Jared Kushner delivers a statement to the media alongside U.S. Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff and U.S. Vice President JD Vance, near Kiryat Gat, on October 21, 2025. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
President Trump’s envoy, Jared Kushner, blames Israeli elections for stalled Gaza disarmament and reconstruction plan.
By World Israel News Staff
US special envoy Jared Kushner has publicly criticized Israel’s handling of postwar arrangements in Gaza, saying the country’s approaching Knesset election is complicating Washington’s effort to secure Hamas’s disarmament and move ahead with a broader plan for the territory.
Speaking to reporters Sunday in Kyiv, where he and fellow White House envoy Steve Witkoff were holding talks on ending the Russia-Ukraine war, Kushner said Washington and Jerusalem fundamentally share the same objective for Gaza but are divided over how to get there.
“I think we agree with the Israelis on the end state for Gaza,” Kushner said.
He then attributed some of the current disagreements to Israel’s October 27 election.
“They just have crazy elections, and that makes them a little irrational in certain regards,” Kushner said.
The comments amounted to an unusually open criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government from a senior member of President Donald Trump’s foreign-policy team, which has spent months trying to advance the next stage of the US-backed Gaza peace framework.
At the center of the dispute is a plan negotiated through the Trump-led Board of Peace that would require Hamas and other armed factions to give up their weapons, dismantle military infrastructure and surrender control of Gaza to a Palestinian technocratic administration.
Hamas accepted a 15-point roadmap on July 30 that calls for phased demilitarization, international verification and an Israeli withdrawal tied to progress in removing weapons and military infrastructure. The framework would ultimately place civilian and security authority under the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza.
Israel, however, remains deeply skeptical that Hamas will actually disarm and has resisted steps that could limit its freedom to conduct strikes in Gaza before the terrorist group’s military capabilities have been eliminated.
That disagreement has slowed implementation of the plan.
Kushner suggested Sunday that the scale of the problem itself has also proved greater than US officials initially understood.
“We’re now starting to understand the scope of the militarization of Gaza,” he said, adding that it was “beyond your comprehension.”
The envoy said Washington had worked with Hamas for more than four months and had obtained the group’s commitment to demilitarize, but acknowledged that implementing such an agreement would be considerably more difficult than securing it on paper.
The US plan envisions Hamas weapons being inventoried and removed or placed under the control of a Palestinian authority, while tunnels, weapons-production facilities and other military infrastructure are dismantled. An international verification mechanism and a multinational stabilization force would oversee the process as Israeli forces gradually withdraw.
Kushner had sounded considerably more optimistic during a visit to Israel last month.
After meeting Netanyahu in Jerusalem in August, he predicted that the first movement on Hamas’s weapons could occur relatively quickly.
“We could be seeing progress… in as little as 30 days,” Kushner told Fox News at the time.
But negotiations produced no breakthrough.
Netanyahu maintained that Israeli forces would not withdraw from Gaza until Hamas was demilitarized, while Hamas insisted that Israel fulfill its own obligations under the agreement, including ending attacks and withdrawing forces in conjunction with the disarmament process.
The impasse has increasingly become intertwined with Israeli domestic politics.
Netanyahu’s coalition partners have stepped up calls for encouraging Palestinians to voluntarily leave Gaza as the election approaches. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir recently presented a plan intended to facilitate the voluntary departure of large numbers of Gazans, while Defense Minister Israel Katz has said Israel is prepared to enable Palestinians to leave by land, sea and air.
The proposals have drawn opposition from Arab and Muslim governments and are at odds with provisions of the US-backed peace framework rejecting forced displacement. Netanyahu has supported allowing Palestinians who wish to leave Gaza to do so, while distancing himself from proposals to reestablish Israeli settlements in the enclave.
Meanwhile, Israeli military operations in Gaza have continued despite the ceasefire reached in October 2025. Israel says many of the strikes target Hamas members who pose threats to Israeli forces or were involved in the October 7, 2023, attacks.
Those operations have become another obstacle to implementation of the disarmament arrangement. Mediators have said Hamas is unlikely to begin surrendering weapons while Israeli strikes continue, while Israel argues that halting military activity before Hamas is disarmed would leave the group free to rebuild.
US officials are now increasingly resigned to the possibility that significant progress will have to wait until after Israelis vote on October 27.
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