You can negotiate the weapons out of a moment. You cannot negotiate Palestine out of history.
Many were baffled when Hamas agreed to a framework for disarmament.
Even despondent.
After everything Gaza had endured, is this the end? Had nearly three years of genocide and destruction[1] finally exhausted not merely Hamas, but the fundamental Palestinian capacity to resist?
It was only when the question was viewed from inside Gaza itself that the calculation began to look very different. And Al Jazeera’s extraordinary new documentary on the Commander of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Mohammed Deif has since made that explanation much harder to dismiss.
To understand why the Palestinian resistance might now contemplate giving up its weapons, we have to truly fathom the intentions behind October 7th.
October 7 was not conceived as just ‘another round’
Al Jazeera’s Ma Khafi A‘zam has now published internal documents, recordings and previously unseen footage from the circle around Mohammed Deif.
One document records a February 11, 2023 meeting involving Deif, Yahya Sinwar, Marwan Issa and Mohammed Sinwar. The proposed operation was then called “Project Fahd.”
The document says preparations had reached roughly 70 percent readiness and, remarkably, included a provision to cancel the operation if Zionist actions at Al-Aqsa and against Palestinian hostages changed.
On October 5, after a six-hour military leadership meeting, Deif signed the final operations order setting zero hour for 6:30am on October 7.[2]
Whatever people say about October 7, this was definitely not a makeshift border raid.
It was the culmination of years of military development: tunnels, specialised units, intelligence gathering, anti-armour capabilities, command structures and extraordinarily tight operational secrecy, built in reaction to decades of colonial domination, brutality and strangulation.
The new footage of Deif examining a life-size Merkava model is almost a visual summary of that mentality: study the stronger enemy obsessively until you find the points at which their apparent invincibility breaks down.
Most notably, behind October 7th was a strategic horizon that was determined ideal.
A peer-reviewed study published this year, drawing partly on Hamas documents seized during the war, argues that Hamas had gradually come to believe that the regional balance had created a genuine opportunity not simply to hurt the colony, but to precipitate a much wider confrontation capable of threatening it fundamentally.
Hamas, the study argues, had become strategically tied to the regional “Axis of Resistance” and appears to have expected its own attack to ignite that wider infrastructure.
Other planning documents recovered after October 7 similarly describe a strategy for the complete liberation of Palestine extending far beyond the Gaza perimeter.[3]
But the accumulating evidence makes one thing increasingly difficult to believe:
that Gaza expected to fight the consequences, as it did, all alone.
For Several Hours, the Impossible Happened
The scale of the initial breakthrough explains why such expectations may not have seemed fantastical from inside the operation.
The occupation’s own military investigation estimated that between 5,000 and 5,600 attackers crossed the perimeter into occupied Palestine.
For almost ten hours, the ‘Israeli’ ‘Gaza Division’ was utterly defeated and overrun. Its command-and-control system collapsed, and the death of Southern Brigade commander Col. Asaf Hamami crippled the southern command structure.[4]
For the Palestinian resistance that had spent years confronting an overwhelmingly superior military through light skirmishes and primitive capabilities, this must have looked like confirmation of the wager. The colony was about to collapse.
And now came the second half of the calculation:
The Other Fronts… and the Rest of the Pro-Palestine World
And that is where everything changed.
Though Hezbollah’s fight with the occupation eventually widened dramatically, the immediate, overwhelming regional cascade that the Palestinian resistance had envisaged did not occur.
The West Bank did not become the decisive second front. Palestinian citizens of Israel did not rise en masse. Nor did the guerrilla forces envisaged from across the Jordanian border materialise.
And Gaza -tiny, besieged, strangled Gaza- was left to carry almost all of what followed.
Left to fight not merely the colony itself, but an entire colonial world order assembled around it: the governments that armed it, the industries that supplied it, the technology that enabled it, the financial systems that sustained it, the diplomatic machinery that shielded it, and the media apparatus that sanitised it.
