US Press
Washington reads a Gaza meeting nobody expected and a deadline nobody kept
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
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What Washington is reading on Monday morning, from the American front pages and the shops that brief them.
The New York Times ran two Middle East leads. One reported Jared Kushner meeting Hamas's leaders in Egypt to advance Trump's Gaza plan before seeing Benjamin Netanyahu. The other reported that Washington and Tehran blew through their own deadline for a broad deal to end the Iran war, with the two sides still far apart.
The Washington Post carried the same trip with the Israeli half in front: Kushner meets Hamas, and is expected in Jerusalem on Monday to see a prime minister who rejected the fifteen-point plan last week.
Axios had the room's contents. Barak Ravid reported, from a source with direct knowledge, that Hamas's leaders used the meeting to restate a commitment to disarm and demilitarise Gaza while Kushner pressed for tangible steps.
Ravid's colleagues separately published the story of a secret American backchannel to Iran's Revolutionary Guard, opened in May when US negotiators could not tell whether the people across the table spoke for the Guard at all.
The Hill covered the bill. Senator Ruben Gallego rejected the administration's request for another $17 billion in Iran war costs in the sentence now circulating in Washington: giving a drunk more money and hoping he stops drinking.
The loudest think-tank argument came from Responsible Statecraft, the magazine of the Quincy Institute, which argues for American military restraint. Nick Cleveland-Stout reported that the Hanover Institute for Public Policy — a hundred-odd anonymous reports on AIPAC, Israel's army and starvation in Gaza — was built by an advertising contractor for the Israeli government, and engineered to be read by chatbots rather than people.
Underneath all of it, the Gaza file moved only in Cairo and Jerusalem. Nothing in Monday's American press describes a single truck, crossing or withdrawal changed by any of it.
