CAIRO — Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law and Middle East envoy, held a rare face-to-face meeting Sunday with Hamas political chief Khalil al-Hayya in Egypt and is scheduled to press Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday to accept a 15-point road map for Gaza that Israel rejected last week.
The back-to-back sessions represent the Trump administration's most direct effort yet to salvage a ceasefire framework that would require Hamas to surrender its heaviest weapons and Israeli forces to withdraw from most of a territory they now largely control. More than 10 months after major military operations formally ended, roughly 2 million people in Gaza and any prospect of reconstruction hinge on the sequencing dispute — whether Israel withdraws first or Hamas disarms first.
The Cairo meeting
The Sunday session with al-Hayya ran more than two hours and included former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Nickolay Mladenov, director of Trump's Board of Peace, alongside officials from Egypt, Qatar and Turkey, according to a regional official and a Hamas official who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters. Kushner also met Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in New Alamein.
Hamas afterward called on mediators and the Board of Peace to "compel" Israel to approve the road map. A Hamas official told The Associated Press that the group is committed and awaiting the start of a 14-day negotiation period to set an implementation timetable — a clock that requires every party's approval to begin.
A source with knowledge of the talks told CBS News that the agenda included "beginning to transfer all governing responsibilities to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, ensuring Hamas has no future governing role in Gaza, facilitating Israeli withdrawals and deploying an international stabilising force to the region."
Where Netanyahu stands
Netanyahu rejected the 15-point plan last week in a rare public break with the Trump administration, Israel's closest ally, saying Israeli forces would not retreat from any position in Gaza until Hamas is fully disarmed. Israel also wants surrendered weapons destroyed rather than stored by a Palestinian technocratic committee and opposes any role for Turkey and Qatar in verifying Hamas compliance, the BBC reported.
Israeli forces have advanced beyond the so-called yellow line — a boundary that was never precisely defined — and now control about 60 percent of Gaza. In May, Netanyahu said the next step was to move to 70 percent control, "tightening the grip" on Hamas "from every direction."
Arab pressure builds
Eight regional powers — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia — issued a joint statement Sunday saying "Israel now bears responsibility for obstructing the efforts to bring peace in Gaza." The foreign ministers called on the Board of Peace and the United States to take "immediate and concrete measures" to prevent any party from blocking implementation.
The Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, cited by Al Jazeera, reported that U.S. officials view Israel as "playing games" and that Kushner's assignment Monday is not to reopen negotiations. A source told the paper Kushner "is not coming to Israel for another round of diplomatic ping pong" but "is coming to close."
Netanyahu's constraints
Netanyahu's coalition includes ministers pressing for a harder line on Gaza and faces a national election on Oct. 27, constraints that narrow his room to concede on withdrawal timing. His Likud party responded to the Arab statement Sunday by claiming that "Arab states want to topple" Netanyahu so that centrist challenger Gadi Eisenkot and center-left party leader Yair Golan "will give them everything they want. That will not happen." Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has called publicly for nightly "targeted eliminations" of "30 or 40" people in Gaza, the BBC reported. No right-leaning U.S. outlet contributed to today's dossier; the Israeli-government counterargument here is drawn from wire reporting.
The ceasefire took effect Oct. 10, 2025; more than 1,200 Palestinians have been killed since, according to Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures the United Nations considers reliable. The third anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack that started the war falls three weeks before Netanyahu faces voters.