Authored by Mathew Piepenburg via VonGreyerz.gold,

It’s that time of year again to put everything somehow together.

But looking back on the knowns of 2025 as we prepare for the inevitable unknowns of 2026, there is little need for the wringing of hands.

Preparation vs. Timing

This is because the more things change, the more they stay the same. And toward this end, we do know this much: Unprecedented and unsustainable debt has made the global financial system, its paper currencies and its bloated markets a bug looking for a wind-shield.

In short, and as history confirms, there is no avoiding the gravity of debt nor the ripple effects of its appalling misuse.  

Mouse-clicked trillions to monetize debts just means slow but consistent currency destruction. Timing the same is not nearly as important as preparing for it, and the walls are narrowing/closing in on a broken monetary model.

Equally known is the fact that policy makers in such a desperate yet now mathematically obvious setting of their own making will do what they have always done throughout history.

That is, as conditions worsen, they will become increasingly desperate (perhaps even militant) to employ their favorite tools of manipulation, dishonesty and non-accountability for the fatal corners in which they’ve placed us and our debased paper currencies.

In the end, and as usual, the man on the street will pay for the sins of the clowns in power who have made the currencies by which they measure their wealth little more than melting ice-cubes.

Precious metal owners, of course, have seen this pattern recognition well ahead of the crowds. The historical, banking, and currency risks attendant to all slowly dying monetary systems means one thing: Real money will have more power than paper money. Or as I stated elsewhere: Rock now beats paper.

Looking Back

We saw 2025 begin with much fanfare out of DC to cut spending and impose a series of emergency measures (from gold-revaluation and tariff headlines to USAID and The GENIUS Act) out of the White House to make a clearly broken America great again.

“Our Currency, Your Problem.”

Critical to this laudable goal was the “External Revenue Service” and a wave of tariff measures designed to make the rest of the world pay for the overspending of a nation who for decades arrogantly maintained that an “our currency, your problem” policy would never end.

That is, after America waffled from a promised gold-backed dollar in 1944 to a welched fiat-dollar in 1971, it then conveniently imposed a petrodollar in 1973 to force global demand of an otherwise inflationary dollar before legally (and equally conveniently) price fixing the dollar’s only honest antagonists – gold and silver – on the COMEX exchange in 1974.

As owners of the world reserve currency, the U.S. could compel decades of demand for its dollar through oil, while simultaneously knee-capping precious metals on the New York COMEX and then export American inflation globally with impunity.

Or so we thought.

But with debt levels at $38T (unlike $250B in 1971) and a debt/GDP ratio at 124% (unlike 38% in 1971), the U.S. and its weaponized dollar is clearly not the same hegemon today that it was when John Connolly made the famous claim, “Our currency, your problem.”

In short, the U.S. went too far, and the world knows it.

Our Currency, Our Problem

When, for example, the U.S. attempted its Liberation Day tariffs in April of 2025, markets tanked. But far more importantly, no one showed up at Uncle Sam’s Treasury auction to buy his unloved IOUs.

Not very, well… liberating.

In other words, and thanks to decades of debt-addiction, inflation-exporting and the fatally short-sighted (stupid) idea of weaponizing the dollar in 2022, DC was forced to accept the inevitable yet now present karmic reality that “our currency is now OUR problem.”

Or stated even more simply, no one wants, trusts or fears the indebted and debased USD as they did in decades prior.

This IS a problem for DC…The U.S. is simply too much in debt to be all-powerful. 2025 and 2026 were and will be a much different world than 1944 or 1971. The US, in short, is not what it once was, and nor are its dollars or IOUs.

Who Wants an IOU from a Broke(n) Issuer?

Since the USA outsourced the American dream and manufacturing to China and the WTO circa 2001, it has lived essentially on debt and the assumption that the world, from Tokyo and Riyadh to Moscow and Shanghai, would always buy its IOU’s and hence its dollar.

By April of 2025, however, we learned this assumption was not only arrogant – it was false.

As U.S. markets plunged and crickets chirped at the April Treasury Auction, DC was forced to immediately retreat on its strong-armed tariff policy in order to restore calm on the NASDAQ as well as renew interest in its less-loved UST and USD.

Anywhere But the USA?

Around the same time as the DXY and dollar were cratering in 2025, the ABUSA—or “anywhere but the USA”—trade kicked into gear, as an already openly de-dollarizing BRICS+ wave was joined by booming stock markets in the UK, Japan and emerging markets, all of whom outperformed the US composites.

