Geopolitics · 2026-10-11 · 10 min read · By Vsevolod

Hamas Disarmament by December 2026 Odds & Analysis

Will Hamas agree to disarm by December 31, 2026? As of October 2026, prediction markets put the odds at about 12.5% Yes and 87.5% No, with the order book showing 11 cents bid and 14 cents asked for Yes. The level matters less than the direction. After the Board of Peace announced late on July 30 that Hamas had accepted a phased disarmament roadmap, the same contract traded as high as 89% on July 31. It has fallen almost every week since, losing about 10 points in the last month alone, as traders decided that a conditional "yes" from Hamas is not the formal, unconditional announcement the market needs. You can take a leveraged position on either side of this outcome on PredMart, but the analysis below is about one question: what would actually have to happen in the next 11 weeks for this market to resolve Yes?

The answer starts with the rules. This contract does not ask whether Hamas will hand over a single rifle. It resolves Yes if Hamas "officially announces it will disarm in the Gaza Strip" by 11:59 PM ET on December 31, 2026. Partial disarmament counts, including agreeing to disarm in stages or in one region, as long as it is part of an acknowledged disarmament process. But the rules also exclude "plans contingent on future conditions" and "statements of intent without a formal policy directive." That last clause is the whole story of this market since July.

The front-runner: No, and why it keeps getting stronger

The No side has been the favorite for most of this contract's life, and the history of this market series explains why. This is the sixth deadline in the same question. Contracts asking whether Hamas would agree to disarm by November 30, 2025, December 31, 2025, February 28, 2026, March 31, 2026 and June 30, 2026 all resolved No. Each time, talks produced language about freezing, storing or decommissioning weapons, and each time it fell short of a formal disarmament announcement.

Hamas leaders have been consistent on that point. In a December 2025 interview with Al Jazeera, senior leader Khaled Meshaal said that "disarmament for a Palestinian means stripping away his very soul," and that Hamas could store its weapons but would not give them up. In February 2026, at a conference in Doha, he again rejected criminalizing the group's weapons and any foreign rule over Gaza, offering instead a long truce of "five to seven to 10 years" during which the weapons would not be used (Times of Israel). On April 5, the group's armed wing said raising disarmament before Israel fully implemented the first phase of the ceasefire was not acceptable (Al Jazeera).

What changed in July was not Hamas's red lines but its packaging. The 15-point roadmap that Hamas accepted lets it say yes to disarmament while attaching conditions that the other side rejects. According to Israel Policy Forum's August 11 assessment, Hamas gave conditional acceptance and said it would not begin disarming before Israel met its obligations under the October 2025 ceasefire (Israel Policy Forum). Other factions went further: Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the PFLP argued that resistance weapons cannot be given up before a Palestinian state is established.

Then Israel said no. On August 9, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet that Israel "rejects the 15-point document" and that the army would not withdraw from Gaza until Hamas is fully disarmed, meaning "heavy weapons, the less heavy weapons, all the weapons" and "real disarmament, not fictitious disarmament" (JNS). That is the opposite of the reciprocal sequencing Hamas says it signed up to, in which each disarmament step is matched by an Israeli withdrawal. Hamas responded that it was ready to move ahead with the framework and called on Washington to pressure Israel.

The newest reporting points the same way. On September 26, Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya, who was elected head of the political bureau in July, defeating Khaled Meshaal by 35 votes to 34 according to Israel Policy Forum, told Qatar's Al-Araby channel that the roadmap's weapons provisions "must be implemented as a package" running from completion of the ceasefire's first phase through to a Palestinian state. He did not directly say whether Hamas would disarm (Times of Israel). On October 10, a senior Israeli security official told Walla that Hamas shows no sign of disarming, that it can only repair existing weapons, with no weapons entering Gaza from outside, and that a large-scale confrontation before Israel's October 27 election is unlikely (Jerusalem Post). That is an Israeli assessment, not independent confirmation, but it is consistent with the price.

