Kushner shuttles between Hamas and Netanyahu, and the Gaza plan moves nowhere

The plan with too many signatures

Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and envoy, spent Sunday in Cairo and Monday in Jerusalem. He came away from both with nothing that moves.

In Cairo he sat for more than two hours with a Hamas delegation led by the group’s political chief, Khalil al-Hayya [6]. It was Kushner’s second known meeting with Hamas, which Washington lists as a terrorist organisation [4]. On Monday he spent three hours with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. An Israeli official said there was no breakthrough [1].

The thing they are all circling is a 15-point roadmap drawn up by Trump’s Board of Peace, the body he set up to run the peace effort. Former British prime minister Tony Blair and veteran UN envoy Nickolay Mladenov both sit on it [1]. The plan is simple to state. Israeli troops pull out of Gaza in stages as Hamas hands over its weapons. An international stabilisation force then works with a new Palestinian police force to hold the ground [2].

Hamas agreed to that plan on 30 July [3]. Eight governments back it. On Sunday the foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Jordan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt issued a joint statement. Israel, they said, now “bears responsibility for obstructing” the plan [2].

Netanyahu rejected the roadmap a week ago and has not moved since. In Monday’s meeting he repeated that there will be no withdrawal and no reconstruction until Hamas is disarmed across the whole strip [1]. Israeli forces are continuing operations in Gaza and hold about 60% of the territory [1]. Hamas says the opposite. Israel must withdraw first, and its own commitments follow [1][4].

So the two sides are arguing about sequence, not substance. Both have said yes to the same destination and no to every route there.

What did come out of Monday was procedure. Netanyahu and the Board of Peace agreed to set up two working groups, one of them on disarmament [1]. They also agreed that an American general would supervise Hamas handing over its weapons [1][3]. That is a change from the roadmap Hamas signed. That version put the handover under the International Stabilization Force, led by US Major General Jasper Jeffers. The weapons were to go to a new Palestinian governing body [3].

Kushner, on Fox News, drew the line the Israeli side wanted. Washington “will not allow Gaza to be rebuilt until the demilitarisation occurs,” he said [5]. He added that the United States would not “restrict Israel’s right to defend itself” [5].

Why now. Netanyahu is fighting a re-election campaign, with a vote due in October [4][3]. A leader who needs his own base through an election is the wrong counterpart for a deal that requires him to concede first.

For anyone watching this file: the number to track is not the meetings but the working groups. If the disarmament group produces a written sequence with dates, something real has shifted. Statements calling a meeting “productive” have now followed several rounds that changed nothing [1].

Sixty days, and no deal on Iran

The other deadline in the region passed on Monday. The United States and Iran missed the 60-day mark to agree terms on Iran’s nuclear programme under the ceasefire they signed in June [7].

That agreement was a 14-point memorandum of understanding, a signed statement of intent rather than a treaty [8]. Pakistan brokered it, both sides signed on 17 June, and it was meant to start a two-month negotiation and reopen the Strait of Hormuz [8]. It did neither. Al Jazeera’s account of the collapse points at loose drafting. The clauses never settled who ultimately controls shipping through the strait, and Iran struck vessels that ignored its approved route [8].

The strait is the sea gate between Iran and Oman. Roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil normally passes through it. It has been all but shut since the US and Israel attacked Iran on 28 February [10][7]. The war is now in its sixth month [7].

Both sides are digging in for economic attrition. Washington has cancelled the permissions it granted during the truce for buyers of Iranian oil, and put its naval blockade of Iranian ports back in place [7]. A senior Iranian official told Reuters that Tehran has switched from a defensive to a “fully offensive” posture [9]. If diplomacy fails, the official said, Iran would mount a “timely and precise” attack to break the blockade [9].

Trump used a Fox News interview to threaten Oman, the Gulf state that has spent years acting as the quiet channel between Washington and Tehran. “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them,” he said [10]. On Friday he had floated declaring the strait “a territory of the United States” [10]. He also said he was in no rush: “I have no time schedule. I’m not in a hurry” [11].

The cost of not being in a hurry shows up at American pumps. The national average price of petrol was $4.06 a gallon on Monday, the highest ever recorded for August, and about $1 more than a year ago [11]. In California and Hawaii it is around $5.50 [11]. Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, spiked to $112 a barrel in March and has settled near $85, still roughly 30% above last year [11]. The Joint Economic Committee, a bipartisan congressional panel, calculated in July that Americans have paid $56.4bn more for fuel since the war began. That is about $477 per household [11].