Even European stocks, suffering under genuine recessionary indicators from angry French farmers to Volkswagen shutdowns, rose 36% in dollar terms, including dividends, nearly doubling the S&P’s 19% in 2025.

AI Will Save Us?

Meanwhile, US markets pretended that AI, which had gone from expensive to just ridiculous, would somehow save us from, well, I guess humans themselves.

AI (whose prices vastly outpace revenues) accounted for 80% of US market gains in 2025. NVDA, at the center of a circular financing bubble in which concentrated tech names were investing over $350B in AI data centers, and pricing in what they assumed would be $2T in annual revenues which have yet to arrive.

A Ticking Credit Time Bomb

This dangerous AI spend/bubble is funded primarily in off-balance sheet debt via private credit pools and other SPVs, the magnitude of which screams of credit risk.

Speaking of private credit, this market of bad loans to an entirely unknown class of largely subprime borrowers now churning between hedge funds, private equity pirates, and VC supermen is literally screaming of default risk ahead.

Tapped-out borrowers in these hidden pools are paying their interest payments in “equity” rather than actual dollars.

No wonder Jeffery Gundlach sees private credit pools as the new weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, longer-sighted players like Michael Burry are short AI, and that value-driven “oracle from Omaha,” Warren Buffett, is sitting on over $380B in cash, the largest such defensive move in Berkshire Hathaway’s history.

Sadly, such credit risk is not merely a US market embarrassment. The global shadow-banking system is a $250T bubble providing increasingly defaulting credit outside an already sick, yet at least “quasi-regulated” banking system.

Instead, this “shadow lending system,” which has no capital requirements/security, also has zero depositor insurance or central bank access and is ticking like a time-bomb beyond our so-called financial “headlines.”

The Markets Will Save Us?

But hey, at least US markets (CAPE at 39.5 by October and 30% of its market-cap held by 10 companies) are still double-digit positive heading into 2026. Something must be strong in the USA despite the worst private labor data since 2008.

But sadly, the real wind beneath the US markets is not as clean or strong as the current numbers suggest.

Rigged Game

In fact, 2025 saw $1.3T of stock buy-backs—i.e. insiders (led by Apple and Google) buying their own shares to artificially increase share prices and “fudge up” Earnings per Share data by reducing share volume.

In essence, this once-illegal practice of artificial market manipulation boils down to executive insiders voting themselves a raise (they are paid on share prices). As Buffett himself observed: “This is deception, not talent.”

Meanwhile, these same C-suiters have also been quietly selling their other shares at market highs to cash out before a crash.

In such a totally rigged game, it sure is good to be on the inside.

For the rest us market outsiders, however, chasing these inflated market highs is an entirely personal choice.

Given that Pavlovian markets are entirely Fed-driven, so long as QE liquidity is mouse-clicked at the Eccles Building and rates are artificially compressed, a dovish Fed typically means this Frankenstein bubble can stumble, arms stretched forward, to even more frothy highs.

Looking Ahead

This brings us to the Fed in 2026. Will or can it tow the White House’s line to further rate cutting and more QE? The likely answer is yes, and not because of politics, but because of basic survival.

The Fed’s Real Mandate & Problem

The Fed’s real mandate is bond market stability, not inflation, which is an open lie, and not employment, which is equally so. Given that the post-2022, weaponized USD is openly unloved and untrusted, someone has to buy Uncle Sam’s debt, and that won’t be China or Japan.

Japan has been dumping USTs to support its own broken credit markets and Yen, and China, well… it has been walking away from USTs (in favor of gold) in a staggering manner. Its FX reserves were once 40% USTs; by 2025, that figure had fallen to less than 1%:

Given the fact that less UST demand means lower bond prices and hence rising bond yields, Uncle Sam is in deep trouble heading into 2026.

Rising bond yields are an absolute terror to bankrupt debtors like the US, because it means the interest expense on its debt, already over $1T/year, gets even harder to repay.

The Bond Market’s Real Power

For this reason, DC needs to keep yields and rates down. The Fed has thus been pushing rates down in 2025, but as we also saw in 2001, yields still climbed despite the Fed’s rate cuts, a terrifying confirmation that the Fed’s tools are breaking down as the bond market, rather than Powell, takes the wheel.

In 2025, 70% of Uncle Sam’s IOUs were short-duration bonds, which need to be paid back soon. This will be entirely unsustainable going into 2026 unless Powell breaks out bazooka money printing and becomes a perma-buyer of our own debt with mouse-clicked dollars.

