Netanyahu rejects 15-point Gaza peace plan

ISRAELI Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has restated his rejection of Donald Trump's latest Gaza plan in televised remarks to his right-wing government, even as Israel's military has effectively halted attacks in the territory under pressure from the US President.
"Israel does not accept the 15-point document," Netanyahu said at the start of a meeting with cabinet ministers.
The IDF will not carry out any withdrawal until Hamas is disarmed, he said, adding: it means heavy weaponry, lighter weaponry, all weaponry.
"And we are talking about genuine disarmament, not fictitious disarmament," he said, noting that Israel is in talks with the United States on the plan.
"They (the US) have ideas, some of which are acceptable to us and some of which are unacceptable to us," Netanyahu said without elaborating.
Netanyahu is in campaign mode as he seeks re-election at a vote due on October 27, but is caught between far-right ministers angered by concessions in Gaza and his key military backer, Trump, who wants progress toward ending the conflict with a new 15-point peace plan.
Israel has scaled back attacks in Gaza since Monday, when Nikolay Mladenov, the Gaza envoy for Trump's Board of Peace that oversees the Gaza ceasefire, met with Netanyahu.
A source familiar with Israel's position said it had agreed that the military would only act against what it perceives as immediate threats and no longer carry out targeted assassinations as it had been doing on a near-daily basis.
Trump announced last month that there had been a breakthrough in his plan to end the war, to which both Israel and Hamas agreed, with Israeli forces to withdraw as Hamas disarms and an International Stabilization Force working with a new Palestinian police force to secure the enclave.
But complications have swiftly emerged. Israel has said that troops in Gaza would not move before Hamas disarms. Hamas has insisted that Israel halt attacks before it begins implementing the part of the agreement dealing with its arms.
Trump said last month that Iran-backed Hamas, which ruled Gaza for nearly two decades before carrying out the October 7 2023 attack on Israel that triggered the Gaza war, had agreed to lay down its weapons.
Hamas avoids the use of the term 'disarmament' and said the group agreed to hand over weapons to be stored under a US-backed Palestinian technocrat administration that would run the affairs in Gaza under the supervision of Trump's Board of Peace.
Hamas said it agreed to the plan in order to spare the people in Gaza a possible resumption of war, but it added that the implementation of the deal would depend on Israel first meeting its own commitments, including withdrawal.
Since the US-mediated agreement reached in October to end the war, Israel had vowed to hunt down every militant who had taken part in the October 2023 attack before stopping the targeted attacks on Monday.
We expect the mediators and the US guarantor to press Netanyahu and his government to adhere to the road map, Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official, told Reuters.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said: "We went to war with a central goal: the destruction of Hamas." The military "cannot withdraw even a millimetre from the Gaza Strip," he said.
More than 1,250 people have been killed in the Israeli attacks since the ceasefire, most of them civilians, according to Gaza health officials, with the death toll since 2023 standing at more than 70,000.
Hamas has not disclosed the number of its fighters killed.
Israeli troops have occupied and depopulated two-thirds of the enclave, leaving nearly all its more than 2 million residents confined to a tiny strip of land under Hamas control along the coast, most in makeshift tents or damaged buildings.