Kushner meets Netanyahu a day after rare talks with Hamas in Egypt
The 15-point roadmap has been accepted by Hamas and rejected by Israel, which leaves the US envoy shuttling between a party that has signed on to the sequence and a party that has not.
A day after sitting down with Hamas leaders in the Egyptian coastal city of El Alamein, US envoy Jared Kushner met Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on Monday. The Egyptian meeting was the first contact of its kind between Washington and the movement since October 2023.
At the Egyptian session, Kushner pressed the movement for "concrete, verifiable steps" and told it that Gaza "can never again be a source of terror for Israel", according to an account of the talks given by an official. Hamas restated that it stands by the roadmap and that what follows depends on Israel honouring the obligations it carries under the same text.
Kushner was accompanied by Nickolay Mladenov, director-general of the Board of Peace, and by former British prime minister Tony Blair. Egyptian, Qatari and Turkish mediators took part. Separately, the Egyptian presidency said President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi met Kushner in New Alamein and stressed that every party must fulfil what the Gaza agreement requires of it.
The gap the envoy is carrying between the two capitals is not procedural. Netanyahu has said any settlement must leave Hamas "genuinely disarmed", and Israel has rejected the 15-point plan over precisely the two clauses that would sequence that: gradual decommissioning of weapons and the handover of governance in the Strip. Hamas has accepted the plan Israel rejects, and Netanyahu goes to an election in October.
In Cairo, a Hamas delegation led by the movement's leader, Khalil al-Hayya, met Egyptian intelligence chief Hassan Rashad. Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem said the purpose was to brief the mediators on Israeli violations and on what the movement describes as Israel's retreat from the commitments it made at Sharm el-Sheikh.
Gaza's Health Ministry says at least 1,260 people have been killed and more than 4,100 injured in the Strip since the truce took effect in October 2025. That is the count against which a verifiable step is read by the people the plan is written about, and it has kept rising through every round of these meetings.