Nine months after the ceasefire came into force, something is moving on a political level in the Gaza Strip. After twenty years of uninterrupted rule in the Palestinian Territory, Hamas has announced the dissolution of the government body, paving the way for a technical committee that will administer the Strip, as already foreseen in the ceasefire plan. This is a change for the Islamist movement that took control of Gaza in 2007 after a violent clash and the subsequent expulsion of the rival al-Fatah movement, which did not recognize the result of the January 2006 elections, won by Hamas.
«The head of the government’s emergency committee, Mohammed al-Farra, has officially submitted his resignation», said Ismail al-Thawabta, head of the press office of the Hamas government, during the press conference in the courtyard of the Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir el-Balah. «He also decided to dissolve the committee to facilitate the administrative and governmental transition to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG)».
The Ncag, currently based in Cairo, is a technical and temporary committee for the implementation of essential public services and civil administration and to coordinate reconstruction. It was born in January 2026 under Resolution 2803 of the United Nations Security Council as part of the 20-point peace plan drawn up by the US administration which, after having brokered the ceasefire in October 2025, created the Board of Peace, the body wanted and chaired by Donald Trump.
Currently the Committee, made up of 15 members, is led by Ali Shaath, a Palestinian civil servant and engineer, born in the Gaza Strip, in Khan Younis, and with long experience in the Palestinian administration. But to date none of the members have had permission from Israel to enter the Strip. “We hope that this important step on the ground will help to end the aggression, to stop the genocide, to ensure the withdrawal of the Israeli army from the Gaza Strip, to reopen the crossings to allow the entry of aid trucks and to put an end to the policy of starvation,” Ismail al-Thawabta told Al Jazeera on the sidelines of the press conference.
Al-Thawabta explained that the technical and professional staff will remain operational in their functions, stating that «all employees engaged in the provision of services are “state employees” and are fully ready to work under the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza».
The handover of political powers, despite being a step forward, has a more than anything else symbolic value, at the moment with few concrete implications. The question of the form of government in the Gaza Strip is one of the issues to be resolved in the peace process. One of the fundamental problems is the disarmament of Hamas, a topic to which the movement made no mention: the second phase of the ceasefire in Gaza should have included the gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Strip to bring about the end of the occupation and at the same time the disarmament of the Islamist movement.
But none of this happened, on the contrary: Israeli forces have effectively expanded their presence, taking control of almost 70% of the Strip. And Hamas demands the establishment of a Palestinian administration before considering the surrender of its weapons. The de facto ceasefire has been continuously violated: since it was declared in October 2025, more than a thousand civilians in Gaza have been killed. More than 73 thousand people in the Strip have died since October 2023.
