Evan Vucci/AP/File
By Kevin Liptak, Alayna Treene, Kylie Atwood and Kristin Holmes
As President Donald Trump was predicting this week that peace could be imminent in Gaza, he pointed to the man he dispatched to seal the deal as a source for his optimism.
“I have Jared,” he said. “Find anybody more capable. And we have the A-plus team working on it.”
Jared, of course, is Jared Kushner: presidential son-in-law, onetime senior adviser and, this week, envoy to peace talks in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, where — alongside Trump’s current Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff — he helped finalize an arrangement that would see all hostages released from Gaza and a partial withdrawal of Israeli troops.
Trump spent hours on the phone with Kushner and Witkoff this week, both before and after he announced the deal had been reached, US officials said. From Egypt, the two men traveled to Israel, where they presented the plan to Israel’s Cabinet on Thursday evening before the body eventually approved it. The two men got a combined five hours of sleep from the time they left the United States, one senior US official said.
As the talks were getting underway on Wednesday, video from the Red Sea resort showed a grinning Kushner — clad in a navy blue suit, open-necked white shirt and black aviator sunglasses — emerging from a black SUV with Witkoff and heading into the talks.
It wasn’t until that evening that the negotiators arrived at what the senior official called “very serious breakthroughs” on the outstanding issues.
Plenty of details remain outstanding, including whether Hamas will disarm and what future governance of Gaza will look like. Kushner is expected to continue playing a very active role in the next phases of the negotiations, another White House official told CNN.
“There’s still, you know, just a lot of ways that this can go wrong,” another senior US official said Thursday evening in a phone call with reporters. “So we’re staying on top of the details to make sure everyone fulfills their obligations and that any misunderstandings are quickly discussed and adjudicated, and we really want to make sure that we get to the withdrawal, we get to the cease fire, and then we get to a place where the hostages can return home, the exchange is done, and then we’ll go into the next phase, which is figuring out what comes next in Gaza.”
“We have a lot of concepts and ideas that we’ve been trying to get developed for a long time that now we’ll have to get operationalized and hopefully done. So this is a very delicate time,” the official said.
On Thursday, administration officials and Trump allies praised Kushner and Witkoff for getting the first phase of the deal across the finish line. One ally told CNN that Kushner was responsible for making many of the negotiators and leaders from Arab countries feel more comfortable with the negotiation process, given his close relationships in the region.
“I put Jared there because he’s a very smart person, and he knows the region, knows the people, knows a lot of the players,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting.
Before they left for Egypt, Witkoff and Kushner privately said they would not leave the region until they had an agreement to release hostages and end the war, a senior US official told CNN. Sources said the negotiating teams on the ground operated on very little sleep, sitting through hours of discussions and meetings to bridge final differences in the agreement.
Now, Trump is preparing to join his son-in-law and envoy in the region. He said he could travel within days to celebrate the agreement.
Business and diplomatic interests in Middle East
For Kushner, the envoy role represents a return to public global diplomacy after declining to take a formal role in Trump’s second administration. For months, he has operated mostly behind the scenes to informally advise administration officials on Middle East diplomacy and compile the 20-point plan that has emerged as the latest, best hope to resolve the conflict.
Kushner’s intention once the Gaza deal is finalized is to return to the same informal advising role he was carrying out in the first months of Trump’s second term.
His involvement has not been without controversy. Following the president’s 2020 election loss, Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, moved to Miami and largely exited politics. Kushner founded an investment fund, Affinity Partners, shortly after leaving Washington with major backing from sovereign wealth funds in the Gulf — some of the very monarchies who are now heavily invested in the ongoing peace efforts.
In a deal last month, Kushner’s firm teamed up with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and other partners for a $55 billion deal to take the video-game maker Electronic Arts private, the largest leveraged buyout in history.
Affinity has also raised billions in capital from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, the latter of which has played a key mediating role in the ongoing efforts to end the Gaza war.
The set-up in many ways illustrates Trump’s preferred way of doing business in his second term: Rely on longtime confidants, many of them wealthy, to execute his objectives, give them broad operational leeway and mostly gloss over the ethical questions raised by their complex finances.
Earlier this month, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt took umbrage when a reporter asked about Kushner’s parallel business and diplomatic dealings in the Middle East.
“I think it’s frankly despicable that you’re trying to suggest that it’s inappropriate for Jared Kushner, who is widely respected around the world and has great trust and relationships with these critical partners in these countries, to strike a 20-point comprehensive, detailed peace plan that no other administration would ever be able to achieve,” she said. “Jared is donating his energy and his time to our government, to the president of the United States, to secure world peace, and that is a very noble thing.”
