Hamas police officers stand guard, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Gaza City, Oct. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer

In six weeks, Israel will mark three years since Oct. 7, 2023 — the worst single day in the history of the State of Israel and the Jewish people since the end of the Second World War.

Three years later, Israelis have still not been released from the sense that the sword remains at their throat, and that the seven fronts, arguably more, have not been finally extinguished.

In the West, that sense is often hard to follow. From the outside, the picture looks like a ceasefire in every sector. Iran has stopped firing directly. In Lebanon, Israel operates through targeted strikes on terror infrastructure and no longer strikes Beirut itself. And in Gaza there is an arena with a signed framework and a document to point to. So where, exactly, is the problem?

The answer lies in the matrix and the reality constructed by the Trump administration’s 20-point plan for Gaza and endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2803. The terms were clear to every player, carried Western backing, and drew in even the states closest to Hamas — Turkey and Qatar. Phase one was unambiguous: return the hostages, end active fighting. Phase two is equally unambiguous: the complete disarmament of Hamas.

The problem is not that the matrix has failed. It is that it is being kept running by tolerating deviations from its own rules — small ones, individually defensible, each easier to certify than to confront. Call them glitches. Everyone can see them. The question is only whether anyone stops the program to fix them.

Thirty-three years ago, Israel signed the Oslo Accords and created a new Middle Eastern matrix. Within less than a year, the first glitch appeared in it. Yasser Arafat, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, moved wanted terrorists and weapons into the Gaza Strip in his personal motorcade. Israel saw it and chose to look away.

The glitches accumulated. In a study published in July by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, Lt. Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch documented where that accumulation leads. The Oslo Accords capped the Palestinian police in Judea and Samaria at 12,000 personnel, equipped with 4,000 rifles, 4,000 pistols, 120 machine guns, and 15 armored vehicles — the inventory of a police force. Today the Palestinian Authority fields roughly 70,000 armed security personnel who undergo full military training, with tens of thousands of firearms and dozens of armored vehicles.

None of that happened in a single night. It happened one tolerated exception at a time, over three decades in which Israel held a formal veto over every recruit and never used it. The accumulated glitches in the Oslo matrix have cost thousands of Israeli lives.

The Gaza matrix is now producing its own, and they are visible in real time.

IDF field observers, the same soldiers who sat in the Re’im outpost and were the first to call over the radio that the border had been breached, are reporting that they can see armed operatives and explosive devices moving freely along routes and ridgelines inside the Strip, close to IDF forces and without any apparent fear. Those reports arrive almost daily.

Nickolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace’s high representative for Gaza, told the UN Security Council on Aug. 26 that every weapon still carried and every tunnel still being dug sets the process back. In the same period, Arab mediators reportedly asked Hamas to stop deploying armed and uniformed men openly on Gaza’s streets.

Read those two facts together and the glitch is exposed. What is being requested of Hamas is not decommissioning. It is discretion. Moving gunmen out of view and pausing visible tunnel work are precisely the deviations the international community has to stop certifying as compliance because certification is what converts a glitch into a rule.

Some of the criticism aimed at Jerusalem in that same briefing lands. Mladenov called Israel’s current policy on quality shelter unacceptable with winter approaching and questioned whether near-daily strikes advance demilitarization or delay it. Those are serious arguments and they deserve serious answers rather than dismissal. But on the central point Israel is right to hold and is holding: Anyone engaged in terror and posing an immediate threat has to pay the price, and that message needs to be legible to Gaza’s residents as well as to Hamas.

There is a second cost to tolerated glitches, and it falls on the Palestinian side.

Poll No. 97 of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, conducted Aug. 5-8, found that 72 percent of Palestinians oppose Hamas disarming before a full Israeli withdrawal, and an identical 72 percent believe that if Hamas did disarm, the war would resume and Israel would not withdraw. Only 24 percent express any trust in the Board of Peace.

That is what a decades-long pattern of certified deviations produces. A public that has largely stopped believing Hamas won anything keeps it on as an armed insurance policy, because it does not believe the framework will deliver anything it can hold. No horizon, no visible future, no leadership worth the name, and a settled sense that nothing will actually change — not in Ramallah, and not in Gaza. A matrix that everyone knows is being gamed cannot generate trust on either side of it.

In “The Matrix,” Neo identifies the flaw in the system when he sees the same cat cross the doorway twice. The classic déjà vu.

Israel is living through its own déjà vu now. It does not arrive in the form of an innocent black cat. It arrives as a Hamas rocket, or as an attack tunnel dug to reproduce the massacre three years on.

Stop treating concealment as disarmament, because a rifle carried out of sight is still a rifle. Stop treating a signed framework as an achievement when the mechanism to verify it has not been built. And stop asking Israel to accept in Gaza the arrangement it was asked to accept in Ramallah in 1994 an arrangement whose results are now counted in the tens of thousands of trained men standing 22 kilometers from Israel’s center.

This matrix cannot be allowed to run again.

Sagiv Steinberg is a Middle East geostrategic analyst and communications expert. He previously served as a senior editor in Israeli and international media organizations, and he is the communications manager of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA), a leading Israeli think tank.