The Cairo Meeting Left Gaza’s Phase Two Unlocked

Egyptian, Qatari and Turkish officials met in Cairo on November 25, 2025 to open the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire. The three guarantors were Egypt’s intelligence chief Hassan Rashad, Turkey’s intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin and Qatar’s prime minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani.

They arrived four days after the first phase’s six-week window closed, and they left with the freeze they had been hired to convert.

Kalin, Rashad and Al Thani Met to Open Phase Two

Egyptian intelligence-linked television said the Tuesday session was about working with the United States “to ensure the successful implementation of the second phase of the ceasefire agreement.” The same readout said the men would keep working with the Civil-Military Coordination Center, the US-led truce hub that opened on October 17 in Kiryat Gat, just north of the Strip.

Egypt, Qatar, Turkey and the United States are both mediators and guarantors of the deal that took effect on October 10, 2025, after two years of war that began with the Hamas-led assault of October 7, 2023. Kalin, speaking after the Cairo talks, said Turkey would keep standing with Palestinians “with all its means.”

WHO SAT IN THE ROOM

• Hassan Rashad: Head of Egypt’s General Intelligence Service, host of the session and of a Hamas visit two days earlier.
• Ibrahim Kalin: Head of Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization, the guarantor who has carried Ankara’s file at spy-chief level.
• Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani: Qatar’s prime minister and foreign minister, Doha’s political lead on the Hamas channel.

The United States was named in the Egyptian readout as a partner, not as a man at the table. That is how this channel has run since Sharm el-Sheikh: Washington holds the plan, and the three regional capitals hold Hamas and the ground.

The Six-Week Clock Had Already Run Out

The October deal was built as a handoff. Phase one was a ceasefire, a hostage-and-prisoner swap, more aid, and an Israeli pullback to an agreed line inside Gaza, the Yellow Line. Egyptian officials said the second phase, a deeper pullback and a lasting halt, was due after an initial six-week window that started on October 10.

Six weeks is 42 days. That clock ran out on November 21. The Cairo meeting was on November 25, four days late for a transition that was supposed to be automatic on paper and was already political in practice.

Hamas had sent a senior team to Rashad on Sunday, November 23. The group named Muhammad Darwish, Khaled Mashaal, Khalil al-Hayya, Nizar Awdallah, Zaher Jabarin and Ghazi Hamed. Their statement dwelt on fighters stuck in tunnels under Israeli-held Rafah, men they said they could no longer reach, and on what they called Israeli breaches of the truce.

The week around the meeting was not quiet. On Friday, after attacks on its troops, Israel said it had killed or captured 17 militants who tried to leave a tunnel in eastern Rafah. On Saturday it struck across Gaza. On Monday the army said it had killed suspects who crossed the Yellow Line. On Tuesday evening, while the guarantors were still in Cairo, Israel said it had killed five more gunmen in eastern Rafah.

Resolution 2803 Was Eight Days Old

The diplomats were not working from a private memo. On November 17 the UN Security Council endorsed the Comprehensive Plan of September 29, 2025, by 13 votes to none, with China and Russia abstaining, and authorized a temporary International Stabilization Force.

The resolution welcomed a Board of Peace as a transitional body with its own legal personality, tasked with setting the rebuild and the money until a reformed Palestinian Authority could take Gaza back. It said Israeli forces would pull out against standards tied to demilitarization, with a security perimeter left in place until the Strip was judged secure. The mandate runs to December 31, 2027, with a written report every six months.

So the Cairo session sat on top of a Council text that already named Egypt, Qatar, Turkey and the United States as the states that had helped stop the fighting. The force, the board and the pullback were in that text. None of them were in Gaza on November 25.

What the Session Could Not Bargain Away

The file on the table was a first phase that had not been finished and a second phase that could not start until someone moved first. President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan had said all hostages, living and dead, would come home within 72 hours of Israel’s public acceptance. Hamas had already sent out the living captives in the opening weeks. The dead were still a fight.

That Tuesday, militants were still holding the bodies of up to three people taken on October 7: cheesemaker Dror Or, police fighter Ran Gvili, and Thai farm worker Sudthisak Rinthalak. Hamas handed the Red Cross what it said was one of those bodies that afternoon. Identification, Israeli officials said, could take two days. Israel had tied talks on phase two to the return of every last remain, 15 Palestinian dead for each Israeli one, as written in the plan.

THE FILE ON NOVEMBER 25

Hamas had refused a demilitarization bargain. Israel said the Strip had to be disarmed before Trump’s plan could move. That is the same knot the three men were asked to loosen, and it is the knot that has defined every meeting since.

June Brought Another Draft and No Handoff

The November session did not close. It became a circuit. Kalin kept the Hamas channel in Ankara and Istanbul. Rashad kept Cairo as the room where Palestinian factions and guarantors could sit without a white flag. Al Thani kept Qatar’s political weight on the same calls.