This should be a tailwind for precious metals.

Temporary QE – What a Joke

The “temporary QE” Powell announced in December of 2025 is as much of a joke as the “transitory inflation” he announced in 2022.

Instead, we can rationally expect that this temporary QE will become structural QE in 2026, and that the Fed’s balance sheet will expand massively, which could bring the DXY and dollar further south and hence the dollar’s percentage of global reserves even lower.

This, too, should be a tailwind for precious metals.

The Dollar—Weaker or Stronger in 2026?

Some, however, predict a “last-dance” for the dollar, and I have debated this issue for years with Brent Johnson and more recently with Henrik Zeberg. Their case for the strong dollar has obvious merits, and I won’t unpack all the details of our divergences here.

No hegemonic currency gives up easily or overnight. Ultimately, a DXY at 110 has a set-up. I don’t, however, see it anywhere near 130, 140 or 150 as the milkshake theory suggests.

Gold’s Endgame: More Important than Timing

Regardless of this dollar debate, however, the end-game for gold and silver is agreed by all—it’s merely the timing where the mugs-game of predicting and debating the dollar’s direction takes form.

That is, and regardless of the Dollar’s relative strength or weaknesses to other currencies in 2026, and regardless of the desperate move to create dollar-demand via a 2025 stable coin ruse, all paper currencies are losing purchasing power in absolute terms when measured against real money—namely gold.

And that, ladies & gentleman, explains a 2025 in which gold and silver broke more all-time-highs than Trump tweets in a typical day.

Golden Light-House Cutting Through the Fog

Wondering what to do about gold in 2026 is no mystery for those who own gold as a wealth preservation and store-of-value asset as opposed to a speculation trade.

Trading precious metals, of course, requires precise timing. (I know a few who actually do it well.) Preserving long-term wealth in precious metals, however, only requires common sense.

Egon von Greyerz has been making the case for gold for decades, while many “gold experts” were popping up on YouTube screens in 2025, only to capture an obvious price move. Where were they when gold was outperforming markets for the last 25 years?

But none of this really matters, because all-time-high gold and silver prices measured in paper currencies is almost comical, akin to measuring your weight on a broken scale.

For decades in general, and for 2025 in particular, we have tracked the obvious tailwinds for real money like gold in a setting of dying paper currencies like the dollar. There’s always a new headline or event to explain.

But the jig was up long ago. The bigger picture, which Egon saw decades ago, was always right before us.

Since 1971, when the US insulted the world and its Constitution by taking away a gold standard, all the major currencies have lost more than 95% of their purchasing power when measured against gold.

The more recent evidence of this accelerating and now undeniable trend toward gold and silver has been almost too obvious, from a rising, BRICS-lead de-dollarization trend, unprecedented central bank gold-stacking and a COMEX meltdown this year, to the BIS’s Tier-1 gold status confirmation and the year-end desperation to artificially repress the silver price by systems terrified of what rising metals says about their dying currencies.

In short, a world soaked in over $300T in debt is, as Thomas Gresham warned centuries ago, naturally moving from bad (paper) money to real (gold/silver) money as a superior strategic reserve asset and store of value.

For those who understand the advantages of saving in real money and spending in fiat money, sitting around and speculating about the future price of gold and silver in dollars or euros, or trying to time its “peak-price” or potential retracements, is missing the far bigger picture.

Yes, gold can and will have pull-backs—but from what price? And yes, metal-poor exchanges can continue to try (with less and less effect) to manipulate the physical metals with paper contracts and leverage, but the end-game will never change.

That is, paper money will continue to be debased to monetize the debts of nations led by financial midgets, which means gold and silver will continue their secular rise.

This is not a bull market in precious metals, but simply a fatal turning point for paper currencies globally.

This explains why central banks to commercial banks are trying to get as much gold as possible today in preparation for the Uh-Oh’s happening now and tomorrow in a system tilting towards a reckoning of historical magnitude.

This, folks, is not sensationalism. This is history 101.

In this context, I will not make price targets in gold or silver for 2026. I never have in years prior, and never will in years to come.

But every day of every year, we have consistently said that these metals will rise materially in the years to come. This never meant in a straight line, but always in a longer-term direction north.

The more speculators worry about timing an entry or exit in metals rather than preserving their wealth in them, the more they risk missing that inflection point wherein real money like gold, with its infinite duration and fixed supply, simply becomes too rare and too expensive for most investors to meaningfully acquire.