Even the U.S. side frames it as unfinished business. Marking one year since the Gaza agreement on October 10, Jared Kushner said Hamas had signed a phased disarmament framework in July, acknowledged it has not been fully implemented, and listed completing disarmament as a key task for the coming year (Jerusalem Post). "The coming year" is a long way past December 31.

The biggest mover: the July 31 roadmap and the long unwind

No single event has moved this contract more than the Board of Peace announcement. Late on July 30, President Trump posted on Truth Social about a "HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT of Hamas," after mediators from Egypt, Qatar, Turkey and the U.S. finalized the roadmap, and Hamas said it had agreed to a deal that included staged disarmament (Al Jazeera). The terms, as reported: an inventory schedule within 14 days, a Palestinian National Committee as the only body allowed to hold weapons in Gaza, no transfer of weapons to Israel or any non-Palestinian party, an international verification commission, and each disarmament phase linked to a gradual Israeli withdrawal. Al Jazeera reported that full demilitarization could take 200 to 300 days.

The contract went from about 16.5% before the announcement to as high as 89% on July 31. That was the market pricing a simple reading of the rules: Hamas announced it would disarm in stages, and staged disarmament counts. Then the fine print arrived, and the price has walked down ever since, roughly as follows:

July 31: about 83.5% to 89%, the day after the announcement
August 1: about 64.5%
August 7: about 46.5%
August 18: about 31.5%, after Netanyahu's rejection
August 28: about 20%
Mid-September: about 16% to 23%
Early October: about 12.5% to 15.5%
October 11: 12.5%

Three things drove that unwind. First, conditionality. Hamas's own officials kept repeating the conditions. Ghazi Hamad, a member of its negotiating team, said Hamas would not implement any step of the deal if Israel did not meet its withdrawal obligations. The market's rules specifically exclude plans contingent on future conditions. Second, the roadmap itself was thin. Israel Policy Forum noted it had no signatures, no final timetable, no updated withdrawal map, no procedure for resolving violations, and no definition of "all parties," so even the 14-day clock had no clear start. Third, Israel was not a party and publicly rejected it.

The resolution process told the same story. The contract went through two rounds of a proposed resolution followed by a dispute on the market's oracle, and it is still open and trading. Whatever the exact outcome of those rounds, the practical result is clear: the July acceptance has not, so far, been treated as a qualifying announcement, and anyone who bought Yes at 60 to 80 cents in the first days of August has been marked down to about 12.

For leverage, this is the clearest lesson in the chart. The move from 16.5% to the high 80s in about a day was roughly a fivefold gain on a Yes share, but the three-month slide that followed would have liquidated almost any leveraged Yes position opened near the top, because leverage turns a slow drift against you into a forced exit long before the deadline.

The rest of the board: where the value might be

This is a single binary contract, so "the field" is really two sides plus the paths that lead to each.

At 87.5 cents, No is paying you about 14.3% to wait 11 weeks, assuming nothing changes. That return exists because Yes still has real paths. The most realistic ones are not a sudden change of heart from Hamas leaders, but a technical step in the existing process that the market accepts as an "acknowledged disarmament process." Examples would be a signed implementation timetable, a public start to the weapons inventory under the Palestinian National Committee, or a formal policy statement from the Hamas leadership that commits to a first stage without conditions attached. The resolution rules also allow "a wide consensus of credible reporting confirming a policy of disarmament has been instituted," which is a second route to Yes that does not require a single Hamas press conference.

At 12.5 cents, Yes is pricing roughly a one-in-eight chance of one of those things happening before New Year's Eve. The case for Yes being too cheap rests on pressure. Egypt, Qatar and Turkey mediated the July deal. Atlantic Council experts said at the time that intense pressure from those mediators likely drove Hamas's acceptance, and that Hamas is losing financial support from an Iran strapped by a U.S. naval blockade and sanctions (Atlantic Council). If a post-election Israeli government signs on to a version of the phased process, the conditions Hamas attached could start to look met, and a formal first-stage announcement becomes plausible.

