Netanyahu Rejects Trump’s Gaza Plan: No Withdrawal Until Hamas Gives Up ‘All Weaponry’

Netanyahu just told the White House, in so many words, that its own peace plan isn't good enough. Not tweaked, not modified. Rejected. That's a remarkable thing to watch happen to a document Trump spent months and considerable political capital assembling, and it says a lot about how much daylight actually exists between Washington's version of "winning" in Gaza and Jerusalem's.

The disagreement isn't cosmetic. Trump's framework envisions a phased Israeli withdrawal as part of a broader deal. Netanyahu is saying no troops move until Hamas has zero weapons, full stop. Those are two different wars with two different endings. One assumes you can manage Hamas down to irrelevance through a negotiated process. The other assumes you don't leave until the threat is physically gone, because anything less just resets the clock until the next October 7th.

We get why Israel doesn't want to bet its security on promises. Hamas has broken every ceasefire it's ever signed, and Netanyahu knows better than anyone in Washington what "phased withdrawal" looked like the last time Israel tried it. Skepticism there isn't unreasonable.

But an American president can't broker peace if the party doing the fighting on the ground treats his plan as an opening bid rather than an agreement. Trump put real weight behind this. If Netanyahu wants a different outcome, the honest move is to say so plainly and negotiate the terms, not announce from the cabinet table that the American plan simply doesn't count.