A Promised Halt That Never Came
Israel escalated its attacks across the Gaza Strip on Sunday, just hours after Palestinian factions were told by Board of Peace director-general Nikolai Mladenov that Israeli forces would halt their daily attacks and assassinations that morning to begin implementing phase two of President Trump’s Gaza deal. What followed on the ground was the opposite: barely an hour passed without a new strike, as drone attacks, airstrikes, and artillery shelling hit areas across the Strip, killing at least 18 Palestinians and wounding dozens more, among them children, women, and an infant. Palestinian Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Bassal said more than 10 strikes had been carried out since early morning, with the bombardment still ongoing at the time of his statement, which he described as an unprecedented pace of attacks.
A Hamas Leader and His Wife Assassinated.
Among those killed was Hamas official Kamal Abu Mailaq, who was assassinated in a strike on Deir al-Balah that same morning along with his wife — a killing carried out at the very moment mediators had reported such attacks were supposed to stop. Hamas said the intensified bombardment amounted to a deliberate attempt by the Israeli government to derail implementation of the ceasefire agreement and the understandings reached with mediators, and called on mediators and guarantor states to move immediately to press Israel into halting the assault and honoring its commitments.
Behind the Scenes: Three Israeli Objections Threaten to Sink the Deal.
The escalation came as Haaretz reported that Israel had conveyed three core objections to the agreement to the Board of Peace, relayed through board member and former UK prime minister Tony Blair — with no date yet set for the deal to take effect. First, Israel is refusing to accept a plan that merely places Hamas’s weapons under Palestinian administrative control rather than requiring their destruction outright; the roadmap Hamas agreed to calls for weapons to be collected and held under the oversight of a technocratic governing committee without specifying their final disposal. Second, Israel objects to the proposed verification mechanism for tracking implementation, specifically the involvement of Qatar and Turkey as mediating states within that process. Third, Israel is demanding it retain freedom of movement and the right to conduct military operations even inside areas slated to come under the authority of an international stabilization force and Palestinian police — a demand that runs counter to the deal’s core structure of gradually transferring security control as disarmament and withdrawal proceed.
These objections were echoed publicly by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who said Sunday that the agreement disregards Israel’s demands entirely and that Trump is paying little attention to Netanyahu’s position. Barak argued the deal’s language was deliberately vague but its direction unmistakable, criticizing it for failing to secure full disarmament, the removal of weapons from Gaza, or the exile of Hamas’s leadership — offering instead only a halt to assassinations and an Israeli pullback to 53% of the Strip rather than the 65% Israel had sought. A Board of Peace official told Haaretz that once the agreement formally takes effect, a 14-day window will open for both sides to finalize detailed implementation timetables.