The roadmap calls for Israeli and Hamas forces to stop military operations immediately while an implementation plan is finalized within 14 days. After that, a new body called the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza — a technocratic Palestinian committee, not Hamas — is supposed to take over government institutions, police, weapons licensing, and internal security.

An International Verification Committee, made up of Board of Peace representatives, guarantor states, and a not-yet-deployed International Stabilization Force, is supposed to certify that each side has done its part before the next phase starts. Hamas gives up weapons in a given area; the committee verifies it; Israel withdraws from that area; the new committee moves in. Repeat, zone by zone. The weapons go into storage under the new committee, not destroyed outright. Washington’s own preliminary estimate for the full process: seven to eight months. Morocco has signed on to help train the new Palestinian police force. Indonesia is a possible contributor to the stabilization force.

It is more detailed, on paper, than any earlier phase of this ceasefire. It also depends entirely on two parties who don’t trust each other to go first.

Trump unveiled his 20-point Gaza plan on September 29, 2025. Israel’s cabinet approved a ceasefire built on it ten days later. Under phase one, hostages held in Gaza — living and dead — came home within days, and Israel released hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in exchange. Israeli forces pulled back to a line covering roughly 53% of Gaza, with two further withdrawals, to 40% and then 15%, built into the plan’s later stages. On November 18, the UN Security Council authorized the International Stabilization Force the new roadmap now leans on.

Phase one is the backdrop the new roadmap is being judged against. Phase two is supposed to be the part where Gaza stops being run by the group that started the war.

An Israeli official told Reuters there will be no troop withdrawal until Hamas undergoes what the official called “genuine disarmament.” A second Israeli official went further, calling Hamas’s complete disarmament and the total demilitarization of Gaza preconditions for any pullback — not steps that happen alongside it.

Hamas negotiator Ghazi Hamad called the roadmap “difficult and painful” but said the group won’t begin disarming until Israel ends military operations, increases humanitarian aid, and fully withdraws. American officials have separately acknowledged that Israel remains “very skeptical” Hamas will give up its weapons at all.

Both sides signed a document built on gradual, zone-by-zone trust. Both are publicly describing that trust as something the other side has to earn first.

While the roadmap was being finalized, the IDF reported 32 separate strikes or operations in Gaza between July 10 and July 31 — mostly targeted killings of named Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad figures the military links to the October 7, 2023 attack, along with the destruction of weapons-production sites, one of them inside a mosque. Gaza health officials, tracking casualties since the original October 2025 ceasefire, count well over a thousand Palestinians killed by Israeli strikes in the months since. Neither figure comes from an independent source — the IDF is counting its own operations, Gaza’s count comes from the territory’s health ministry — but both sides are, in effect, agreeing that the fighting this ceasefire was supposed to end hasn’t fully stopped.

That pattern continued into this week. Jared Kushner has reportedly been working to get Israel to pause strikes as the disarmament process begins; a senior Israeli minister said as of August 2 that no such agreement exists. Strikes over the August 1–2 weekend killed at least nine people in Gaza, according to Israeli officials — a reminder that “roadmap” and “ceasefire” are, right now, two different documents.

Supporters point first to the track record: phase one of this same plan returned every living hostage and ended five months of open war — outcomes they say no earlier framework in this conflict achieved. Republican Study Committee Chairman August Pfluger praised the deal as a historic achievement and likened it to the Abraham Accords, framing it as the kind of breakthrough only this administration has managed to broker.

The roadmap itself is also more specific than what came before it. It names a governing body, a verification process, and a timeline instead of leaving “then what” to be worked out later. It has international buy-in beyond the usual U.S.-Israel-Hamas triangle — Morocco training police, Indonesia weighing a troop contribution — spreading both the cost and the credibility of enforcement across more than one government. A plan with named mechanisms and outside guarantors, on this reading, has a real shot at outlasting the next news cycle in a way a handshake wouldn’t.

Skeptics start with timing: Israel’s government said the roadmap didn’t meet its own bar within hours of Hamas accepting it — one of the two parties required to execute the plan publicly distancing itself from it before the ink dried. This administration has set this precedent before: Trump declared the separate Iran conflict over in June, then notified Congress hostilities had resumed within a month.

The deeper problem is structural. A plan that requires each side to move only after the other has already moved tends to stall rather than progress, absent someone with the power to force the first move — and nothing in the roadmap identifies who that is. The numbers back the skepticism: 32 Israeli strikes in three weeks, well over a thousand Palestinians killed since the “ceasefire” began, and a senior Israeli minister publicly denying any strike-pause agreement as recently as August 2. Skeptics note that a document can specify fifteen points; it can’t make either side trust the other’s paperwork.