US President Donald Trump’s envoy and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has said that the US clinched the October 2025 Gaza ceasefire-hostage deal by leveraging the “global isolation” Israel faced after its “terrible” strike on Hamas’s headquarters in Doha last September.

The strike on September 9, 2025, targeting Hamas leadership in the Qatari capital killed a security officer and five lower-ranking Hamas members, but left leaders of the terror group relatively unscathed.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was pressed by Washington to publicly apologize to the Qatari leadership, and the ceasefire in Gaza was reached soon thereafter.

Kushner, who has represented the US in talks on Gaza, Iran and Ukraine despite holding no official government position, made his comments Friday while speaking remotely to the Yalta European Security Conference. They were publicized on Sunday.

Asked about talks with Russia, Kushner used the Gaza ceasefire deal to illustrate that extraneous events can help pave the way to diplomatic breakthroughs, but only if diplomats have “done the work” to reach an agreement.

“Look at the deal we got done… in Gaza,” Kushner said. “We worked on that for nine months, and we’d created what happens after the war… what would be the security guarantees, what would be the humanitarian efforts.

“Then, actually, we used the errant strike,” Kushner said. “Israel did the strike in Doha, which was a terrible thing… it was unsuccessful as a military operation,........

© The Times of Israel