I'm John Batch with Bill Raja, Senior Fellow for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies,

and we're joined by research fellow Samuel Ben-Ur for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies,

watching Hamas. Very difficult to see because Hamas remains in retreat in Gaza. But outside of

Gaza, the political leadership, last I knew, was in Doha, Qatar, protected by what? And some of the

exiles were in Istanbul, protected by what? If Hamas is to be ended, you must end the political

much more than the military, while the idea of his having success reducing their military commanders,

what about the political leadership and its ability to raise money

and maintain relations with other hostile regimes?

Samuel, having nothing to say about the Board of Peace is something to say.

The Board of Peace was to present itself as an interlocutor between the Hamas leadership,

political leadership, and its allies, and the IDF. Is it acting in that fashion at all? What I had was a

report in the Financial Times that it was without money. What else is it doing? So, as you mentioned, basically, no news is news in this case.

They haven't done anything since the Board of Peace was established. They had one push to bring a

disarmament deal to Hamas that they spent about eight months working on for that to be their

major product or

achievement or proof of progress, whatever you want to call it. But they presented that to Hamas.

Hamas rejected it immediately. And they seemingly have been left scrambling with nothing to do.

And as part of that, as you mentioned, even though people have pledged, I think, about $17 billion,

none of that money has gotten into Board of Peace coffers because they're all for programs

that are predicated on Hamas being disarmed.

Since when the Board of Peace was created, it was made, Trump made it explicitly clear that

their job was not to disarm Hamas. They could help them reach a deal, but forcible disarmament was something that was left totally up in the air with the, you know, I think implication that Israel would be the one to do it if these things didn't happen. So even though the UAE pledge a hundred million to train a police force to police Gaza not controlled by Hamas, why would they

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