Politics & Diplomacy

Dahlan says Kushner confirmed Israel will halt Gaza attacks from Sunday

Times of Palestine2d ago · 02/08 · 00:15

Published Sunday, August 2, 2026 · 00:15 Jerusalem timeUpdated Sunday, August 2, 2026 · 21:05 Jerusalem time

Photo: Mohammad Dahlan's verified Facebook page (screenshot)

Original Reporting

By TOP Newsdesk · 5 min read

Mohammad Dahlan, the exiled Fatah leader whose back channel to Washington helped unlock the latest Gaza breakthrough, said on Saturday that US envoy Jared Kushner has confirmed to him that Israel agreed to halt its attacks on Gaza from Sunday morning, now that Hamas and the Palestinian factions have approved the fifteen-clause implementation document.

"After Hamas and the Palestinian factions approved the fifteen-clause document, the success of the agreement depends on Israel's full commitment to halting the bombing, the killing, the assassinations and the daily attacks in Gaza," Dahlan wrote on his verified Facebook page minutes after the factions' approval was announced. "Mr.

Jared Kushner confirmed to us that he has agreed with the Israeli side to halt the attacks on Gaza as of tomorrow morning, while we continue our intensive contacts with the American side to guarantee full and secure implementation of the agreement."

The document Dahlan referenced is the fifteen-clause framework drafted with President Trump's Board of Peace for the next phases of the Gaza ceasefire — the plan carried by the Board's Gaza envoy Nickolay Mladenov, built on the "one authority, one law, one weapon" governing principle and anchored in UN Security Council Resolution 2803.

Regional reporting in recent days recorded the factions negotiating final amendments to clauses five and eight before consenting to the full text.

The Times of Israel reported this week that direct contacts between Kushner and Dahlan were credited with the breakthrough in the disarmament talks — the same channel through which, by his account on Saturday, the promise of a halt was relayed.

Dahlan coupled the announcement with a demand aimed at his own side of the ledger.

He called on all factions to commit fully to the agreement, to end armed displays, and to avoid "anything that could hand Israel a pretext to make it fail" — and to prepare, he wrote, "for a phase full of challenges." He closed with the hope that "our people in Gaza witness the beginning of a new phase that restores their hope and confidence in the future," and with confidence in Palestinians' capacity "to overcome, to rebuild Gaza, to protect the West Bank, and to continue the road toward freedom, independence and the establishment of our independent Palestinian state."

Within hours, the definitive version of that promise disappeared.

Dahlan's original post — the one stating Kushner had "agreed with the Israeli side" to halt the attacks as of Sunday morning — was taken down and replaced with markedly softer language: Kushner, the revised statement said, was "working with the Israeli side" to stop the attacks on Gaza, while contacts continued to ensure implementation.

Reuters-syndicated reports carried the revised wording, and the outlet Drop Site News flagged the change. The edit converted a commitment with a deadline into an effort without one.

No public statement from Kushner, the White House or the Israeli government has confirmed any halt; a senior Israeli official told reporters the disarmament offer was insufficient; and Israeli strikes continued through Saturday, killing at least six people including a child, Palestinian medical sources said in accounts carried by Haaretz's live coverage.

What remains on the record is the sequence that produced the original claim: the factions' approval of the fifteen clauses closes the Palestinian side of the framework, and shifts the weight of the agreement's success — as Dahlan's own first sentence framed it — onto Israeli compliance, under an American guarantee whose exact wording its own messenger has now revised once.

The morning after, measured in hope#

By Sunday afternoon, one of the most credible Palestinian voices in the American aid world had written down what the episode felt like from inside Gaza's waiting.

Hani Almadhoun — vice president of philanthropy at UNRWA USA and co-founder of the Gaza Soup Kitchen his family runs in Beit Lahia — wrote on LinkedIn that Dahlan's post "sent a surge of hope through Gaza," and explained why with a sentence that indicts an entire political order: "Official leadership has collapsed — neither Hamas nor the PA can stop the horror — so when a Palestinian leader with real access speaks, people listen, because there's almost no one left to listen to." People "grabbed onto those words like a lifeline," he wrote; they "allowed themselves to breathe." Then, in his words, came the reality check: nobody had confirmed it with Israel, strikes resumed within hours, and the post was "quietly edited afterward — the certainty softened, the promise walked back, with no real acknowledgment of what had happened." Almadhoun was careful where the record requires care — "I don't think Dahlan set out to deceive," he wrote, while noting that Kushner, the promise's other name, has never had to earn Palestinian trust.

His postscript did the accounting the diplomats have not: "Since that post went live, 18 more Palestinians in Gaza have been killed." And his conclusion states the stakes of this story better than any analyst has: the lesson "isn't about any one person's honesty.

It's about who gets to hold Palestinian hope in their hands in the first place, and how little accountability comes with that power."

The Sunday morning Dahlan promised has now come and gone.

By Almadhoun's count and the continuing casualty reports, the halt did not arrive on schedule — and every previous phase of the ceasefire has taught Gaza to measure promises in the frequency of strikes, the reach of aid convoys and the daily count of the dead.

Whatever the American channel is still negotiating, Gaza has already paid the difference between "agreed" and "working on it" in its own people — which is why this newspaper will keep scoring the fifteen-clause bargain the way Almadhoun scores it: not by the eloquence of the promise, but by the silence of the guns.