Muhammad Shehada, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), said that Hamas suspects Mladenov to be working under Israeli pressure and has deliberately barred the NCAG from visiting Gaza—to delay reconstruction and the political process from moving forward until Hamas disarms. In March, Basem Naim, a member of Hamas’s decision-making political bureau, posted on X that Mladenov wanted to achieve his “own ends” at the expense of the Palestinian people “to please the Americans and Israelis.”

Gazans, meanwhile, are crammed into less than half the space they had before the conflict. Israeli forces have encroached on more land since the cease-fire and moved beyond the so-called yellow line—a boundary demarcated by yellow concrete blocks that splits the 53 percent of Israel-controlled Gaza from Hamas-controlled territory.

They have expanded to occupy roughly 11 percent more territory and now control 64 percent of Gaza. The edge of the new Israeli-controlled zone is reportedly marked on maps as an “orange line” and a new de facto boundary. Aid organizations require prior Israeli approval to provide aid to people living between the yellow and the orange line—an extended Israeli buffer zone.

And at the end of May, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had directed Israeli forces to take over 70 percent of Gaza, adding to suspicions that Israel aims to expand and occupy the territory.

Additionally, activists point to the expulsion of Palestinians as part of state policy. Gisha, an Israeli legal group that advocates for Palestinians’ freedom of movement, and Adalah—another legal center for Arab rights in Isreal—have been documenting various aspects of life in Gaza. In February, they sent a letter to Israeli authorities demanding “an immediate end” to what they described as the “harassment and unlawful restrictions imposed on Palestinian residents seeking to return to Gaza through the Rafah Crossing,” from Egypt.

Gisha claimed in February that only a negligible number of those who left Gaza during the war have been permitted to reenter and that the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories—a unit in the Israeli Ministry of Defense—has barred Palestinians who were outside Gaza before the start of the war in 2023 from returning.

“Some 30,000 Palestinians have already signed up to return to Gaza from Egypt, where more than 100,000 reside, but they are being let in at a very slow pace,” said Tania Hary, Gisha’s executive director. She said that 50 medical patients should be allowed to leave, together with their companions, and the same number of people should be able to return to Gaza every day according to the terms agreed in negotiations. But the number of people traveling in practice in both directions is “artificially low,” she said.

At the time of the negotiations, Egypt insisted that the number of those being allowed to leave should be matched by those returning. While Egypt and other Arab countries fear that they may have to host Palestinians leaving Gaza due to the fear that Israel may not take them back, activists who spoke with Foreign Policy said that Israel is more eager for Palestinians to leave than it is to accept those willing to return.

Hary said that expelling Palestinians from Gaza appears to be state policy. “Israel has been very forthcoming about its desire for Palestinians to leave Gaza, they are not even hiding it. [Defense Minister Israel) Katz has even said that he is looking for countries willing to take Palestinians from Gaza. The policy goal is very clear,” she told Foreign Policy.

Gisha and Adalah argue that discouraging the return of Palestinians to Gaza amounts to a “forcible transfer of a population” and constitutes a war crime.

Lerman said that some on the extreme right in Israel have expressed intentions to occupy Gaza and expel Palestinians—presumably referencing Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, both of whom are part of the Netanyahu government and have supported “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.

However, Lerman added that he didn’t think that expelling Palestinians was government policy. He said the idea is for the Israeli forces to stay in Gaza until Hamas is no longer a threat.

“Mladenov has told Jerusalem to inform Netanyahu that Hamas is not disarming, and that the international stabilization force is not coming in,” Lerman said. That means that Israel will have to create the conditions for the group’s disarmament itself, he added.

“The strategy is not to conquer Gaza, but to eliminate Hamas commanders, and to crawl ahead to narrow down Hamas-controlled areas, while keeping it below the level of an all-out confrontation,” he told Foreign Policy.

Shehada, the ECFR fellow, said that the trouble is that Israel seeks total disarmament as the starting point, while Hamas is pushing for gradual decommissioning of weapons. He said that if Hamas gives up its small weapons, then Israeli settlers could move in to occupy territory.

“If the weapons are gone, if Hamas dismantles, settlers will move in and take over Gaza in a matter of months, like they are doing in the West Bank,” Shehada said, referencing settler violence in the West Bank. “The arrangement in Trump’s Board of Peace is not at all seen as a guarantee against Israeli occupation.”

For its part, the Israeli government says it is merely trying to disarm Hamas to avoid another attack like the one on Oct. 7, 2023. In Israel, there are concerns that discussing a Palestinian state before Hamas’s defeat might be seen as a reward for Oct. 7 and encourage the group. Hamas fears being attacked by rival local groups in cooperation with Israel if it gives up its weapons to Israeli forces.

Hamas has said it would be willing to decommission its weapons and store them away for five, 10, or 15 years—until a credible path for a Palestinian state is worked out—and under the supervision of the NCAG. “We can talk about freezing or storing or laying down, with the Palestinian guarantees, not to use it at all during this ceasefire time or truce,” Naim said in December.

Lerman sees the NCAG as an unarmed entity that is simply incapable of effectively monitoring such a process. “We have no trust that Hamas means what it says, and it [storing weapons] sounds like a trial balloon,” he said.

In essence, the reticence to move forward emanates not only from a lack of trust but also from each side feeling that it has an upper hand, however self-defeating. Hamas appears to be emboldened by the United States and Israel’s failures in the Iran war and by the survival of Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, even as the people it is meant to protect live in shambles. It feels that it can keep its weapons and resume its tactics at a later date.