JERUSALEM – An unnamed senior Israeli official said on Friday that Israel would not withdraw from Gaza until it had determined, by its own standard, that Hamas had genuinely disarmed; analysts say that condition was deliberately structured to ensure no exit would ever be required.
The statement came as three experts on Israeli domestic politics published assessments concluding that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cannot withdraw from Gaza without ending his government. Asked directly by Al Jazeera whether Israel was genuinely ready to exit, each of the three said, in different terms, no.
Nimrod Goren, a senior fellow at the Mitvim Institute, was explicit. “He’ll make sure Trump gets his announcement, his signing ceremony and all the optics are in place, but I don’t see him withdrawing from Gaza,” Goren said. Netanyahu’s worldview makes any genuine exit nearly inconceivable, he added: “It goes against his whole philosophy, ideology and worldview: that Israel needs to be present beyond its borders.”
The condition Israel set on Friday, that it alone will judge when Hamas has been “genuinely disarmed,” is designed to be indefinitely deferrable. No external verifier, no third-party body, no UN framework enters the definition. Israel will decide when the threshold is met, meaning withdrawal requires no deadline and no specific military benchmark that could be verified or enforced by any outside authority.
Dahlia Scheindlin, a US-Israeli pollster and political consultant, framed Netanyahu’s calculations in terms of survival rather than policy. “Netanyahu’s considerations have nothing to do with public trauma,” she said. “Everything to do with politics.” The most likely outcome, she suggested, would be “very symbolic moving” of Israeli forces to positions held before the most recent phase of fighting, a repositioning that could be labeled withdrawal in Washington while preserving Israeli operational presence throughout Gaza.
Netanyahu’s political position is constrained from multiple directions simultaneously. His far-right coalition partners, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, have made explicit that they will collapse the government if the war ends without Hamas’s total defeat. Israel’s October elections are approaching with the opposition leading in polls. And Netanyahu, against whom the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for crimes against humanity in connection with the genocide in Gaza, also faces a domestic criminal corruption conviction that could mean a prison sentence, making continued government service a personal survival imperative.
Dov Waxman, a professor at UCLA’s Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, laid out the geometry of Netanyahu’s bind. “Netanyahu already faces an uphill battle in forming any government, more so if he agrees to this,” Waxman said. He must be hoping Trump will deliver him “some kind of present during the election cycle,” Waxman observed, suggesting Netanyahu’s current posture is as much about managing the timeline of a US political favor as any genuine assessment of Hamas’s military capacity.
Meanwhile, Israel has continued killing Palestinians throughout the diplomatic process. Since violating the October 2025 ceasefire agreement, more than 1,200 Palestinians have been killed and Israeli forces have repeatedly expanded their controlled territory. The genocide of Palestinians in Gaza has continued through every phase of the negotiations the Trump administration has described as progress.
The 82 percent figure, the share of Jewish Israeli poll respondents who support the forcible expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, provides the electoral backdrop against which Netanyahu reads every statement about withdrawal. A leader who agreed to end the war, withdrew forces, and allowed Palestinian civilian life to return would be running against that 82 percent in an October election against an opposition that has not challenged the war on moral grounds.
The Trump administration has treated the Hamas disarmament deal announced Thursday as a diplomatic achievement and pushed both sides toward implementation. What it has not resolved is the definitional question at the center of Israel’s stated condition: what constitutes “genuine disarmament,” when Israel defines it, verifies it, and retains authority to declare it incomplete at any point of its choosing.
For Palestinians still in Gaza, the gap between a deal’s signing and any actual withdrawal remains the operative fact of daily life. The ceasefire Israel agreed to in October was violated within weeks. Israel’s formal objections to the US-proposed framework placed the same pattern of conditional acceptance on the record before this latest announcement. Each diplomatic declaration since has been framed in Washington as progress; none has yet produced a day when Israeli forces left a populated area and did not return.
Whether Netanyahu eventually faces American pressure that forces a genuine withdrawal is the unknown this analysis cannot resolve. What the three analysts consulted by Al Jazeera agreed on uniformly is that the political incentives currently point in the opposite direction, and that the condition Israel set on Friday was drafted with that arithmetic in mind.