A population sealed inside a strip of land was expected to withstand the whole world’s endless conveyor of the most technologically sophisticated military machines on earth.
No cavalry arrived.
No great front opened.
No army came over the horizon.
Gaza broke through the wall, and then discovered that beyond it stood not one enemy, but an entire international system.
And it stood there… all alone.
The scale of the abandonment defies language. Gaza was tiny; those who abandoned it were the world. And that great tragedy is necessary to understand the disarmament discussion.
As a friend once put it, Gaza was like a homeless man who had survived endless freezing nights, only to succumb to the cold on the night he was promised a warm blanket.
Three Years Later
And now consider the battlefield from that perspective.
Gaza has been devastated.
The resistance has been fundamentally degraded. Much of its senior leadership has been killed. Israel still controls roughly two-thirds of the Strip. Even under the ceasefire framework, Israeli strikes have continued.
Reuters reported in October that Gaza’s health authorities say more than 1,500 Palestinians have been killed since the October 2025 ceasefire began. The new governing and international security mechanisms promised for Gaza have not been deployed.[5]
This is the context in which Hamas agreed to what is routinely described as “disarmament.”
But the actual agreement is more complicated.
The framework provides for heavy weapons, production facilities, stockpiles and tunnels to be progressively inventoried, stored or decommissioned under the authority of a Palestinian National Committee.
The agreement explicitly says the weapons are not to be handed to Israel or another non-Palestinian party, and links the process to phased Israeli withdrawal and other commitments. Hamas has insisted that it will not implement its side unless Israel implements its own.
Ghazi Hamad put the reasoning as simply:
“For the sake of our people in the Gaza Strip, to save them from killing and displacement.”[6]
That sentence may explain more than pages of military analysis.
Seen this way, the calculation is brutal, but intelligible.
The so-called “heavy weapons” were accumulated for the zero hour, for the moment when the wall would break and the wider world was expected to awaken.
But the zero hour came, and the world remained asleep.
An unprecedented investment in liberation was therefore spent without producing the breakthrough upon which it had depended. In the immediate term, those weapons can simply no longer recreate that moment.
Worse, their continued possession was being invoked to justify the very opposite: continued killing, delayed withdrawal, blocked reconstruction and the indefinite suspension of normal life.
So weapons acquired to serve liberation were now being used as the pretext for preventing it. And only at that point did preserving them at all costs no longer preserve their purpose, but the opposite of it.
Is this therefore The End?
Retreat and extinction are not the same thing
Weapons can be collected.
Tunnels can be filled.
Rocket workshops can be destroyed.
Command structures can be dismantled or obliterated.
An organisation representing resistance may even disappear.
But occupation does not disappear because its opponent has surrendered a rifle.
Nor do memory, military experience, technical knowledge, political grievance, dispossession or the accumulated experience of three generations simply vanish.
Armed movements are ultimately symptoms before they are organisations.
You may destroy an organisation. But leaving intact the conditions that produced it will only produce another.
That is why the most important question is not:
Will Palestine Resist?
It is:
Will Palestinians still possess the reasons that caused armed resistance to emerge in the first place?
The agreement, if it ever works, is not the abandonment of resistance, but the recognition that a people must survive before any future can be fought for. And this painful reality is of our making, as members of the abandonment contingent. The ones who stood behind.
October 7 was built around the hope that breaking the wall would summon a wider battle that Gaza would be part of, not the only part of.
Three years later, Gaza is being asked to place its weapons into storage while much of the world that failed to enter the battle is either supervising the peace, or worse, criticising it for its wholesale commitment to liberation.
And ultimately, a few rifles can be surrendered, but a just cause for libertion, which is Palestine, can never be disarmed.
[1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvINECygN6Q
[3] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1057610X.2026.2613426
[4] https://www.timesofisrael.com/767-troops-faced-5000-terrorists-gaza-division-was-overrun-for-hours-idf-oct-7-probe/amp/
[5] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-strikes-kill-three-people-gaza-medics-say-2026-11-02