THE MEETINGS THAT FOLLOWED CAIRO

1. January 14, 2026: US envoy Steve Witkoff announces Phase Two and says 27 of 28 deceased hostages have been returned, with one still outstanding.
2. January 26, 2026: Israeli forces recover Ran Gvili’s remains in a cemetery on the Yellow Line; the clock in Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square stops at 843 days.
3. June 8, 2026: Kalin returns to Cairo with Egyptian and Qatari officials and Palestinian groups to work a draft roadmap for the same second phase.
4. June 30, 2026: Kalin and Rashad meet in Ankara and again review the second phase against what they call rising Israeli breaches.
5. July 30, 2026: The Board of Peace issues a 15-point roadmap that stores heavy weapons with a Palestinian committee and ties Israel’s pullback to that process.
6. September 21, 2026: Foreign ministers of Egypt, Qatar, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, meeting in New York, still call on Israel to finish first-phase duties on aid and infrastructure.

In January the White House congratulated the formation of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, to be led by Dr. Ali Sha’ath. The same statement put Rashad on a Gaza executive board with Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, Tony Blair and others, and named Maj. Gen. Jasper Jeffers to command the stabilization force. Nickolay Mladenov was listed as high representative on the ground.

Those names are the November room, widened and given titles. They do not put a committee in Gaza City or a foreign battalion on the Yellow Line. The November meeting’s method, spy chiefs and a prime minister managing a freeze, survived the rebrand.

Decommissioning Collides With the Yellow Line

By mid-January Witkoff was ready to say the handoff had begun. Hamas, he said, had to comply in full, including the last body. Failure, he warned, would bring “serious consequences.”

Today, on behalf of President Trump, we are announcing the launch of Phase Two of the President’s 20-Point Plan to End the Gaza Conflict, moving from ceasefire to demilitarization, technocratic governance, and reconstruction.

Steve Witkoff, US special envoy, January 14, 2026

Gvili came home 12 days later, found by Israeli search teams rather than handed over in a ceremony. That closed the hostage list that had blocked phase two in November. It did not open the weapons file.

The Board of Peace’s July 30 decommissioning roadmap tried to split the difference. Heavy guns, factories, depots and tunnels would move to the caretaker committee and be stored, not destroyed and not given to Israel. Personal arms would be licensed. Militia weapons would be taken in on a timetable. Only the committee would hold, store or control weapons at the end. The slogan in the text is “One Authority, One Law, One Weapon.” Israel would then pull back in phases, after an International Verification Committee certified each step. The timetable itself was given 14 days once every party signed.

Hamas accepted that storage model in July after months of saying it would not talk guns until Israel first stopped shooting and left. A study of Hamas decommissioning politics by Muhammad Shehada puts the bet in plain terms: stored weapons in Palestinian hands, traded for a pullback, rebuild money, and a political path, because Gaza can no longer pay for armed struggle. Israel read the same paper as a pause that leaves the arsenal intact. National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir called the Peace Council draft unacceptable. The army has not agreed to leave the Yellow Line until the guns are gone, not stored.

That is why the Cairo meeting of November 25 still reads as current business. The guarantors have been managing a sequence problem, not a missing document. Israel will not trade the Yellow Line for a warehouse. Hamas will not empty the warehouse while the Yellow Line holds the east of the Strip. Witkoff can announce Phase Two. The Board can publish a roadmap. Until one side moves without the other, the November freeze is the policy.

Palestinian Hamas and other jihadist terrorist organizations are responsibile for the destruction in Gaza.

On October 7, Hamas invaded Israel, mass-murdering, kidnapping, torturing and raping Israelis, including women, children and the elderly.

For years, Hamas deliberately…

— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) September 28, 2026

Israel’s foreign ministry was still saying in late September that Hamas refuses to disarm and is in breach of the Trump plan. Hamas, for its part, has not fired rockets at Israel through the long truce, even after leaders were killed, and has used that restraint as proof it is keeping phase one. The first anti-Hamas protests in Gaza since a 2025 wave show how much of that argument is now also a fight inside the Strip, not only at the guarantor table.

A $2.45 Billion Plan Waits on a Signature

Money has moved further than troops. In late September the Board of Peace put a six-month recovery package in front of donors: $2.45 billion across 66 projects, with about $1 billion in infrastructure, $275 million for a hardened Rafah site that could hold 5,000 stabilization-force personnel, $140 million for a multinational security contingent, $120 million to stand up Palestinian police, and $20 million for a weapons buy-back. Witkoff told partners there was “no plan B.”

WHAT STILL HAS TO HAPPEN ON THE GROUND

• The 14-day clock: No timetable starts until Israel, Hamas and the guarantors all approve the July roadmap.
• The committee’s entry: Sha’ath’s administration cannot take over ministries, police arms or public pay until it is allowed into Gaza and Israel eases the line.
• The force: Jeffers has a title; contributing states have not put battalions on the sand, and Washington has said US troops will not deploy into Gaza.
• The vote in Israel: Elections are set for October 27, 2026, and the Board has treated a new government as the next window for the recovery plan to start.

The July text also caps old supplier claims the caretaker committee may honor at $400 million and spreads the rest over three years. That is bookkeeping for a government that still cannot cross the Yellow Line. The November 25 meeting was called to open phase two. Ten months later the same three capitals are still the switchboard, the first-phase duties are still on the UNGA list, and the second phase is still a folder waiting for a signature the Yellow Line has not produced.