Kushner lands in Israel after Hamas talks as eight ministers blame Israel for the stall
After Hamas talks in Egypt, Jared Kushner flew on to meet Benjamin Netanyahu. Eight foreign ministers blamed Israel for blocking the US-backed Gaza roadmap as settlers pitched new West Bank outpost tents.
Geopolitics··Midday
Kushner flies from Hamas to Netanyahu
Donald Trump's Middle East envoy Jared Kushner sat with a Hamas delegation led by the movement's new leader, Khalil al-Hayya, in Egypt on Sunday, then landed in Israel on Monday to see Benjamin Netanyahu. A Palestinian official told the BBC that Board of Peace envoys Nickolay Mladenov and Tony Blair joined the session alongside Egyptian, Qatari and Turkish mediators; no official statement followed. Kushner also met President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi while in Egypt. The contact was the first at this level since last year's ceasefire. Israel had rejected the Board of Peace's 15-point plan a week earlier. Netanyahu has said the Israeli military will carry out no withdrawal until Hamas is genuinely disarmed, and he faces an October election with coalition partners pressing for a harsher line in Gaza.[1]
Eight ministers assign Israel the blame
The foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Turkey, Indonesia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates said Israel's rejection of the US-backed roadmap threatens Trump's effort to end the war in Gaza. Their statement landed a week after Israel turned the plan down. The ministers wrote that rejecting the roadmap is an explicit refusal to move into implementation of the Comprehensive Plan, and they assigned Israel direct and full responsibility for any consequences of continued rejection, obstruction, delay or non-compliance. The roadmap, unveiled by Trump's Board of Peace in May, pairs a phased decommissioning of armed groups' weapons with matching phases of Israeli withdrawal; Hamas endorsed it late last month. Netanyahu rejected it on 9 August, saying there would be no Palestinian state in Gaza or the West Bank while he remains prime minister.[2]
New outpost tents go up near Ramallah
Israeli settlers pitched tents on Sunday in Wadi Zeytun, near Umm Safa northwest of Ramallah, and the same day began a separate outpost in Burqa, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Ramallah reported. The Palestinian news agency Wafa reported the same encroachment. If the new outpost holds, Wafa said, the number surrounding the two villages will rise to six. Settlers have taken roughly 4,700 of Umm Safa's 4,800 dunams and 10,000 of Burqa's 12,000, according to the correspondent. In Qusra, south of Nablus, a settler siege of three families entered a second week, with 15 Palestinians, two of them children, confined to their homes; municipal crews restored their electricity and water. Al Jazeera also reported settler attacks in Beit Imrin, where Israeli forces arrested nine people, and in Hebron's al-Jaabari neighbourhood, where the Palestinian Red Crescent said some of the injured had been shot.[3]
