There is something deeply troubling about the spectacle now unfolding in the Middle East.

On Saturday, an IDF tank drove over a Hamas-planted explosive near the “Yellow Line” in southern Gaza. No soldiers were hurt. In a separate incident the same day, Israeli troops shot and killed two Hamas operatives who had crossed the line to sabotage IDF equipment. The IDF labeled both a “grave” ceasefire violation.

The next day, Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and special envoy, sat down in Cairo with Hamas’s political chief Khalil al-Hayya — his first direct meeting with Hamas leadership since the ceasefire was signed last October. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Nickolay Mladenov of the Board of Peace joined him, alongside Qatari, Egyptian, and Turkish officials. Hamas’s public response afterward was not a disarmament pledge — it was a demand that the Board of Peace “compel” Israel to fulfill its own obligations and “halt killings and incursions.” Kushner is now slated to travel to Israel on Monday to press Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on “corresponding steps,” part of an American-backed Gaza withdrawal plan Netanyahu has resisted on security grounds.

That was not an isolated flare-up. IDF monitoring reports from the preceding week documented fourteen separate ceasefire violations — eleven classified as “developing threats,” along with weapons transfers and another planted explosive near the same line. Israeli officials say these reports exist precisely to give Washington a real-time picture of what Hamas is actually doing while Israel is asked to hold its fire. Netanyahu has cited them directly as his reason for rejecting the administration’s proposed withdrawal timeline.

That sequence raises a question Washington should be asking itself: why is Jared Kushner sitting down with Hamas’s leadership — the same organization the IDF says just planted a bomb under one of its tanks — and then heading to press Israel’s prime minister, rather than the other way around?

To be fair, this isn’t a case of pure inexperience. Kushner helped broker the original ceasefire and hostage framework that is currently holding, however imperfectly, and he was central to the Abraham Accords. He has real relationships with Gulf and Qatari officials that a career Foreign Service officer might not have, and Trump trusts him in a way he doesn’t trust the bureaucracy. Those are genuine assets in getting parties to a table.

Getting parties to the table is one skill. Determining whether an enemy has actually been disarmed is another. Kushner has never served in the State Department or in uniform, and has no background in........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)