The meeting with Khalil al-Hayya was the story on Sunday in the Egyptian resort town of El-Alamein, where Jared Kushner sat at the table. It was the first meeting between Donald Trump's son-in-law and Hamas' chief negotiator since they agreed to the initial hostage and ceasefire deal about a year ago. At that time, it resulted in a ceasefire. This one was designed to bring disarmament. It did not, and the disparity between the two has become the main reality of the Gaza file.

The environment conveyed a story. Kushner was joined by Board of Peace envoys Nickolay Mladenov and Tony Blair, and officials from Egypt, Qatar and Turkey took up the rest of the chairs, representing essentially all of the mediator's structure that has kept the ceasefire alive since last year. Kushner, meanwhile, met separately with Egypt's intelligence chief, Hassan Rashad, in Cairo, and Hayya had been meeting with President Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi. Two parallel tracks and one common goal getting Hamas to pick up its guns under a plan that it had agreed to in principle on July 30 but has not acted upon yet in practice.

An Arab diplomat who was briefed on the session told the Times of Israel that Kushner pressed Hamas with a hard line on implementation during the session. But Hamas stands by Hayya's side, he said, but they will proceed only if Israel does its part. That's a minor condition. It is a direct reference to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's public rejection of Trump's 15-point roadmap, which is now the No. 1 hurdle that the American mediation team must navigate.

Kushner apparently made that move to ease the divide by offering to influence the Board of Peace to hold off on any strikes and begin a staged withdrawal "when Hamas would begin to hand over arms. It simply a sequencing argument: believe the process and Israel will follow. Netanyahu, on the other hand, has stated in public that he will not be withdrawing until Hamas is totally disarmed, end of story. A source told reporters that the Prime Minister's attitude is “more elastic” than what he says in public.

And it's in domestic politics that it gets complicated. The diplomat involved in the Egypt negotiations was dismissive of any certainty about progress on the disarmament front before the elections on October 27 and another one- to two-month hiatus after the election while a new government is formed. That would likely put any real transfer of Hamas weapons into 2027 a date that conflicts with Washington's sense of urgency since the ceasefire took effect.

There’s also a hard operational constraint that lies below the politics. The Board of Peace had anticipated that within weeks it would be able to witness the first weapons transfer from Hamas to the newly established National Committee for the Administration of Gaza. But that is unlikely to happen before the end of the year, according to the same diplomatic account, as the International Stabilization Force, a multinational outfit to oversee and secure the process, is still in the early stages of training and still far from being ready to deploy at large scale. If there's no security force to receive the weapons, disarmament is, in essence, not disarmament, it's a promise hanging on infrastructure that still doesn't exist.

As the diplomats talked, the guns did not go silent. On Sunday, Israel claimed to have attacked two operatives, one a member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Khan Younis and the other a Hamas member in Nuseirat, both of whom were involved in preparing attacks. Palestinian medical sources said that several people were wounded in the strikes. This followed an explosion that struck an Israeli tank a day earlier near the so-called 'Yellow Line' which is being used by the IDF to delimit Hamas-controlled territory in Gaza from Israeli control. The army said it was a serious violation of the truce. None of the soldiers were injured, but it was hard not to hear the symbolism: Israel had stopped its air campaign for a few days before flying off again on Wednesday; and this incident with the tanks provided Israel an instant argument to continue strikes.

The pressure campaign has turned strongly to Jerusalem in region terms. Eight countries Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, Indonesia and Pakistan issued a joint statement hours after the Kushner-Hayya meeting condemning Israel's rejection of the roadmap and stance on Palestinian statehood, alleging that the Jewish state now has responsibility to block an internationally endorsed peace process based on UN Security Council Resolution 2803. It's a rare case of all the Muslim-majority states in the Gulf and the Levant coming together on a single diplomatic message, and it leaves Washington in a difficult position: the same administration that touts itself as Gaza's peace broker is now openly declaring that it blames Israel not Hamas for the lack of progress.

This standoff isn't just of political importance, it's economic as well. Earlier this year, the final UN-EU-World Bank damage assessment estimated the reconstruction cost of Gaza to $71.4 billion over the next ten years, with a huge $26.3 billion required for basic services in the first eighteen months. The losses to physical infrastructure total $35.2 billion; over 370,000 housing units have been destroyed or damaged, and more than half of Gaza's hospitals have suffered total damage and are not operational, while the Gaza economy has shrunk by about 84 percent since the war commenced. This reconstruction is seven times more expensive than all previous reconstruction efforts following the Gaza conflicts of 2008-09, 2014 and 2021 combined, Oxfam has said. There is no real movement of any of that money without a stabilizing ground force and a viable transitional government a tie-in point that is inextricable without a stabilization force on the ground, which is why Kushner spent Sunday trying to unjam the disarmament one.