Thus, if you are looking to trade in gold or silver, watch the tape, and best of luck to you.

But if you are looking to preserve a portion of your generational wealth in real rather than paper wealth, watch history—not just of yesterday, but the very history you are living in right now.

Authored by Sundance via The Last Refuge,

I don’t care if you support Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis or the Easter Bunny, any American who doesn’t realize the tenuous future of our union, after reviewing the information within this testimony, is going to forever live in a collapsed dystopian nightmare, if they vote for any political representative who supports it.

The House Judiciary Committee has released the [VIDEO] and [TRANSCRIPT] of special prosecutor Jack Smith’s deposition.  What is outlined within it is alarming in the extreme.  I strongly urge anyone with any platform to review the details and quickly highlight the content therein.  There is no time to waste.

Jack Smith appeared before the committee with three personal lawyers to support him.  The content of the deposition is chilling in the extreme.  While many will focus on the granular details of the testimony, I wish to highlight one of the more alarming aspects to the bigger picture.

The predicate for Jack Smith to prosecute President Trump for his efforts to “interfere in the 2020 election”, and thereby “challenge all democratic norms”, essentially boils down to Jack Smith accusing President Trump of participating in a fraud when he challenged the outcome of the 2020 election.

To get beyond President Trump’s first amendment right to free speech, Jack Smith claims Trump knowingly understood that Joe Biden had won the election; President Trump was told by senior Republican advisors that Biden had legitimately won the 2020 election; President Trump rejected the reality of the “truthful information” presented to him, and instead chose to launch a psychological operation against the American people, i.e. “fraud.”

It is the charge of “fraud” which underpins the entirety of the case against Donald Trump, as pursued by Jack Smith.   The charge itself is predicated on definitions of what constitutes truthful information, and within that subset of predicate you begin to realize just how important it is to professional leftists that they control information.

The case was dropped after the results of the November 2024 election, won by President Trump.  However, if President Trump had not won that election, the prosecution would have continued.

Jack Smith notes in his testimony, in the most Machiavellian way, that his primary prosecution approach was to present “Republican” witnesses like Mike Pence, who Smith cunningly said he could not discuss as he was restricted from revealing grand jury testimony.

Smith was prepared to present witness testimony from Pence and other political “Republicans” who told President Trump that Joe Biden had legitimately won the election, and Trump needed to concede.  This testimony then forms the baseline for the definition of “truthful information” that Trump rejected out of a malice mindset to continue clinging to power.

In essence, Smith defines what is “truth” (Biden won), then outlines how that truthful information was delivered and how President Trump dismissed it. Therefore, President Trump’s “mens-rea”, or state of mind, was one of promoting an intentional falsehood.  According to the Lawfare approach selected by Smith, this mindset is the predicate that blocks President Trump from using his First Amendment right to speech as a defense.

Intentional fraud is not allowed under the protections of “free speech.”   Jack Smith wanted to prove that President Trump was engaged in intentional fraud, and wanted to prove his mindset therein through the use of Republican political voices who delivered information to President Trump.

Jack Smith sought to define “truth”, and then counter the free speech defense by mob agreement on what constitutes the “truth.”  Under this predicate, President Trump was being prosecuted for a thought crime, and Jack Smith sought to legally prove he knew his thoughts.

The only way Jack Smith could prove fraud would be to prove that President Trump believed the information about Joe Biden winning the election.  Smith sought to prove Trump’s belief by presenting Republican voices who told President Trump he lost.

Whether you like or dislike President Trump, the issue here is alarming when contemplated.

A man tells you a chicken is a frog, you laugh.  The man then brings 15 of your family members to tell you a chicken is a frog. You reject the absurdity of the premise, but the man brings forth hundreds more people to tell you the chicken is a frog, and if you do not accept that Chickens are Frogs, you will be defined as mentally impaired, institutionalized and become a ward of the state.

[Insert any similar metaphor needed, including “what is a woman.”]

When we consider the current state of sociological, societal or government manipulation of information, and/or the need for government to control information (mis-dis-mal-information) as an overlay, you can quickly see where this type of legal predicate can take us.  Bizarro world becomes a dystopian nightmare.

Yes, it is also clear that Leftists, inside that closed-door committee hearing, are intending to impeach President Trump on these grounds if they successfully win the 2026 midterm election.  However, that is not the critical takeaway from this deposition.   Instead, the critical takeaway is how the Lawfare construct can be twisted and manipulated to create the legal means to the leftist ends.

Stop the Division! 