Kushner has told the president and Witkoff that he views securing a peace deal between Israel and Hamas as something that “supersedes anything he has going on in the region,” a White House official told CNN.
“He has told me himself that the business stuff doesn’t matter as long as there’s a peace deal,” the official said, arguing that Kushner’s role in the negotiations could impact some of his business ties.
A person close to Kushner said that the president’s son-in-law “talks about legacy a lot.”
“He’ll often say he won’t be remembered for the business deals he made. He will be remembered for the peace deals,” this person said.
‘He’s never not been in the fold’
Few inside the Trump administration are surprised at Kushner’s role in the current talks, given his continued influence with the president. Kushner’s father Charles, a real estate developer, is Trump’s ambassador to France. A number of Trump’s nominees read Kushner’s 2022 book detailing some of his experience in Trump’s first term to understand the players and dynamics in the Middle East, sources said during the transition period last year.
Kushner and Witkoff — another real estate developer and longtime friend of Trump’s — have maintained a close personal relationship for years, sources told CNN. The two have been in regular contact since the president’s transition after last November’s election, often with Kushner offering advice to Witkoff on how to handle certain Arab leaders and relationships in the region.
“They bounce ideas off each other, they give each other advice — that has been happening since the beginning of this administration,” one White House official told CNN.
Witkoff has privately referred to Kushner as one of his “rabbis” when it comes to his efforts to drive a solution to the Gaza conflict, one source said.
“He has never really been gone,” said another source of Kushner’s engagement, noting frequent text exchanges with Witkoff throughout the last months and frequent meetings between the two men at the White House and in Miami.
White House officials told CNN there wasn’t a specific point in the president’s second term when Kushner got heavily involved in the talks to end the war in the Middle East. Instead, they argued he has always played a critical role — albeit a quiet, more behind the scenes one — in negotiations.
“Even on the campaign trail, Jared had a heavy presence. He’s never not been in the fold, particularly on matters related to the Middle East and the war,” one of the officials said.
Kushner is among a small handful of people who “speak on behalf of the president with the authority of the president of the United States,” said David Schenker, who served as assistant secretary of state for Middle East issues during Trump’s first term.
“Jared’s involvement was a positive indication of the administration’s investment in this process,” he told CNN.
Schenker noted that although they have reached a phase one deal, “the second phase, the next 15 points or so of the plan, are really the challenging part, and what will require intensive, high-level engagement from Washington and pressure to push this through.”
“Jared is the administration’s sort of ‘Mighty Mouse’ on this,” he said.
Kushner quietly began working with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair almost a year ago on developing a post-war plan for Gaza, building on a relationship between the two men going back to the first Trump administration, two sources said.
Blair and Kushner, who had met multiple times at the White House during the first Trump administration, spoke with regional players for input. They both attended an August meeting in the Oval Office with Trump to discuss the framework.
But it was the Israeli strike targeting Hamas leaders in Doha on September 9 that jumpstarted the discussions that are unfolding this week, turning Witkoff and Kushner’s efforts into a collective push to create an overall plan to stop the fighting, bring home the hostages and work on day-after plans.
“The Doha strike brought them together, with all of the American players saying it is time to end this, so let’s do everything at once. It catalyzed everyone,” a source familiar with the discussions said at the time.
As the new Trump-led framework gained traction, Kushner moved from the background of the discussions to the forefront. He was in the Oval Office in late September when Trump met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, standing behind top Trump administration officials a sofa as the Israeli leader placed an apology call to Qatar’s prime minister.
Later, he huddled with Netanyahu and his delegation to go over the framework point-by-point in the Cabinet Room. And after Netanyahu publicly agreed to the deal during a press conference, he walked alongside the prime minister and Trump down the West Wing Colonnade as they absorbed the moment.
“Jared is a trusted voice on Middle East, as someone who played a major role in the Abraham Accords and he still has great relationships in the region,” an official said, describing Kushner’s value to the mission and his regular communication with Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio on relations in the region, with both men valuing his input.
Personal relationships with Arab and Israeli leaders
Influential players in the region have also privately welcomed Kushner’s return to the diplomatic scene in an active way, multiple sources said. While officials in the Middle East predicted he would always be involved behind the scenes, many feel his involvement at the table now could drive real results.
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Via https://edition.cnn.com/2025/10/10/politics/jared-kushner-trump-gaza-deal
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