Jerusalem (AFP) - Israel said Thursday that Hamas “will be disarmed” as part of the US-sponsored peace plan for Gaza, after a top leader from the Palestinian Islamist movement suggested a weapons freeze.

The ceasefire, in effect since October 10, halted the war that began after Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. But it remains fragile as Israel and Hamas accuse each other almost daily of violations.

Top Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal told Qatari news channel Al Jazeera that the militant group is open to a weapons “freeze”, but rejects the demand for total disarmament put forward in Trump’s plan for the Palestinian territory.

Shosh Bedrosian, spokeswoman for the Israeli prime minister’s office, said “Israel will continue to follow the 20-point plan. There will be no Hamas inside of the Gaza Strip. Hamas will be disarmed”.

“The prime minister says this will happen the easy way or the hard way,” Bedrosian told journalists in a briefing.

The agreement is composed of three phases. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently indicated that he expected the second phase to begin soon.

Under that phase Israeli troops would further withdraw from their positions in Gaza and be replaced by an international stabilisation force (ISF), while Hamas would lay down its weapons.

The Palestinian militant group has indicated it would not agree to giving up its arsenal.

“The idea of total disarmament is unacceptable to the resistance (Hamas),” Meshaal said in the interview aired on Wednesday.

“What is being proposed is a freeze, or storage (of weapons)… to provide guarantees against any military escalation from Gaza with the Israeli occupation,” he added.

“This is the idea we’re discussing with the mediators, and I believe that with pragmatic American thinking… such a vision could be agreed upon with the US administration,” he said.

- Mediators as ‘guarantors’ -

Netanyahu is expected to meet US President Donald Trump in the United States on December 29 to discuss the next steps in the truce.

In the first phase of the deal, Palestinian militants committed to releasing the remaining 48 living and dead captives held in the territory. So far they have released all of the hostages except for one body.

In exchange, Israel has released nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners in its custody and returned the bodies of hundreds of dead Palestinians.

As for the international peacekeeping force, Meshaal said the group was open to its deployment along Gaza’s border with Israel, but would not agree to it operating inside the territory, calling such a plan an “occupation”.

“We have no objection to international forces or international stabilisation forces being deployed along the border, like UNIFIL,” he said, referring to the UN peacekeeping force deployed in southern Lebanon near the Israeli border.

Meshaal said such forces would separate Gaza from Israel.

Mediators as well as Arab and Islamic nations, he said, could act as “guarantors” that there would be no escalation originating from inside Gaza.

- Rains batter Gaza -

Heavy winter rains swept across Gaza starting late on Wednesday, flooding tents and makeshift shelters, bringing yet more hardships to Gaza’s residents, nearly all of whom faced displacement at least once in over two years of war.

“Last night was a terrible night for us and our children because of the heavy rain and cold. The children got all wet, the blankets got wet, the mattresses got wet,” Suad Muslim, who lives in a tent with her family in al-Zawayda, said.

With most of Gaza’s hard structures destroyed or damaged, thousands of tents or homemade shelters line areas cleared of rubble in the Palestinian territory.

According to a United Nations report, 761 displacement sites hosting about 850,000 people are at high risk of flooding.

“Give us a decent tent, blankets for our children, clothes to wear. I swear their feet are bare and they have no shoes. How long will we remain in this situation? This is injustice”, she told AFP.