Hamas gunmen stand guard on the day that hostages held in Gaza since the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack, are handed over to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), as part of a ceasefire and hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Oct. 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed

In the Season 7 finale of “The Walking Dead,” Negan stands over Carl Grimes and tells the boy’s father what will happen next: “I’m gonna kill Carl now.” Rick Grimes has no means to prevent it. His reply is a statement of deferred intent: “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but nothing is gonna change that.”

The exchange is a precise model of two positions. The aggressor announces its plan in the open. The party that absorbed the blow cannot yet respond, and says in advance that it will.

Hamas has taken the first position. Chen Goldstein-Almog, released from captivity in November 2023, recounted that her guards told her they planned to come back, with 20,000 fighters next time, once Israel had spent a few years recovering. Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, pledged in the fall of 2023 that the group would repeat Oct. 7 again and again.

Israel holds the second. Three years after Oct. 7, it has an open account with Hamas. The hostages, the October 2025 ceasefire, and the Washington-led framework closed the window before the mission was done. The account was deferred. It remains open.

Western capitals see a war that is over. On July 31, President Donald Trump announced, on behalf of the Board of Peace, an agreement for the complete disarmament of Hamas. Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey, co-signers of the October 2025 Sharm el-Sheikh declaration, helped finalize the roadmap. It sets out phased disarmament, heavy weapons and tunnels first, matched by a gradual Israeli withdrawal, over an estimated 200 to 300 days. Hamas conditioned every step on Israeli withdrawal.

Jerusalem reads the ground differently. On Octo. 6, 2026, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet that precisely because Hamas is so weak, it would try to challenge Israel with its remaining strength ahead of Israel’s elections. The same day, Israel’s defense minister ordered the IDF to prepare for scenarios based on intelligence that Hamas intends to attack Israeli forces in the Strip.

Less than a month after the Board of Peace announcement, its High Representative for Gaza, Nickolay Mladenov, told the UN Security Council that Hamas was rebuilding tunnels and had not met its commitment to end all military activity. Mladenov also criticized Israeli strikes, but his own report confirmed that the infrastructure meant to go first is being rebuilt.

In February, the IDF said Hamas had turned Yemen al-Saeed Hospital in Jabalia into a base run by a commander of lieutenant colonel rank, moved operatives and weapons by ambulance, and placed a commander in every school in the camp. In late August, it struck weapons depots, two inside mosques, some holding rockets, it said. On Sept. 27, the IDF released footage from central Gaza of a terrorist using a child to move weapons into a civilian home. The troops held fire because of the child.

In late September, Hamas itself released footage of two young fighters in civilian clothes lying in wait among the ruins for an Israeli tank and firing an anti-tank missile at it. One was born in October 2008, was 15 when the war began, and was killed at 17. The civilian clothing is the method: Once dead, such fighters are presented as innocent children.

Hamas is also rebuilding its rule. According to a Washington Institute study published Oct. 6, the group taxes private traders’ goods at 15 to 25 percent, seizes part of the humanitarian aid Israel continues to allow into the Strip in wartime, and sells it at high prices. It still pays tens of thousands of employees and runs a covert unit that monitors dissent. Its internal security chief, Moein al-Arabeed, whom the IDF credits with rebuilding Hamas’s grip on northern Gaza, was captured on Sept. 1.

On Aug. 3, Hamad sat across from Piers Morgan and conceded that Hamas had paid a heavy price for Oct. 7, then listed the gains: Israel isolated, its prime minister wanted by the International Criminal Court, the Palestinian issue at the top of the global agenda. He called these strategic achievements and added: “We didn’t change our mentality.”

Some of those gains were supplied by the West. In September 2025, France and Canada recognized a Palestinian state. On Oct. 7 this year, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani marked the third anniversary of the massacre with a statement accusing the Israeli government of an “ongoing genocide in Gaza.” Hamas books each of these on the income side of its ledger.

The roadmap’s defenders have a real argument. The ceasefire brought the living hostages home, and for the first time Hamas agreed, on paper, to hand over its weapons. But the roadmap as published does not say what happens if Hamas violates it. A disarmament deal without enforcement gives Hamas the one thing it needs most: time to rebuild.

For Israel, no withdrawal line should move before disarmament on the ground is verified. The election period is a window of vulnerability, and the country’s leadership has said so publicly. And Israel must preserve its freedom of action and make clear to its allies that the open account will be settled, by agreement or by force.

When Israel returns to finish the mission, because Hamas keeps violating its commitments, no one in Paris, Ottawa, or New York will be able to claim ignorance. The evidence on tunnels, hospitals, mosques, and child fighters, and on Hamas’s declared intentions, is already on the table.

Israel stands where Rick Grimes stood facing Negan. It took the blow, it knows who delivered it, and it is waiting for the right moment. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But the account with Hamas will be settled.

Sagiv Steinberg is the communication director of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA).