US special envoy Jared Kushner sounded optimistic about the prospects for quickly advancing the disarmament of Hamas when he was in Israel on August 17.

“We could be seeing progress… in as little as 30 days, hopefully in starting to take some of the weapons out,” Kushner told Fox News in an interview hours before he left the Jewish state.

A US official told The Times of Israel at the time that Washington envisioned a ceremonial handover of the first batch of Hamas’s weapons to a new committee of Palestinian technocrats tasked with replacing the terror group in governing Gaza.

While less than three weeks have passed since Kushner laid out his timeline, three diplomats from mediating countries have told The Times of Israel that they don’t expect it to hold due to fervent Israeli opposition to the disarmament proposal crafted by the US-controlled Board of Peace.

Kushner had insisted that Israeli approval of the disarmament plan wasn’t necessary for it to move forward. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had already given his backing last year to a broader 20-point plan by US President Donald Trump for ending the war in Gaza.

The weapons handover was to be between Hamas and the Board of Peace-overseen Palestinian technocrats. Israel was only being asked to fulfill commitments it had made as part of the 20-point plan, which primarily had to do with stabilizing the humanitarian situation in the Strip, Kushner maintained.

But the text of both the 20-point plan and the 15-point disarmament roadmap required all sides to immediately halt military operations in the Strip.

Israel has refused to do so, carrying out near-daily strikes against what it says have been terror operatives posing immediate threats.

The US didn’t push back aggressively for much of the past year, as it sought to pressure Hamas to accept the Board of Peace’s disarmament plan.

When the terror group finally did on July 30, Washington began leaning on Israel to stop bombing Gaza.

During his visit to Jerusalem last month, Kushner urged Netanyahu to at least limit strikes to what is actually an imminent threat, apparently not buying Israel’s rationale for many of its strikes to date.

But Netanyahu didn’t budge,........

© The Times of Israel