Politics & Diplomacy
Kushner and Blair take the Gaza plan to Israel and Egypt
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The Newsdesk gathers reporting from wire services and primary sources and rewrites every story in-house before publication. How our journalism is made →
Jared Kushner arrives in Israel on Sunday with the two men who run the Board of Peace, the first stop on a trip meant to move a Gaza plan that stalled almost the moment it was announced, the Associated Press reported.
Travelling with him are Nickolay Mladenov, the board's high representative, and Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who sits on its executive board. From Israel the delegation flies to Cairo.
Axios, whose correspondent Barak Ravid reported the trip first, described it as Kushner's first visit to Israel since January.
Cairo holds the substance. A Palestinian technocratic body — the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza — has met in the Egyptian capital for months, and under the American-brokered ceasefire it is the administration that takes the Strip when Israel leaves.
What the delegation cannot carry with it is agreement on when that happens.
President Donald Trump announced this month that Hamas had accepted the disarmament plan, whose text has Israeli forces withdrawing and power passing gradually to a Palestinian administration.
Benjamin Netanyahu answered that his army would not leave until Hamas "has completely disarmed" — a rare public break with an administration he seldom crosses.
A senior Israeli official, unnamed, went further in the Israeli press: no withdrawal from the positions the army now holds inside Gaza before what Israel itself judges to be genuine disarmament.
Sequencing is the whole argument. The plan is written as an exchange, and Israel reads it as a precondition.
An official of the Board of Peace, also unnamed, told the Associated Press the visit would show a determination to see "peace, prosperity and sustainable security" emerge in a demilitarised Gaza.
The trip lands on a month in which the killing slowed without stopping. Deaths recorded by the health ministry in Gaza fell from 47 in the week to 3 August to eight in the week to 10 August, Al Jazeera reported, and Israeli fire still took lives in Deir al-Balah inside that second week.
The rest of the plan waits on the same sequence — the international force, the reconstruction money, the contractor and severance payments written into clause five of the roadmap.
Every one of them is drafted for a Gaza that the committee in Cairo governs. That committee has not yet taken office.
%20(cropped).jpg?width=640)
