A Hamas delegation led by Khalil Al-Hayya, including Ghazi Hamad, Zaher Jabarin, and Hossam Badran, arrived in Cairo on Wednesday evening for talks with officials handling mediation efforts and, for the first time, with senior Gaza envoy Nikolai Mladenov, a movement official told Al Manassa.
The delegation is scheduled to meet Palestinian faction representatives on Thursday, including the Popular Front, the Democratic Front, and Islamic Jihad, as well as a representative of the Reform Current, to discuss a final response to a proposal presented by Mladenov on disarming the resistance and completing the second phase of the ceasefire agreement, the Hamas official said, requesting anonymity.
The proposal is part of Trump’s plan, which Israel and Hamas reached preliminary agreement on in October last year, and calls for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the start of reconstruction in exchange for the movement’s disarmament.
The “Board of Peace” headed by US President Donald Trump previously submitted a written proposal to Hamas that included a mechanism for disarming the resistance of all heavy and light weapons in exchange for granting amnesty to some of its members.
The Hamas source said “pressure is being exerted” on mediators by prominent members of Trump’s Board of Peace to push the movement to accept the proposal in its current form, stressing that Hamas has already settled its position on the plan.
According to the source, the meeting with Mladenov also covered the entry of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip and enabling the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) to begin its work, amid continuing Israeli refusal to allow its members in so far.
A senior official in Hamas’s political bureau had previously told Al Manassa that the proposal received by the movement was met with outright rejection, but that Hamas would not respond with a direct refusal.
A source from NCAG told Al Manassa it was waiting for the outcome of the meeting between the Hamas delegation and Mladenov to determine whether the committee would be able to enter the territory and begin operating. The source said all efforts so far had failed to pressure the Israeli side and compel it to allow the committee to take up its duties from inside Gaza.
The plan sets an eight-month timeline beginning with NCAG assuming responsibility for security in the territory and ending with the full withdrawal of Israeli forces once there is “final verification that Gaza is free of weapons.”