Iran’s calculation is that it can absorb more pain than a US president facing midterm elections in November [7].

Russia turns to the winter

Ukraine’s state energy company Naftogaz said Russian drones and missiles hit its facilities 13 times in the past week, and nearly 300 times since January [12]. Ukrainian officials call it a campaign to weaponise the coming winter [12]. At the coal and power company DTEK, a Russian strike started a fire in a mine and killed a 52-year-old man [12].

Ukraine is hitting back at Russia’s economy and its nerves. Its general staff released photographs of a strike on the Kamensky Combine in Rostov region, which destroyed two workshops [12]. The plant makes solid rocket fuel for Russian multiple-launch rocket systems [12]. Drones reached Moscow again overnight, suspending flights at three of the capital’s airports, and organisers postponed a military music festival due in Red Square this Friday [12].

On the ground the killing is mutual and unglamorous. A Ukrainian missile hit the village of Koloskovo in Russia’s Belgorod region on Monday, killing at least six people and wounding four, including a 14-year-old [13]. Russian strikes across Ukraine the same day killed people in Zaporizhia and Sumy, and injured others in Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv and Kherson [13]. Another attack damaged a Togo-flagged ship at Izmail, Ukraine’s largest port [13].

Two smaller stories say more about Russia’s mood than the strike counts. The chief economist of VEB, Russia’s second-largest bank, was fired after a leaked May speech [14]. In it he said Russia was falling behind China, the US and “in some respects, Ukraine” [14]. “We will not win this competition in a war of attrition with Ukraine,” Andrei Klepach told fellow economists [14]. And Russia’s Supreme Court rejected the anti-war Yabloko party’s appeal against its ban from September’s parliamentary elections [17]. Another court jailed the party’s deputy leader, Lev Shlosberg, for 11 years [17].

In Europe, the bill is being argued over. Latvia’s prime minister, Andris Kulbergs, told Politico he wants 7bn euros from the EU’s next seven-year budget [15]. It would cover the defence spending and lost Russian trade that frontline states carry [15]. Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, separately urged EU capitals to restart stalled talks on sanctioning Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear company [16]. Both requests share an obstacle: EU budgets and sanctions need every member state to agree.

Congo’s Ebola outbreak becomes its deadliest ever

The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has now killed 2,325 people [18]. That passes the 2,299 who died in the outbreak of 2018 to 2020, and comes from 4,945 confirmed cases [18]. The UN says it is the fastest-growing outbreak on record, and that someone in the country is dying of it every 30 minutes [18].

Two numbers explain the alarm. The share of confirmed cases ending in death has climbed from about 20% in early June to 46% now [18]. And this outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo species of Ebola, for which no vaccine or treatment has ever been approved [18]. It was declared on 15 May in the northeastern province of Ituri and has since spread to five more provinces [18]. Only the West Africa outbreak of 2014 to 2016, with 11,310 deaths, has been worse [18].

Shorter

Colombia put a first price on last week’s earthquake. President Abelardo De La Espriella said losses would reach 30 trillion pesos, about $9.6bn [19]. Roughly 24.5 trillion of that is buildings and 5.5 trillion is infrastructure. He called the figure preliminary [19].

Mali’s junta jailed two of its best-known critics for seven years each. The broadcaster Mohamed Youssouf Bathily, known as Ras Bath, was convicted in Bamako of criminal conspiracy and discrediting the state [20]. So was the campaigner Rokia Doumbia, known online as “Rose, the cost of living” [20]. Both had been held since March 2023, over a programme about the cost of living [20].

Lebanon. UNIFIL, the UN peacekeeping force there, said Israeli flags planted on a main coastal road in the south violate UN Security Council resolution 1701 [21]. It urged all sides to avoid provocative actions [21]. Israel says its presence shields its northern towns from Hezbollah [21].

Iraq. Drones struck the office of Masrour Barzani, prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government, and the home of the region’s security chief early on Monday. No casualties were reported [22].

The story nobody’s covering

The African Union has reopened its liaison office in Khartoum, more than three years after pulling staff out when fighting erupted in April 2023 [23]. Since then the AU has run its Sudan diplomacy by video call from Addis Ababa [23]. Getting people back in the room matters because the alternative has not worked. Outside powers have crowded into Sudan’s war, and the continent’s own body has been mediating a conflict it could not visit. The office’s stated job is technical support and an open channel to Sudan’s warring parties [23]. It is a small move, and the first structural one in a while.