What happened
Hamas's leadership crisis compounds the disarmament question. Yahya Sinwar, the architect of October 7, was killed in October 2024; his successor as Gaza's on-the-ground leader, Mohammed Sinwar, was killed in May 2025; the next leader, Izz al-Din al-Haddad, was killed in May 2026 — a pattern of successive assassinations that has left Hamas's Gaza leadership answering to a five-person council rather than a single confirmed leader, with a February 2026 Shura Council leadership vote failing to produce a winner amid internal factional disagreement between figures favouring continued armed confrontation with Iranian backing (Khalil al-Hayya) and figures favouring pragmatic negotiation with greater Gulf-state sponsorship (Khaled Mashal).
That leadership vacuum is one real, practical obstacle to disarmament — it is not obvious which body within Hamas could even authorise and enforce a full weapons handover under current conditions, whatever its political will to do so. But Hamas's public position has also been that disarmament before a credible, permanent political horizon (rather than a temporary security committee) is a one-way concession it will not make unilaterally, a position with some echo of Israel's own reluctance to withdraw fully from agreed lines without reciprocal guarantees (documented in IsraelTimelineSeeder's ceasefire-violations entry). The result, as the Board of Peace's own high representative stated, is a peace process where both parties' specific, attributable choices — Hamas's non-disarmament and Israel's territorial expansion beyond the agreed line — are each doing real work to keep Gaza's reconstruction stalled, which is why this entry, like its Israeli counterpart, is attributed as mixed rather than assigning the impasse entirely to one side.