The Gaza bait and switch: What Trump's deal changed and why Israel was right to reject it - opinion

Rather, its deception lies in the plan walking back key points while sounding as if it is implementing them.

The most noteworthy change is in the sequencing. The road map takes commitments that were sequential – Hamas had to do X before Israel would do Y – and turns them into parallel or reverse processes.

Given that nothing is crossed out, it still looks like implementation. But in an agreement like this, the order in which the process is executed is part of the agreement. Reverse the order, and you have reversed the deal, even while every clause appears intact. Netanyahu’s rejection is, in effect, a rejection of that reversal.

“Destroyed” became “stored,” and the new governing body now precedes Hamas’s disarmament rather than following it. Article 9 goes a step further, subjecting “personal weapons” belonging to Gazan citizens to Palestinian law under the NCAG. Personal weapons? Palestinian law?

The ISF’s role may be the single most consequential change. Originally, it was “the long-term internal security solution,” working alongside Israel. But Article 12 of the road map redefines its job as separating Israeli forces from NCAG-controlled areas and explicitly bars it from any policing role.

Internal security, however, now falls entirely to a Palestinian police force; Israel has no role in vetting this force.

The ISF hasn’t been diminished – it has been redefined. What was originally meant to be a security partner now serves as a buffer standing between Israel and the Gaza population centers instead.

This raises a question that the road map never answers: If the ISF isn’t the internal security solution, who actually takes Hamas’s weapons away?

What’s emerging instead is a Palestinian Authority security force under a new acronym. A former PA bureaucrat leads the NCAG, which is shaping up to be “PA 2.0.” Notably, the original plan demanded comprehensive reform by the PA before it would play any role in Gaza.

LET’S BE clear about what this adds up to. While Trump’s original 20-point plan aspired to a Gaza free of Hamas, this road map eventuates in its preservation.

Consider Article 10: “Weapons of the militias shall be decommissioned and stored under NCAG authority ... Members of those militias shall not be integrated into the security and police services.”

The militias in question are the courageous anti-Hamas groups that have formed in Gaza – some working with the IDF, fighting to free Gaza from Hamas, and seeking peaceful coexistence with Israel. The road map categorically excludes them from the future police force.

This begs the question: If the goal is a post-Hamas Gaza, and police officers are to be vetted, what vetting standard would these anti-Hamas militias fail? These militias are the closest thing Gaza has to a homegrown constituency for coexistence, and they are the one group locked out of building what replaces Hamas.

The issue of Palestinian statehood follows the same pattern. In the 20-point plan, it appears only at the end, as a distant aspiration contingent on real PA reform and progress toward transforming Gaza’s society.

In the road map, a Palestinian state is introduced in Article 1 as a core aim, and it reappears in Article 8, tied to the weapons process – but with no mention of PA reform at all.

Netanyahu addressed this too on Sunday, saying that “as long as I am prime minister, there will be no Palestinian state.” That is the correct answer to a document that tried to smuggle statehood in through the front door while dropping the one safeguard – PA reform – that made the idea conditional in the first place.

And the body meant to enforce all of this, the International Verification Committee, includes Qatar and Turkey among its guarantors – two governments with long records of financing and hosting Hamas’s leadership. They have now been positioned to judge whether Hamas is keeping its word.

Nickolay Mladenov, the head of the Board of Peace, said the quiet part out loud when he wrote that Israeli withdrawal “must move in lock step with decommissioning” weapons. That phrase captures precisely the sequencing shift Netanyahu just refused to accept.

This is not a new story. It is the oldest story in Israel’s diplomatic history. From the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty to the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, nearly every agreement Israel has signed has followed the same arc: the other side ignores its written obligations, and Israel is expected to accept less than was promised.

For example, the Oslo Accords required the PA to educate its population toward peaceful coexistence. That clause was abandoned without consequence, and two generations of Palestinians were raised on a curriculum that teaches murdering Israelis is the highest act of patriotism.

This road map is repeating that pattern in real time, clause by clause. Netanyahu’s rejection is the first sign that, in a post-October 7 world, Israel may finally be prepared to insist that all agreements be implemented exactly as written. Netanyahu must hold his ground and declare that the decades of bait-and-switch games are over.