Nearly 21 months after the outbreak of the latest Israel-Gaza war, a new round of high-level diplomacy aimed at breaking the region’s long-running deadlock has gotten underway in Cairo, with rare high-level talks between a senior U.S. envoy and Hamas leadership.
Jared Kushner, Middle East envoy for former U.S. President Donald Trump and head of the globally focused Trump-led Board of Peace, held discussions Sunday with a Hamas delegation led by the group’s new top leader Khalil al-Hayya, a Palestinian official confirmed to the BBC. The meeting marks the first senior-level engagement of its kind since a ceasefire took effect in the Gaza Strip last October.
The talks centered on advancing the 15-point U.S.-backed Gaza peace plan that the Board of Peace agreed to last month, which includes provisions for the complete disarmament of Hamas and all other armed factions in Gaza, a full withdrawal of Israeli troops from the enclave, and the reconstruction of Gaza under a new civilian Palestinian administration. Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly rejected the framework, defying Washington by insisting that complete, verifiable disarmament of Hamas must be completed before any Israeli troop withdrawal can proceed. Netanyahu’s position has held despite ongoing Israeli strikes targeting areas of Gaza that have continued in violation of the 2024 ceasefire, with the most recent operations targeting areas the Israeli military claims house Hamas militants in Khan Yunis and Nuseirat.
The current conflict traces its origins to the October 7, 2023, attack led by Hamas on southern Israel that killed approximately 1,200 people and took 251 hostages. Israel’s subsequent large-scale military response has killed more than 73,000 people in Gaza, per health ministry figures verified as reliable by the United Nations. The humanitarian catastrophe that has unfolded has displaced 90% of Gaza’s population, or roughly 1.9 million people, according to UN estimates.
Joining Kushner and Hamas representatives in Sunday’s Cairo talks were Board of Peace envoys Nickolay Mladenov and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, alongside mediators from Egypt, Qatar and Turkey—three longstanding players in regional Gaza peace efforts. No official communique has been published following the closed-door discussions, which sources indicate also covered the expansion of life-saving humanitarian access to Gaza, alongside the core issues of weapons decommissioning and troop withdrawal. On the same day of the Hamas talks, Kushner also held a bilateral meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a key regional mediator for the conflict.
Netanyahu’s rejection of the peace plan drew swift international condemnation Sunday, as eight Muslim-majority nations—Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia—jointly stated that Israel’s position poses a direct threat to the Trump-led Board of Peace’s efforts to broker a lasting end to the conflict. Following the Cairo negotiations, Kushner, Mladenov and Blair are set to travel to meet Netanyahu on Monday to push for progress on the plan, even as deep divisions remain between all parties over the sequencing of core peace provisions.