JERUSALEM — The Gaza agreement has never had an answer to one question: what makes Israel move. On Monday it got one, and it is not diplomatic. It is October 27.
Jared Kushner spent more than four hours with Benjamin Netanyahu pressing him to back the American plan and, in the phrasing attributed to him, not to create obstacles. Netanyahu’s response, according to an Israeli source cited by CNN, was that adhering to the plan before Israel’s Knesset elections would be problematic, that it could damage him with his own base, and that he was not prepared to make concessions on Gaza until the vote. Hamas, he said, should move first. Tony Blair and Nickolay Mladenov, who had sat with Kushner opposite Hamas in Egypt the day before, were in the room for this one too.
That is a more specific obstacle than any Netanyahu has previously named, and a more defensible one. Israelis vote on October 27, and the arithmetic is close enough to make the reluctance rational rather than merely convenient.
Polling through the first half of August put Netanyahu’s coalition at roughly 50 seats against about 60 for the opposition, with a Channel 12 survey leaving the anti-Netanyahu bloc one seat short of a governing majority without Arab parties. Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar took 24 to Likud’s 22 in that count, though a later poll had Likud back in front. Neither bloc has reached the 61 seats a government requires. In a race decided at the margin, the marginal voter Netanyahu needs is on his right, and what that voter wants is not a withdrawal from Gaza.
So the plan’s enforcement gap now has a shape. Kushner asked Hamas on Sunday to convert its disarmament pledge into concrete, verifiable steps. Hamas had already dissolved its Government Work Committee in July and handed administration to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza. What Kushner heard in Jerusalem a day later was that the other side of the exchange is unavailable for ten weeks, and that the sequencing Israel prefers puts Hamas first regardless.
Eastern Herald reported in early August that analysts considered the withdrawal conditions Netanyahu had set to be constructed so that they could not be satisfied. Monday’s readout does not contradict that reading so much as date it. The conditions may or may not be impossible in principle. They are, on this account, unavailable in practice until the ballots are counted.
The sourcing here deserves stating plainly. The substance of what passed between the two men comes from a single unnamed Israeli source speaking to CNN. Neither Netanyahu’s office nor Kushner’s has given an on-record account of the four hours, and no American official has confirmed that the exchange took the form described. The meeting itself is not in dispute. The characterisation of it rests on one person’s account of a private conversation, relayed by someone with an interest in how it is understood.
What is not known is whether Kushner left with anything. There is no indication of a commitment, a timetable, or a mechanism, and nothing to suggest the American position on sequencing has shifted or that Israel’s has. Nor is it clear what Washington intends to do with the answer it received. An administration that wanted movement before October would have to spend leverage on an ally in the middle of an election; an administration content to wait would be conceding that its own plan is on hold until a foreign electorate has voted.
Hamas, meanwhile, is being asked to begin decommissioning weapons during precisely the window in which the party across the table has said it will not reciprocate. Whether it does so, having already given up the thing it could not take back, is the question the next ten weeks will answer.
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