Donald Trump’s Board of Peace published a 15-point roadmap for Gaza in late July in which Hamas would hand its weapons to a committee of Palestinian technocrats, certified by an international verification body, and Israel would withdraw from the strip in phases. After Israel officially rejected the plan on August 9, US envoy Jared Kushner flew to the Egyptian coast to meet Hamas representatives. From there, he travelled to Jerusalem where it was proposed the weapons would instead be handed over under the supervision of an American general.
This change to the disarmament process is a clear illustration of what has gone wrong with each agreement reached over Gaza since January 2025: none have established, in advance, who certifies compliance. The University of Edinburgh’s Peace Agreement Database and Dataset recorded four agreements related to the Gaza ceasefire process in 2025. They include a ceasefire agreement in January, a run of ceasefire and related agreements in October and a UN resolution in November.
These agreements addressed things such as the exchange of hostages and prisoners, and created a transitional authority for the Gaza Strip. But they did not build the machinery that decides what counts as a breach, who adjudicates in case of disputes and how the process resumes once a breach has been found. The January 2025 deal contained the most detailed provisions of the four agreements.
Its published text named the number of hostages and prisoners for exchange, the corridors through which Israeli troops would leave Gaza and the sequence in which displaced families could return home. What it did not do is say what holding the parties to it would involve. The guarantors – the US, Egypt and Qatar – were asked only to work towards continued negotiation.
A follow-up mechanism was announced by Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim al-Thani, alongside the deal rather than written into it. Guarantors were given the ability to log issues, but not enforce the agreement. This gap showed when the first phase of the deal ended on March 1 with the second phase in limbo and, on March 18, Israel resumed its bombing campaign.
The two October 2025 agreements sought to get the process back on track under renegotiated terms. The October 10 agreement looked to address the lack of an enforcement mechanism in the January deal. A centre run from Israel by US Central Command, the arm of the American military responsible for the Middle East, was created to coordinate aid and monitor the ceasefire.
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