We cannot allow these communist, Marxist and leftist-minded control agents get back into power.

It’s not about Trump.  It’s about us.

A history professor who taught at Harvard University for 40 years wrote a scathing letter slamming the Ivy League institution over its “exclusion of white males.” 

Professor James Hankins wrote in a piece titled “Whit I’m Leaving Harvard” that his decision to retire “was not a sudden one,” and that he’d made up his mind in 2021 after the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and George Floyd riots – both of which dramatically changed Harvard’s graduate admissions process.

“In reviewing graduate student applicants in the fall of 2020 I came across an outstanding prospect who was a perfect fit for our program. In past years this candidate would have risen immediately to the top of the applicant pool,” he wrote. “In 2021, however, I was told informally by a member of the admissions committee that ‘that’ (meaning admitting a white male) was ‘not happening this year,” 

Hankins said that in another instance, a white male student who he described as “literally the best” at Harvard – and who won the prize for graduating senior with the best overall academic record – was also rejected from the school’s graduate program because “He too was a white male.”

“I called around to friends at several universities to find out why on earth he had been rejected,” Hankins continued. “Everywhere it was the same story: Graduate admissions committees around the country had been following the same unspoken protocol as ours.”

“The one exception I found to the general exclusion of white males had begun life as a female.“

The deal was an even playing field, not extremely tilted in the other direction.

They broke the deal.

Therefore, there is no deal. https://t.co/ZDraFvZbYl

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 29, 2025

Hankins gave his last lecture at the school two weeks ago, after finishing out a four-year retirement contract he signed in 2021 which has now expired. 

Hankins called Harvard’s COVID restrictions “tyrannous invasions of private life” – as professors were forced to lecture in masks and give seminars on Zoom. 

On top of that – he decried Harvard’s dropping their “two-book standard” of requiring staff to have published two books to prove their expertise in a subject area, blaming “feminist activists” 

History professor James Hankins taught at Harvard for 40 years. (Sophie Park/Bloomberg)

“The two-book standard would be shelved in the late 1990s when we were under increasing pressure to hire more women faculty,” he wrote, adding “Feminist activists, at Harvard as elsewhere, were demanding that half of all new appointments be women. That, they claimed, was what liberal standards of equality required.“

Hankins wrote that women previously made up less than 10% of PhDs in the history department – however “equality required that standards be lowered.”

“Feminists denied vociferously that this was happening,” he continued, adding “The real problem, they said, was the inability of men properly to value female scholarship.”

“Soon the department was promoting an ever higher percentage of junior faculty,” he wrote. “The dynamic was similar to Congress voting to restrain its own spending.”

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Former New York Times reporter and Howard University professor Nikole Hannah-Jones has long been controversial as a writer who expressly rejects objectivity and neutrality in journalism. That was most evident in her “1619 Project,” which was ridiculed by historians and law professors in claiming that slavery was the driving force behind American independence. Nevertheless, the project was awarded the Pulitzer Prize despite glaring historical errors. Yet, this month, Hannah-Jones is back on the pages of the New York Times again rewriting history. This time, she is praising cop-killer and 1960s revolutionary Assata Shakur.

Hannah-Jones has been a lightning rod in her writings, from declaring “all journalism is activism” to spreading conspiracy theories against the police.

Yet, mainstream media, including the Times, has run interference for Hannah-Jones, including the dean of the University of North Carolina trying to shut down criticism by reminding a reporter that they must all defend Hannah-Jones.

Hannah-Jones’s latest project of historical revision is a sorrowful memorial to Shakur, which shows the same disregard for facts in favor of a preferred narrative.

Born JoAnne Deborah Byron (and later adopting the names of Joanne Chesimard and Shakur), the violent revolutionary was a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army.

In 1977, she killed New Jersey police officer Werner Foerster, 34, a U.S. Army Vietnam veteran who left behind a widow and a young son.

She later escaped prison and fled to Cuba, where she died earlier this year. In 2005, she was declared a domestic terrorist. In 2013, the Obama Administration put her on the most wanted list.

You would know little of that from the New York Times column. After all, all journalism is activism, according to Hannah-Jones, and, if the facts do not fit the narrative, the facts have to go.

In her column, Hannah-Jones seems to dismiss the conviction as the result of an “all-white” jury. What is omitted is that Shakur had a long and violent criminal record. She was previously shot in the stomach during what was believed to be a drug-connected crime at the Statler Hilton in Manhattan. 

