Disarmament seen as unlikely without years-long military campaign, security official says, adding that terror group's civil servants and police force could take year to replace The post Israel says Hamas may soon formally cede Gaza to technocrats,

With all Israeli hostages now recovered from Gaza, there's a push for the Israel-Hamas peace plan to move to phase-two, but that brings its own challenges.

Gaza’s government urged its more than 40,000 civil servants and security personnel to cooperate with the Palestinian technocratic body with U.S. oversight that is meant to exclude Hamas.

Israel fought a 12-day war with Iran last June that saw it strike military targets across the country and kill a number of the Islamic republic's senior military leaders and nuclear scientists.

A total of 168 hostages were released alive and 87 were returned dead. Most were freed through deals with Hamas. The rest – eight living hostages and 48 bodies – were recovered in Israeli military operations. At least 41 living hostages were killed after being taken captive, most by Hamas, while seven were killed by Israeli fire.

At the start of "American Doctor," a new documentary about US medics working in hospitals in the Gaza Strip during the Israel-Hamas war, director Poh Si Teng initially declines to film pictures of dead Palestinian children that one of the doctors is trying to show her.

There appears to be a growing divide between American mediation efforts and Israel’s bottom-line demand that Hamas be disarmed and excluded from Gaza’s future governance. That comes alongside an unbridgeable gap between a Hamas bent on securing its survival and Israel determined to destroy it.

The group behind a pro-Hamas demonstration near a Queens synagogue earlier this month and a series of other events targeting Jewish religious institutions has deep pockets — and deep roots, which crisscross the country and link it to various extremist cells — according to publicly available tax filings, Jewish Insider ’s Will Bredderman reports.

Senior Hamas official rejects the demand to disarm as part of the ceasefire agreement and insists on a full Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.