Politics & Diplomacy
Kushner says Hamas could start handing over weapons within thirty days
Image credit: Jared Kushner — Andrea Hanks / The White House, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain · License
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Jared Kushner put a clock on the Gaza roadmap on Monday night, hours after four hours with Benjamin Netanyahu produced no breakthrough.
"We could be seeing progress in as little as 30 days, hopefully starting to take some of the weapons out, and hopefully filling in some of the tunnels as well," the American envoy told Fox News from Tel Aviv. He put the tunnel work at sixty to ninety days.
It is the first timetable any principal has attached to the disarmament sequence since Netanyahu rejected the fifteen-point plan on 9 August.
What the two men agreed, and what they did not#
The prime minister's office described the conversation as deep and constructive and said the two sides would set up two working groups, with disarmament handled promptly and before any reconstruction begins.
A senior Israeli official put the same sentence more bluntly to the Times of Israel: the agreement was that there would be no redeployment and no reconstruction until Hamas is disarmed.
That is the position Netanyahu held before Kushner arrived. The Washington Post and the Guardian both reported the meeting produced no breakthrough on the stalled deal.
Axios's Barak Ravid, citing an American official, reported the other half of the conversation: Washington wants Israel to take small steps in Gaza to test whether Hamas's commitment to begin disarming is genuine, rather than wait for the whole arsenal at once.
An American general in the middle#
NBC News reported that the two men agreed an American general should verify the demilitarisation. Major General Jasper Jeffers has commanded the International Stabilisation Force since his appointment in January, and has said the force is planned at 20,000 soldiers and 12,000 police.
Verification by a foreign officer is what turns a declaration into a sequence, and it is also the point at which two irreconcilable demands meet. Israel wants the weapons gone before it moves. Hamas wants the army moved before the weapons go.
An Arab diplomat told the Times of Israel that Hamas would begin disarming only if Netanyahu committed publicly to the plan, and that the movement had asked the Board of Peace to compel Israel to accept the framework it says it already accepts.
The Israeli right reads the same meeting#
Bezalel Smotrich welcomed the prime minister's insistence on dismantling and demilitarising Hamas, then told reporters it was still only half the road, and that Israel had to make its position clear to its friends in the American administration.
Donald Trump, asked about the file in Washington, said his administration has its own relationship with Hamas and that the movement is giving up its guns.
For the people the roadmap is written about, the thirty days start from a line the army has not moved. Israeli forces still hold roughly 60 percent of the Strip beyond the yellow line, the ceasefire's second phase has not begun, and nothing in Monday's readouts changes either fact today.
