Board of Peace envoy warns cease-fire collapse would end roadmap for Gaza

A senior official of the US-backed Board of Peace told the UN Security Council that both Israel’s continued air strikes on Gaza and Hamas’s armed activities are undermining the cease-fire. He said the Board’s 15-point roadmap, announced last month, calls for Hamas to surrender its weapons in exchange for a phased Israeli troop withdrawal, but Israel insists on full disarmament before any pullout.

The envoy, Nickolay Mladenov, said he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had agreed on a mechanism to address remaining questions and that committees had been set up for that purpose. > "A ceasefire in fact under which civilians are still buried is not yet one that the people of Gaza can really feel. Every use of force that does not answer an immediate threat, and every incident that the deconfliction mechanism was not asked to resolve, costs this process something very hard to buy back," he said.

He added that each weapon, tunnel or obstructed convoy delays the process and strengthens the argument of those who want to resume war. Under the new roadmap, Israeli withdrawal would follow verified decommissioning of Hamas weapons handed to a Palestinian technocratic committee supervised by the Board of Peace. The Israeli representative reiterated commitment to the US-brokered plan but said it could not succeed while Hamas retained military capabilities.

Mladenov warned that if the cease-fire collapses, "there will be no roadmap to return to, there will be no administration to deploy, and there will be nothing left of the ground to rebuild."