President Trump announced that his Board of Peace has reached a deal with the Palestinian militant group Hamas to completely disarm, calling it a "historic breakthrough."
But a senior Hamas official told NPR on Friday Israel must withdraw from parts of Gaza first.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not immediately react to Trump's announcement.
"Today, the Board of Peace reached a HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza. This is a monumental step toward lasting PEACE and SECURITY," Trump posted on social media late Thursday.
The Board of Peace is an entity created and chaired by the president to oversee the peace plan in Gaza. The board, which gathered 40 countries at its inauguration, was convened in February. It includes Israel and Arab countries, but no Palestinian representatives.
Trump said the agreement, which comes nearly nine months after the U.S. negotiated a ceasefire to end the fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, would be carried out in carefully structured phases.
"As disarmament is completed, Israeli forces will withdraw, and the International Stabilization Force will work with a new Palestinian police force to take responsibility for Gaza being safe for its residents and its neighbors," Trump said on Truth Social.
The deployment of the International Stabilization Force, which is eventually expected to include thousands of international peacekeepers, is part of Trump's peace plan for Gaza. International peacekeepers are expected to act as a buffer between Israel and Hamas.
But a senior Hamas official, who spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said Israel must uphold its commitments of the first phase of the ceasefire agreement, "including withdrawal" first.
Trump said the agreement was reached with the help of mediating countries: Turkey, Egypt and Qatar.
"CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL ON THIS AMAZING DEVELOPMENT, THAT EVERYBODY SAID COULD NEVER BE ACHIEVED!" he wrote.
In a press briefing, officials with the Board of Peace said a transitional authority would "hold a full monopoly on weapons in the Gaza Strip" and "hopefully all the tunnels will be disclosed and destroyed."
But the condition that Hamas disarm was already central to the 20-point U.S.-brokered Gaza peace deal, announced in October last year. Implementation of that part of the deal has been deadlocked as the Israeli military continues to push into Gaza.
Board of Peace officials said on Thursday that the disarmament agreement with Hamas is "essentially a 'roadmap' to implement that peace deal."
Under the peace deal, Hamas and other militant groups would hand their arms over to a vetted international policing force, which has not been stood up yet.
Nickolay Mladenov, the high representative in Gaza for President Trump's Board of Peace, said the deal "took months of very difficult negotiations."
"What the agreement says matters. What happens next matters even more. Implementation and verification have to be real. Withdrawal must move in lockstep with decommissioning," Mladenov said on X.
Trump's announcement on Thursday did not mention other militant groups, such as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Movement, the second largest group in Gaza.
The militant group disputed the agreement, saying in a statement on Friday that the deal Trump announced was "inaccurate." "We have reservations regarding it in the currently circulated form," Palestinian Islamic Jihad Movement said.
Netanyahu, who met Trump in Washington earlier this week, has been silent on Trump's announcement. There was no indication that the Gaza deal came up in that meeting, with the two putting out very limited statements.
Iran war a factor
Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, the leader of the Palestinian National Initiative, a Palestinian political movement, told NPR on Friday that the big sticking point of the deal is the sequencing of events.
He said President Trump needs to put pressure on Israel to honor the truce.
"He should exercise pressure on Israel to connect to the ceasefire and stop bombarding Gaza, and begin the process of withdrawing from Gaza instead of expanding their occupation," Barghouti added.
Around 1,100 people have been killed in almost daily Israeli strikes in Gaza since the ceasefire was announced. Israel says it is targeting Hamas members, despite the truce.
Trump's announcement comes as the U.S. and Israel are still involved in the war with Iran, a conflict many Americans oppose.The United States and Iran continue to trade strikes in a widening five-month conflict, with near nightly attacks by the U.S. military on Iranian military infrastructure over Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian retaliatory attacks against U.S. military bases in the Gulf states and Jordan.
A new AP poll has found that almost two-thirds of Americans say the war is not worth the fight.
Alex Conant, a veteran Republican strategist, told NPR if fighting continues – and gas prices keep rising – there will be political consequences, and the midterms are just three months away.
"If you look through history, you know, every president who has entered a war in modern times that's gone longer than people expected, whether it was Vietnam or the war on terror and the Iraq war, it starts to weigh on them politically," Conant said.
NPR's Franco Ordonez in Washington, Emily Feng and Frank Langfitt in Tel Aviv contributed reporting.
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