She was sought in other crimes, including a 1971 bank robbery. When asked, Shakur later shrugged off such crimes as a type of racial reparations: “There were expropriations, there were bank robberies.”

Police car after grenade attack

She was also linked to a grenade attack that injured two police officers after being identified by witnesses. In 1972, she was identified by Monsignor John Powis as one of the suspects in the armed robbery at Our Lady of the Presentation Church in Brownsville, Brooklyn. During the robbery, the priest was told “We usually just blow the heads off White men.”

She was also tied to the murder and ambushing of police officers for years before she was stopped on May 2, 1973 on the New Jersey turnpike by State Trooper James Harper who was backed up by Trooper Werner Foerster in a second patrol vehicle. The resulting shootout left Harper wounded and Foerster dead.

Her trials spanned a variety of charges ranging from bank robbery to kidnapping to attempted murder, and other felonies. However, while there were acquittals and a mistrial (due to a pregnancy) on different charges, she was ultimately convicted of murder before her escape.

Yet, the Times and Hannah-Jones brush over that history to gush about Shakur and the effort to shield her, even describing the criminal network as akin to the famed system used to free slaves before the Civil War: “Shakur had been hidden in the United States for several years by a sort of Underground Railroad.”

The Times column bewails how “freedom came with shattering costs for her and her family.” Not a single line of sentiment for the widow and son that her victim left behind in New Jersey, let alone the other victims in murders and attacks that she was connected to as part of the Black Liberation Army.

Of course, such sentiment is not allowed for true victims.

For example, Hannah-Jones was again published by the New York Times, warning in a column that memorials to Charlie Kirk are “dangerous.”

Hannah-Jones has also chastised other writers for covering shoplifting stories because “this is how you legitimize the carceral state.”

Yet, the New York Times is still actively involved in projects to rewrite history with Hannah-Jones. This is the same newspaper that barred columns from Senator Tom Cotton for arguing for the deployment of National Guard troops to quell violent riots, but published columns by “Beijing’s enforcer” in Hong Kong and a University of Rhode Island professor who previously defended the murder of a conservative protester.

It is the same newspaper that forced out a variety of editors who published opposing viewpoints or challenged biased coverage and journalistic activism.

The Times column ends with a line that is breathtaking in its ahistorical and amoral message: “Shakur, who saw herself as an escaped slave, died free.”

A convicted murderer and wanted terrorist died in one of the most blood-soaked, repressive regimes in the world . . . but Hannah-Jones and the New York Times want everyone to know that she “died free.”

That is comforting. As for Werner Foerster, he just died and was not mentioned once by name in the Times column.

Israeli media is reporting that Israel and the United States have reached an understanding to give Hamas a two-month ultimatum to finally and fully disarm. The reports say the agreement came immediately after an overnight meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago at the start of the week.

The move is being described as a fixed deadline rather than an opening for negotiations. Israeli and US teams are already reportedly working simultaneously to determine what they describe as “practical disarmament.” This after Hamas has effectively been defeated since it launched the brutal Oct.7, 2023 terror assault on southern Israel.

Source: Washington Post/Getty Images

Another key focus is the dismantling of Hamas’s underground tunnel network throughout Gaza, which Israeli officials consider a core element of the group’s military strength.

Hamas has throughout the Gaza war proven itself effective in guerilla and insurgency tactics, utilizing small teams to maneuver quickly in and out of the tunnels, even at times taking out IDF tanks with IEDs. Sometimes bombs are even attached to Israeli armor vehicles by hand in these ambushes, after which a Hamas militant darts back into an underground tunnel, as has been demonstrated in various videos.

Sources quoted by Israel Hayom said Israeli officials doubt Hamas that would be willing or able to relinquish most of its weapons or military capabilities within the two-month window.

From the perspective of Hamas leadership, the moment it fully gives up its weapons means the group is effectively dead and will have no more influence to govern in the future.

But this is also exactly what the US-Israeli plan and the ceasefire calls for: the effective end of Hamas rule in governance in the Gaza Strip forever.

PM Netanyahu while giving media interviews during his December US trip described that Hamas still possesses “around 60,000” Kalashnikov rifles and “hundreds of kilometers” of tunnels.

He has vowed that Hamas disarmament can be achieved “the easy way” or the hard way – that is through military force. But as of last summer, Hamas was insistent that it will never give up its weapons.

There’s also the possibility that Hamas leadership won’t be able to induce all of its fighters and ‘ground troops’ to give up their weapons – again, as they would fear being tracked down and killed by Israeli forces.