposed. PA spokesmen accused Hamas of taking the decision after the Cairo talks had ended and after the Fatah representative had left the city.

Once again, Hamas demonstrates—as it has throughout eighteen years of reconciliation attempts with the PA—that it seeks exclusive control of Gaza based on military power, not only to continue “resistance” against Israel but also to prevent any possibility of PA control over the Strip out of fear that the Authority will retaliate against Hamas for what the group did to its personnel when its seized control of Gaza from the PA in 2007. In other words, an intra-Palestinian dynamic combines with external factors—such as decisions by President Trump—to entrench a reality of partition.

Israel fears that given the constraints described above it will have to manage the Strip’s population should it be forced to act militarily to remove Hamas from power and disarm it. Some Israelis—eager to avoid having to change the emerging reality by force—would welcome partition as an end to the war, prefering to focus on expanding the Abraham Accords and on social, military, and economic rehabilitation. Nevertheless, Israel must oppose de facto partition of the Strip along the “yellow line.” Partition would mean a low-intensity, bloody war accompanied by Hamas’s rearmament and strengthening of other factions, which in the end would bring about an even larger and bloodier confrontation in which Israel would be forced to conquer Gaza at a far higher cost in IDF casualties and enormous economic expenditures.

To prevent this, Israel must condition the move to the phase of creating governing and oversight structures—and above all the rehabilitation of Gaza—on the disarmament of Hamas; absent such a step, Israel must reserve the right to continue the war until the task is completed.

JISS Policy Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family.