Kushner’s Gaza Roadmap Runs Into the Hardest Question: Who Will Disarm Hamas?

Kushner’s Gaza Roadmap Runs Into the Hardest Question: Who Will Disarm Hamas?
The latest U.S. push for a Gaza settlement is advancing through high-level meetings, but its central bargain remains sharply difficult: Hamas would have to surrender its military power while Israel considers a broader political and security transition.

U.S. special envoy Jared Kushner met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Aug. 17, one day after holding a two-hour meeting with senior Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya in Egypt. The sequence suggests Washington is testing whether the same 15-point roadmap can bridge fundamentally different priorities: Israel’s insistence on demilitarization and Hamas’s removal from power, versus the need for a Palestinian authority capable of governing Gaza.

Conservative coverage presented the Netanyahu meeting as a direct effort to secure Israeli backing. One headline described Kushner as sitting with Netanyahu “to talk Gaza after 2-hour meeting with Hamas,” emphasizing the unusual proximity of the two engagements. Another reported that “Israel agrees to work with Board of Peace’s demilitarization of Gaza,” framing the plan’s security provisions as the principal measure of progress.

The fuller account casts the discussions as more conditional. Reuters, cited in the report, said the talks were expected to address “dismantling the Hamas terrorist group’s military capabilities,” transferring civilian and security control to a new Palestinian administration, and defining the terms of an Israeli withdrawal. Those objectives overlap with the conservative framing on disarmament, but they expose the unresolved political questions beneath it: who would replace Hamas, how that authority would gain legitimacy, and what guarantees would accompany an Israeli pullback.

The meetings therefore signal diplomatic activity, not a settled agreement. Washington may be moving the parties into the same negotiating framework, but the roadmap’s success depends on converting a shared demand for change into an enforceable sequence of disarmament, governance and withdrawal.