On Sunday, Jared Kushner accompanied Steve Witkoff to Kyiv to discuss Ukraine, but while there, he said something that had a harder landing in Jerusalem and Gaza than in Kyiv. The White House's top Middle East official painted a stark picture of the stalled next step in the Gaza peace process, calling Israel's government "a little irrational" on Gaza because of an upcoming Knesset election. They have a crazy election and in that regard, they have an irrational side, he told reporters, noting that "the end state" is still a part of the Israeli-Palestinian equation despite a misaligned roadmap.

A top American official saying the unsaid is rare. Inside the Board of Peace process, for months, the working assumption has been that Israeli hesitation to disarm Hamas and pull out troops was tactical and was stemming from security concerns. Kushner's statement raises the issue into a political rather than electoral survival one, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government is pushing forward not on a clear Gaza strategy, but simply to win the next election on October 27. That's a huge difference it makes a security issue a political issue, and it is much harder for a third party mediator to solve a political dispute.

The facts of what is languishing aren't up for debate. The Board of Peace's proposal includes handing over arms to Hamas and other armed groups in the Strip, accompanied by a gradual Israeli withdrawal. Israel has refused, Hamas shows no sign of disarming before Israelis go to polls. Kushner did not spare Hamas either, calling the militarization of Gaza "beyond comprehension" and admitting that Washington has been a year and four months working on negotiating disarmament with Hamas without making any progress. But the headline in Kyiv was not about Gaza's arsenal – it was about the politics of Jerusalem and all outlets from the Times of Israel to The Media Line to wire services around the Gulf and South Asia started the same way: An election is warping policy.

That's a reading that matches what the numbers indicate. Likud entered the 2022 election with 32 seats and is now polling in the low-to-mid twenties, with a recent Kan survey putting the party essentially tied with Gadi Eisenkot's upstart Yashar list, and a Channel 13 poll showing the pro- and anti-Netanyahu blocs deadlocked at 53 seats apiece, well short of the 61 needed to govern.

If the Knesset is divided, each right-wing faction to Netanyahu including Bezalel Smotrich's settler movement and Itamar Ben-Gvir's Otzma Yehudit will have more leverage to insist on a strong stance on Gaza to remain in the government. It also helps account for Defense Minister Israel Katz and Ben-Gvir's recent suggestions of easing Palestinian emigration from Gaza, which have been met with a public condemnation from eight Muslim-majority countries, which explicitly forbid forced displacement in the terms of the October 2025 peace accords. Since then, Katz has been forced to concede the self-evident issue with that notion: no country has offered to accept Gazans in any significant numbers.

Behind the politics is an economic fact, no one denies. According to a damage assessment by the World Bank, United Nations and European Union in April, a total of $71.4 billion is required to rebuild Gaza over the next ten years, of which $35.2 billion will be spent on physical infrastructure and $22.7 billion on economic and social losses, with approximately $26 billion being needed in the first eighteen months to stabilize the region.

That's more than seven times the combined cost of the reconstruction of Gaza following the wars of 2008, 2014 and 2021, adjusted for inflation, according to Oxfam and Palestinian research groups, reflecting the extent to which this conflict has surpassed all previous ones. About 90% of buildings in the Gaza city were damaged or destroyed, and tens of millions of tonnes of debris, including some unexploded ammunition, rest on the site of houses and hospitals.

None of that reconstruction can realistically happen while Hamas is still armed and Israel keeps conducting targeted strikes inside the Gaza Strip, including one Sunday that killed a father and his infant daughter in Gaza's al-Nasr neighborhood, according to Hamas-run health authorities, but the Israeli military says targeted at a Hamas operative who participated in the October 7 attacks.

That's the price of the paralyzing gridlock that Kushner referenced. Each week, Jerusalem has to navigate the politics and coalitions, and each week donors, financial institutions and investors from the Gulf who have indicated their willingness to help finance reconstruction sit on the sidelines awaiting a governance framework that has not yet been formed. It also is postponing the installation of the technocratic Gaza administration board, which has not yet occupied the territory more than ten months after the ceasefire took effect, under the terms of the United Nations Security Council resolution that authorized it.

Indeed, Kushner's main statement, that Washington and Israel have a destination regardless of the political deadlocks, might well be correct. However, there are no rebuilds happening at the hospitals, and elections tend to run out of time. But it is not a diplomatic race to disarmament, which is what the next seven weeks is more like than a campaign season run with live ammunition, with Likud barely hanging on and the far right with a coalition veto.