Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flatly rejected President Trump's 15-point plan to disarm Hamas, a move that prompted the terror group to call on Washington to force Israel back to the negotiating table.

Netanyahu made the announcement at a weekend cabinet meeting, declaring in blunt terms that Israel will not pull its forces from Gaza until Hamas surrenders its weapons for real. The New York Post reported that the Israeli prime minister told his cabinet, "I want to be precise here: Israel rejects the 15-point document."

The rejection lands squarely on a deal Trump's Board of Peace brokered last month, when the president announced that Hamas had agreed to terms for disarmament in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Trump called the agreement a breakthrough. Netanyahu, from the start, called it suspect.

Netanyahu drew a line Trump's deal tried to erase

The Israeli prime minister did not stop at rejecting the 15-point document. He went further, ruling out any Palestinian state on his watch. "As long as I am prime minister, no Palestinian state will be established, not in Gaza and not in the West Bank," Netanyahu said at the same cabinet meeting.

He acknowledged ongoing discussions with Washington but made clear he would not bend. "We are now discussing this with the Americans," Netanyahu said. "They have ideas, some of which are acceptable to us and some are not, and we know how to stand up to those things."

By Sunday, Netanyahu sharpened his tone even more. "Contrary to all those who preach to us, we do what must be done for Israel's security and we can and will stand our ground even against our best friends when necessary," he said, a pointed reference to Washington.

Israel currently has forces deployed across more than half of the Gaza Strip, including its eastern and southern sectors. Some members of Netanyahu's own cabinet have pushed to expand that footprint, not shrink it. The 15-point plan, by contrast, envisions Israel pulling back, a nonstarter for a government that views a premature withdrawal as an invitation for Hamas to regroup.

An Israeli government spokesman laid out that fear in stark terms. Doron Spielman, a spokesman for Netanyahu, warned the White House that "if we redeploy before Hamas is truly disarmed, it will quickly expand its presence throughout Gaza, rebuild its terrorist infrastructure, once again threaten Israeli communities, and seek to carry out another Oct. 7-style attack."

Hamas wants Washington to do its bidding

Within hours of Netanyahu's rejection, Hamas responded, not with a counteroffer, but with a demand that the United States lean on Israel. Bassem Naim, a member of Hamas's politburo, posted on X:

"We expect the mediators and the American guarantor to pressure Netanyahu and his government to adhere to the roadmap and not obstruct the process for internal political and electoral reasons."

The statement is worth reading twice. A designated terror group that has refused to lay down its weapons is now asking the American president to pressure a democratic ally into accepting terms Hamas itself has historically rejected. The dynamic is telling: Hamas accepted the 15-point framework because it extracted concessions from Israel without requiring Hamas to prove anything first.

Naim's accusation, that Netanyahu is blocking peace for "electoral reasons", carries a grain of political reality. Netanyahu faces an election in October, and his coalition is struggling in the polls. But framing Israel's security objections as mere electioneering ignores the substance of those objections entirely. Israel's concern is not about ballot boxes. It is about whether a withdrawal hands Gaza back to the same organization that carried out the October 7 massacre.

The tensions between Trump and Netanyahu over Middle East strategy are not new. The two leaders have clashed repeatedly over the pace and terms of regional peace efforts, even as both sides insist the alliance remains strong.

Trump's 20-point plan set the stage, and the trap

The 15-point disarmament proposal that Netanyahu rejected grew out of a broader 20-point Gaza peace plan Trump's administration unveiled last October. That overarching framework laid out three phases: a cease-fire paired with humanitarian support, followed by demilitarization and reconstruction, and finally recognition of a Palestinian state.

The plan required Hamas to disarm and release all 48 remaining hostages within 72 hours of a cease-fire. In return, Israel would free 250 Palestinians serving life sentences and 1,700 detained Gazans. Gaza would fall under international control overseen by a "Board of Peace" chaired by Trump, with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair also involved. AP News reported that Netanyahu threw his support behind the 20-point plan after White House talks, but that support came with conditions Israel has never abandoned: Hamas must actually disarm first.

Skeptics warned from the beginning that the multi-phase structure was a recipe for failure. National Review's Noah Rothman wrote bluntly: "As a rule of thumb, it's wise to assume that multistage peace deals with Islamist terrorist organizations will not progress much beyond stage 1."

That skepticism looks well-founded now. The 15-point plan that followed, the one Netanyahu just rejected, was supposed to move the process into phase two. Instead, it exposed a gap between what Trump's negotiators promised and what Israel is willing to accept on the ground.

