Jared Kushner is set to travel to Israel and Egypt next week with Board of Peace officials after a Trump administration deal on Gaza ran into Israeli opposition. The trip, announced by an official with the Board of Peace, puts three familiar managers of other people’s misery back on the road: Kushner, board high representative Nickolay Mladenov and executive board member and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. They are due in Israel on Sunday before heading to Cairo, where meetings of a Palestinian technocratic group have been taking place for months.
The official said the meetings would show the determination of Trump and the Board of Peace to "see peace, prosperity and sustainable security emerge" in a demilitarized Gaza where Hamas has ceded control to allow reconstruction of the devastated territory. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because planning for the trip had not been finalized. The language is polished. The machinery underneath is not. Gaza is being discussed as a place to be managed, disarmed and reconstructed by outside officials, while the people who live there remain the object of the plan rather than its authors.
The State Monopoly on the Table
The AP said Kushner was traveling to the Middle East to advance plans for an end to the conflict in Gaza after a deal recently announced by the Trump administration ran into Israeli opposition. Israel has dismissed the deal for Hamas to disarm and Israel to withdraw its forces from the Palestinian territory, marking a rare public display of friction with the Trump administration. Hamas accepted the plan to decommission its weapons, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would not withdraw until Hamas has completely disarmed.
That leaves the same old arrangement in place: armed authorities negotiating over who gets to keep the guns, who gets to move troops, and who gets to rule the territory. The deal had been seen as a potential breakthrough for ending the war in Gaza. It was based on an October ceasefire that ended major military operations and brought about the release of the remaining hostages held in Gaza, but it has stalled on other fronts. The ceasefire stopped the biggest bombardments. It did not produce anything resembling freedom from the systems that produced the war.
Washington, Jerusalem and the Village Under Siege
Reuters reported that a siege of a Palestinian village drew U.S. criticism and that White House officials pressed Netanyahu to publicly condemn the siege. The Reuters report said the U.S. criticism came as Israeli settlers dug in, and that the episode became another point of tension between Washington and Jerusalem. The dispute was not about ending domination. It was about how openly it should be carried out, and by whom.
Jerusalem Post live updates added more of the same institutional choreography. The live updates said the IDF would probe soldiers' conduct in Kusra and investigate the time taken to evacuate extremists. It said, according to N12, the IDF would also look into the manner in which the Palestinian families of the town were evacuated on Thursday after being instructed to leave. The same live updates said Katz ordered the IDF to prepare to transfer West Bank civilian enforcement to police after Kusra chaos, and that the proposed plan would shift responsibility for civilian law enforcement and public order involving the Israeli population in the West Bank from the IDF to the police.
That is the administrative face of control. One arm of the state investigates another. Another arm may take over the paperwork. The families are still the ones told to leave.
Reconstruction, Control and the People Caught Between
The Board of Peace official said the Gaza meetings were meant to show determination to produce "peace, prosperity and sustainable security" in a demilitarized Gaza. The phrase sounds tidy enough for a briefing room. On the ground, it means armed factions, foreign envoys and technocratic committees deciding the terms of life for a population already described as devastated. Hamas has ceded control in the plan’s language, reconstruction is the prize, and disarmament is the entry fee.
The same live updates also said the IDF killed a Hamas commander who held hostages after Oct. 7. Elsewhere in the same package, the updates said the UAE condemned an "aggressive Iranian attack" on Hormuz tankers, that a U.S. Energy Secretary said 9 million barrels of oil pass through Hormuz daily, and that CENTCOM launched a multinational attack drone force as the U.S. adapts to drone warfare. It also carried a report that Yemen's UN envoy warned the Security Council of regional escalation amid Iran-backed Houthi attacks, saying Grundberg said Houthi attacks in Marib, Hadramaut, Mokha and other areas have resulted in military and civilian casualties.
The region keeps getting narrated through security briefings, military probes and diplomatic statements. The people living under those systems get reduced to casualties, hostages, evacuees and bargaining chips. The Board of Peace calls that sustainable security. The states call it progress.