The case for Yes being too expensive is the base rate and the calendar. Five earlier deadlines in this exact series resolved No. The roadmap's own sponsors expect the full process to take most of a year. Israeli coalition talks after October 27 could run for weeks. Hamas says it will not begin disarming until Israel meets its withdrawal obligations, and Israel says it will not withdraw first. There is also a pure timing risk: if Hamas commits in January 2027, this contract still resolves No.

In leverage terms, the two sides have very different shapes. A No position at 87.5 cents that resolves at $1 is a 14.3% gain unleveraged, or about 57% on margin at 4x before costs, but a single credible headline could gap No down by 20 or 30 points in a day, as July 31 showed, and a 4x position will not survive that kind of gap.

Catalysts: the dated windows to watch

October 27, 2026: Israel's general election. Israel votes on October 27 to elect the 26th Knesset, after the Knesset dissolved on July 17. Polls are split. Channel 13 polls from September to early October put the current governing coalition at 46 to 50 seats, with Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar party on 20 to 22, while Channel 14 polls over the same period put the coalition at 63 to 64. Whether the current coalition can reach 61 is the open question. For this market, the election is less about who wins than about whether the next coalition accepts a phased, reciprocal process. A government that does is the single biggest potential Yes catalyst. A government that keeps the "full disarmament first" position is a No catalyst.

Coalition formation, November into December. Israeli coalition talks often take weeks. If they run into December, there is very little time left for any new framework to reach a formal Hamas announcement before the deadline. Watch for early statements from the eventual coalition partners on Gaza withdrawal, since far-right partners in the current coalition have opposed withdrawing from Gaza.

Board of Peace and mediator meetings. Egypt, Qatar, Turkey and the U.S. brokered the July roadmap, and its next steps still have to be agreed. Any announcement of a signed implementation timetable, a working International Verification Committee (which, as of August, did not yet exist), or an agreed weapons inventory would move this market sharply, because those are exactly the steps that could turn conditional language into an "acknowledged disarmament process."

Statements from Hamas leadership. Watch al-Hayya and Meshaal in particular. The useful signal is the wording. "Freeze," "storage," "mothball" and "as a package" all point to No under these rules. A formal policy announcement of a first stage, without a list of preconditions, points to Yes.

Palestinian politics. Palestinian legislative elections scheduled for November look set to be delayed again, with sources linking the delay to a national dialogue in Egypt aimed at ending the split between the factions, and al-Hayya recently met Mohammed Dahlan in Cairo (The National). Any intra-Palestinian agreement that puts Hamas's weapons under a Palestinian authority could be the kind of announcement that counts, so these talks are worth watching even though they are not about Israel directly.

The ground situation in Gaza. The senior Israeli official who spoke to Walla said Hamas is planning to confront Israeli troops along the Yellow Line, and that Israel is carrying out three to four targeted killings a day. A major escalation would almost certainly push Yes lower. A period of calm with fewer strikes keeps the door open.

Bottom line

The market has done a careful job here. It reacted to the July 30 announcement, then read the rules and the fine print, and has spent ten weeks repricing from as high as 89% to 12.5%. The main facts have not changed since August: Hamas has accepted a phased framework but tied every step to Israeli withdrawal and calls it a package that runs all the way to Palestinian statehood; Israel has rejected that sequencing; the U.S. now talks about disarmament as a task for the coming year; and the resolution rules exclude exactly the kind of conditional commitment Hamas has made. Five earlier deadlines in this series resolved No for the same reasons.

Our read is that 12.5% is roughly fair, perhaps slightly generous, given how little time is left after Israel's election and coalition talks. The realistic Yes path is narrow but real: a new Israeli government accepting a reciprocal process quickly, followed by a formal first-stage announcement from Hamas before December 31. Absent that, the contract is likely to drift toward zero as the deadline approaches, with sharp, short-lived spikes on headlines. If you want to express either view, a leveraged position sized to survive a headline gap is the way to do it.

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