The broader question of how Trump handles competing pressures from allies and adversaries in the region has drawn attention from voices across the political spectrum. Some commentators have questioned whether the administration's Middle East posture could carry political costs at home.

Hamas's disarmament promises have a shelf life measured in days

The fundamental problem with the 15-point plan, and the reason Netanyahu's rejection carries weight beyond political theater, is that Hamas has never shown any genuine willingness to disarm. The group's own leaders have said so, publicly and repeatedly.

Last December, Hamas leader Khaled Mashal delivered a keynote address at a conference in Istanbul in which he declared that "the resistance project and its weapons must be protected. It is the right of our people to defend themselves." He added that "the battle is not over." Israel's Foreign Ministry responded that Hamas was "making a mockery of President Trump's peace plan" and that Mashal had made clear Hamas has "no intention of disarming, giving up its weapons, its rule, or its path."

Even within Hamas, the signals have been contradictory. Bassem Naim, the same official now demanding the U.S. pressure Israel, previously told the Associated Press that Hamas was "very open minded" to potentially "freezing or storing" weapons for five to ten years as part of a long-term truce. Storing weapons is not disarming. It is parking an arsenal and waiting.

The 15-point plan itself contained a provision that troubled Israeli security officials: it gave the interim Gaza government authority over personal weapons like rifles, requiring only that heavy weapons be placed in storage. For Israel, that distinction is meaningless. A rifle in Hamas's hands is not a personal firearm. It is a tool of terror.

Netanyahu's trip to Washington last month, officially to attend the funeral of the late Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, included meetings with both Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Even then, Netanyahu voiced skepticism about the sincerity of any Hamas commitment to disarm.

The relationship between the Trump administration and Israel involves multiple pressure points beyond Gaza. Trump's decision to strike Iranian targets and declare the Iran deal dead added another layer of complexity to an already volatile regional picture.

Washington brokered a deal one side accepted and the other cannot

The core tension is structural, not personal. Trump's Board of Peace negotiated a framework Hamas accepted precisely because it front-loaded Israeli concessions, withdrawal, interim governance, limits on military operations, while back-loading Hamas's obligations. Disarmament, the hardest ask, was pushed into later phases that may never arrive.

Netanyahu's rejection forces a choice the administration has so far avoided. Either Washington pressures its closest Middle East ally to accept terms that Israeli security officials say will lead to another massacre, or it acknowledges that Hamas's acceptance of the deal was never the hard part. Getting Israel to trust a terror group's word, that was always the obstacle no document could solve.

Hamas conditioned its agreement on Israel committing to pull forces back to what the 20-point plan calls the "yellow line" and ceasing all strikes in Gaza. The specific geographic boundary of that line remains undefined in public reporting. Israel, meanwhile, controls more than half of the strip and shows no interest in giving ground.

Earlier in the conflict, Israeli hard-liners including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Ben Gvir, whose support Netanyahu needs to hold his coalition together, urged the prime minister to reject even partial deals. Smotrich warned against "stopping in the middle with a partial deal that abandons half of the hostages and that could lead to the suspension of the war in defeat."

Trump himself sent mixed signals during that earlier phase. He posted on Truth Social that hostages would only be released "when Hamas is confronted and destroyed," adding, "The sooner this takes place, the better the chances of success will be." That position, Hamas must be destroyed, not negotiated with, sits uneasily beside a 15-point plan that treats Hamas as a negotiating partner capable of good faith.

The dynamic between Trump and Netanyahu has always involved a mix of public solidarity and private friction. This episode fits the pattern: both leaders want credit for pursuing peace, but neither is willing to accept the other's terms for what peace requires.

Open questions the plan's architects have not answered

Several critical details remain unresolved. The full contents of the 15-point document have not been made public. Which of the American proposals Netanyahu considers "acceptable" and which he does not remains unclear. The composition of the Board of Peace beyond Trump's chairmanship has not been fully disclosed. And no public response from Trump or the Board of Peace to Netanyahu's rejection has surfaced.

The October election looms over everything. Netanyahu's coalition is struggling, and his rivals will use any perceived concession on Gaza against him. But reducing his rejection to electoral calculation, as Hamas's Naim did, misses the point. Israel's security establishment has raised the same objections Netanyahu voiced, not because of polls, but because of what happened on October 7 and what could happen again.

When a terror group that has never honored a commitment demands that the United States force its ally to trust that commitment, the problem is not the ally's stubbornness. The problem is the commitment.