July 07, 2026
As part of the U.S.-backed “Board
of Peace” 20-point plan to end Israel’s military assault
on Gaza, Hamas is dissolving its civilian governing body in
the Gaza Strip. Hamas’s head of administration, Mohammed
al-Farra, resigned from his position on Monday. Hamas, which
has controlled the territory for nearly two decades, has
said that its ministries and staff will stay in place, and
that it will still oversee security and policing in parts of
Gaza left under its control.
The National Committee
for the Administration of Gaza, NCAG, was formed in January
2026 and is meant to take transitional control. “In
practice,” says Amjad Iraqi, senior Israel-Palestine
analyst at the International Crisis Group, “Hamas is still
the de facto governing authority on the
Palestinian-populated side of Gaza. The NCAG, the
Palestinian technocratic committee that’s supposed to take
over those governing duties, is still basically stuck in
Cairo and not allowed to enter into Gaza to assume those
duties.”
Since the deal was signed in October,
Israel has continued to uphold its blockade of Gaza,
preventing people and aid from traveling through its heavily
policed borders. It has also violated the deal’s ceasefire
provisions on a near-daily basis, killing nearly 1,100
Palestinians, including women, children and other unarmed
civilians. “Very little of this, if any, is actually being
called out either by [Board of Peace High Representative for
Gaza Nickolay Mladenov] or by the U.S. officials, and what
they’re actually doing is allowing Israel to keep bending
the terms of the ceasefire, if not openly violating it,”
says Iraqi.
Transcript
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This is a rush
transcript. Copy may not be in its final
form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is
Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman,
with Juan González.
In other news from Gaza, Hamas
has announced it will dissolve its civilian governing body
in the Gaza Strip and will hand over power to an interim
Palestinian administration overseen by President Trump’s
Board of Peace. The establishment of the technocratic
National Committee for the Administration of Gaza is part of
the U.S.-backed 20-point plan to end Israel’s assault on
Gaza. Israel agreed to the deal last October, has since
violated it on a near-daily basis, killing nearly 1,100
Palestinians. Hamas has said its ministries and staff would
stay in place, and it would still oversee security and
policing in parts of Gaza left under its control following
this U.S.-brokered truce.
For more on the significance
of this political move in Gaza, we’re joined from London
by Amjad Iraqi, senior Israel-Palestine analyst at the
International Crisis Group.
Can you talk about the
significance of what has taken place, Amjad? Mohammed
al-Farra, the head of the Hamas administration, has
resigned. What does this mean? What does all of this mean in
this so-called technocratic group taking over of
Palestinians from — is it the Palestinian
Authority?
AMJAD IRAQI: Thanks for
having me, Amy.
So, in practice, what this
announcement does, at the moment does very little. In
practice, Hamas is still the de facto governing
authority on the Palestinian-populated side of Gaza. The
NCAG, the Palestinian technocratic committee that’s
supposed to take over those governing duties, is still
basically stuck in Cairo and not allowed to enter into Gaza
to assume those duties. And even if the NCAG did enter Gaza,
the conditions are not ripe for any of these governing
institutions to properly function. Israel is still
maintaining a very serious blockade. It is not allowing
sufficient aid to come in. As we heard from the previous
segment, everything from hospitals to clinics to basic goods
and services are still very short, and people are still
suffering.
With that said, what this announcement does
actually sends a very important political signal from Hamas
to, first of all, the United States, as the head of the
Board of Peace and as the main sort of broker of the
ceasefire deal, to signal Hamas’s commitment to the
ceasefire deal and trying to move it forward as much as
possible. And tied with that is that the Hamas is trying to
counter an Israeli claim that Hamas is not interested in
seeing the truce upheld, that it is not interested in giving
up power, even though Hamas officials have said for months
now that they are ready to hand over all those duties. So
far, we’ve seen a tepid response from the Board of Peace
and from the United States, but we’ll probably see in the
coming days whether this at least gesture to begin that
process will actually unfold.
JUAN
GONZÁLEZ: And, Amjad, no matter who administers
Gaza, the key issue is who holds armed power in Gaza. Is
there any indication that Hamas would disarm, something the
ceasefire called for?
AMJAD IRAQI:
So, for months, we’ve known that the regional mediators
have actually come towards a sort of general framework
that’s trying to divide the question of weapons into what
they call heavy weapons versus light weapons. So, we’re
talking about heavy weapons in terms of rockets, RPGs, and
the smaller weapons being firearms that are quite pervasive
across the strip. And the mediator saw this as a framework
that can actually move the decommissioning or disarmament
question forward. The problem is that Israel has actually
maintained a very maximalist position, where even Prime
Minister Netanyahu has said that, as far as he’s
concerned, disarmament even goes as far as those firearms,
as the AK-47. And so, you’re having a major clash with
this.
And the Board of Peace, including Nickolay
Mladenov, who is the, quote-unquote, “high representative
for Gaza” under the Board of Peace, is supposed to be
trying to sort of negotiate or mediate a process within
those talks. But what we’ve actually heard is that
Mladenov is mostly presenting a much more Israeli position
about what that disarmament should look like, which Hamas
and other Palestinian factions have pushed back on. So, the
issue is not necessarily that there’s an absence of a
framework, but there are still huge political divergences,
and that the Board of Peace is still rather skewed in how it
sees that disarmament question moving
forward.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And how has
the Board of Peace addressed the continued attacks, Israeli
attacks, where more than a thousand Palestinians have been
killed since the ceasefire was declared?
AMJAD
IRAQI: This is clearly one of the blatant blind
spots of the Board of Peace. I mean, the Palestinian
authorities on the ground have recorded hundreds, if not
thousands, of violations of the ceasefire terms. We’ve had
over a thousand Palestinians killed since the truce was
supposed to have gone into effect, and not to mention the
fact that Israel, which was supposed to withdraw to a
demarcation that would control about 53% of the Gaza Strip,
has actually pushed that forward to between 65 and 70%. And
Prime Minister Netanyahu himself has made it quite clear
that he himself has been directing this. But we’ve also
seen that movement precisely on the ground.
Very
little of this, if any, is actually being called out either
by Mr. Mladenov or by the U.S. officials. And what they’re
actually doing is allowing Israel to keep bending the terms
of the ceasefire, if not openly violating it, and such that
they’re recarving the Gaza Strip in such a way as to
entrench their presence rather than to withdraw. And so, the
ceasefire terms itself, while it has certainly lessened the
pace of the violence that we saw last year, the current
conditions are — have now put about 2 million Palestinians
in a humanitarian purgatory, where their fate and their
lives, their access to food and to clean water and other
basic needs are being held hostage at the moment to the
question around disarmament and around guns in the Gaza
Strip. And major pressure needs to be pushed onto Israel,
onto the United States in order to flip those kind of
priorities.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re
going to have to leave it there, Amjad Iraqi, senior
Israel-Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group,
speaking to us from London.
That does it for our show.
I’ll be in Kansas
City on July 17th and 18th. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan
González.
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