Politics & Diplomacy
Kushner met Hamas's Khalil al-Hayya in Cairo before seeing Netanyahu
Image credit: Jared Kushner — US Mission to the European Union / Wikimedia Commons · License
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 sat across a table from the leader of Hamas in Cairo on Sunday, then flew to Israel to put what he heard to Benjamin Netanyahu.
Khalil al-Hayya, the movement's political leader and chief negotiator, attended the talks with Kushner, the fellow American envoy Steve Witkoff and Nickolay Mladenov, who directs the Board of Peace, the Associated Press reported. Officials from Egypt, Qatar and Turkey were in the room.
It is the second known direct meeting between representatives of this US administration and Hamas, and it happened because the plan both sides say they accept has stopped moving.
What each side is refusing#
Axios's Barak Ravid, citing a source with direct knowledge, reported that Hamas's leaders restated their commitment to disarm and demilitarise Gaza, and that Kushner pressed them for tangible steps rather than declarations.
The roadmap runs to fifteen points. Hamas hands its weapons in stages to a Palestinian technocratic committee, Israel halts its attacks and withdraws, and every party has to accept the text before a fourteen-day negotiating period begins.
Netanyahu rejected it on 9 August. "The IDF will not carry out any withdrawal until Hamas is genuinely disarmed," he told his cabinet.
Hamas's condition is the mirror image. It wants the attacks stopped and Israeli forces back behind the yellow line, which they crossed months ago and beyond which they hold roughly 60 percent of the Strip.
Kushner, Mladenov and Tony Blair were due at the prime minister's office on Monday.
For the two million people the plan is written about, nothing has moved. The ceasefire's second phase has not begun, the army's line is where it was, and the men who decide when it moves were in Cairo on Sunday and in Jerusalem on Monday.
%20(cropped).jpg?width=640)
