Jared Kushner: Hamas said ‘all the right things’ on Board of Peace Gaza plan — but IDF won’t leave until terror group disarms

Four hours in a room with Netanyahu is not a small ask, and the fact that Kushner spent that long working the phones and the sofas tells you Washington actually wants this deal to hold rather than just look good on a signing table. "Said all the right things" is a very Kushner way of putting it, and it should raise an eyebrow rather than lower one. Hamas has said the right things before. What it hasn't done is put down a single rifle.

The structure here is at least honest about that history. Disarmament first, withdrawal second, and the IDF stays put until the sequence is real rather than promised. That's the correct order of operations after two years of watching ceasefires get treated as intermissions rather than endings. Anyone who thinks Gaza can be stabilized by taking Israel's boot off the ground before Hamas's hand off the trigger hasn't been paying attention to how the last several truces actually ended.

Where this gets tested is in the gap between rhetoric and enforcement. A Board of Peace with Trump's name on it gives the plan weight, but weight isn't the same as leverage on the ground in Khan Younis. Hamas has survived worse pressure than a diplomatic framework by simply outlasting the news cycle. If Washington wants credit for brokering something durable, it needs to be the party that says no cameras, no ribbon-cutting, until weapons are actually turned in and verified, not just discussed over four hours of tea and translation.

Still, there's something refreshing about an American administration that treats "Hamas talks nice" as a data point, not a conclusion. That skepticism, paired with real pressure on Netanyahu to actually engage the process instead of stonewalling it, is closer to a workable Middle East policy than anything we saw for the better part of a decade.