Kushner Meets Hamas Leaders in Cairo to Push Gaza Disarmament Forward
US presidential envoy Jared Kushner met Hamas leaders in Egypt on Sunday, August 16, alongside Trump administration peace board officials, pressing the group to follow through on its commitment to disarm in Gaza. The meeting, reported by Axios, brought together a notable cast: Trump's Board of Peace high representative Nickolay Mladenov and board member Tony Blair joined Kushner on the US side. Hamas political leader Khalil al-Hayya attended alongside Egyptian intelligence chief Hassan Rashad, Qatari diplomat Ali Al Thawadi, and a senior Turkish official.
Neither Hamas nor the US envoy had publicly confirmed the meeting took place as of reporting time.
The talks aimed to salvage a 15-point, US-backed roadmap for Hamas to disarm in Gaza and Israel to withdraw from the Palestinian territory, according to PBS NewsHour. A source told Axios the objective was translating Hamas's disarmament into concrete, verifiable steps. Diplomatic sources told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity, that Kushner pushed specifically for Hamas to disarm and to give up any future role in running Gaza. A source with knowledge of the talks told AFP that Hamas voiced its commitment to the disarmament agreement during the meeting.
The broader context here is a peace plan that has won nominal acceptance from both sides but remains deadlocked over how to actually carry it out. Trump announced the previous month that there had been a breakthrough in his plan to end the war, to which both Israel and Hamas had agreed. Hamas said it accepted the plan to avoid the war restarting, adding that it would only follow through if Israel first met its own commitments, including withdrawing its forces and halting attacks. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the latest roadmap as "unacceptable." Trump, for his part, said Israel was "very happy" about the disarmament announcement by Hamas.
Trump's plan calls for the immediate end of military operations in Gaza, Hamas disarming as Israeli troops withdraw from the enclave, and Gaza being rebuilt under a new civilian Palestinian administration — meaning a government run by Palestinian civilians rather than armed factions. Kushner's trip to Israel and Egypt was an effort to narrow differences over that roadmap. Earlier in the visit, Kushner met with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, according to el-Sisi's office, while al-Hayya met separately with intelligence chief Rashad, per Reuters.
A senior Israeli official said Kushner and Mladenov were scheduled to meet with Netanyahu on Monday. Israel, according to that official, was concerned about Washington's demand to end targeted assassinations of Hamas fighters in Gaza — a provision that goes to the core of Israel's military doctrine in the territory.
The meeting also took place against a backdrop of renewed violence. Israel resumed its air strikes on Gaza in the days before the meeting despite an October 2025 ceasefire, a formal agreement to halt fighting. At least five Palestinians were injured after an Israeli strike hit a tent encampment in Khan Younis, and a separate air strike hit an apartment in the Nuseirat refugee camp wounding several people, medics said. More than 1,250 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israeli fire since the ceasefire took effect, with the overall death toll since October 2023 exceeding 73,300, according to Palestinian official sources.
The meeting itself broke a longstanding taboo. The United States had for years refused contact with Hamas, which it classifies as a terrorist organisation, but the Trump administration had grown increasingly willing to engage the group directly to end the conflict. The inclusion of Mladenov and Blair alongside Kushner signals an attempt to lend institutional weight to the disarmament track, while the presence of Egyptian, Qatari, and Turkish officials points to the regional mediating architecture — the network of Middle Eastern governments working behind the scenes to broker a deal — that underpins the process.
Looking at what this means for the trajectory of the conflict, several tensions are unresolved. The sequencing question — whether disarmament proceeds at the same time as Israeli withdrawal, or one happens before the other — remains contested. Hamas conditions its compliance on Israel's withdrawal and cessation of attacks; Israel demands verifiable disarmament and rejects constraints on targeted strikes. The gap between Hamas voicing commitment in a Cairo meeting and actually surrendering its military capacity is where the roadmap will either hold or fracture. Kushner's scheduled meeting with Netanyahu on Monday will test whether the Israeli side sees the Cairo talks as sufficient progress or as a concession to an adversary that Israel still considers fundamentally illegitimate as a governing actor.
