Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, plans to visit Israel next week with Nickolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace’s high representative for Gaza, for talks on advancing the US plan for the Palestinian enclave, Axios reported on Thursday.
The planned trip would be Kushner’s first visit to Israel since January, the news outlet said in a report citing five sources familiar with the plan.
Kushner and Mladenov intend to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials in an effort to reach understandings on implementing the plan’s next stages over the coming months, it added.
Netanyahu on Sunday rejected a 15-point Gaza plan approved by the Board of Peace and accepted by Hamas, insisting that the Palestinian resistance group must be disarmed before any further Israeli withdrawal from the besieged enclave.
His remarks came despite a roadmap issued by the board on July 31 which calls for Hamas’ disarmament and a gradual Israeli withdrawal to proceed in parallel.
Axios quoted a US official as saying that “we see eye-to-eye on the strategic goal, but Israel has expressed some doubts about the plan and we want to talk to them in order to make sure we are coordinated.”
Netanyahu’s political needs
The White House does not want the Israeli elections to stall the implementation of the next phase of the plan, the report said.
Another US official said the Trump administration understands Netanyahu’s political needs.
“We have no problem with it as long as he continues to do what we ask — especially regarding restraining attacks in Gaza,” the official was quoted as saying.
Hamas official Ghazi Hamad previously told Anadolu that the agreement stipulated the “storage of heavy weapons” under the authority of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, in parallel with progress on the other components of the deal.
The roadmap also provides for transferring Gaza’s administration to a Palestinian technocratic committee, deploying an international stabilisation force and placing weapons under the national committee’s authority with international oversight.
These measures would proceed alongside a phased Israeli withdrawal and reconstruction.
Since October 2023, Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has killed around 73,000 Palestinians and injured more than 174,000, most of them women and children. The offensive has also damaged or destroyed nearly 90 percent of the Palestinian enclave’s infrastructure.
