Kushner Legitimizes Hamas

By Elliott Abrams

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

 

News stories reporting on Jared Kushner’s current trip to the Middle East have focused on whether the various plans for Gaza will move forward. The New York Times headline, for example, said the trip was an “effort to break logjam in Gaza.” The Washington Post’s headline said Kushner is “aiming to salvage Gaza deal.”

 

These stories and many others focused on details: what was in the original 15-point plan for Gaza, what compromises are possible, or how a step-by-step path forward might work.

 

Far less attention was paid to what may be the most significant fact about Kushner’s trip: He met with the head of Hamas, Khalil al-Hayya.

 

Al-Hayya was a founding member of Hamas in 1987 and is known as a hard-liner, favoring “armed struggle” over negotiations and seeking the closest possible relations with Iran and Hezbollah. Al-Hayya’s lack of concern about improving life in Gaza is very clear. The New York Times quotes him as saying in November 2023, soon after the Hamas massacres of October 7:

 

Hamas’s goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such. Hamas, the Qassam and the resistance woke the world up from its deep sleep and showed that this issue must remain on the table. This battle was not because we wanted fuel or laborers. It did not seek to improve the situation in Gaza. This battle is to completely overthrow the situation.

 

That Kushner met with this terrorist leader does not so much run the risk of legitimizing Hamas as guarantee it. What political leader or diplomat, what foreign minister or special envoy, visiting the region henceforth will want to skip such a meeting? Al-Hayya’s problem will be that his dance card is too full of requests.

 

Kushner can of course defend the meeting by saying it was the only, or the very best, way forward to peace. But legitimizing and therefore strengthening terrorist groups is never the path to peace. Kushner could have delegated the meeting to a lower-ranking official. Or he could have made some tough demands up front and said al-Hayya would have to earn a meeting with the American representative (and the president’s son-in-law). The excuses for the meeting are simple to imagine, but none are persuasive. Al-Hayya is an old-timer and a survivor as a Hamas leader and is in that sense up to his neck in blood. He will not give Kushner concessions he would otherwise refuse, and he will never abandon Hamas’s goal of destroying Israel nor its commitment to violence to get there. He has already won the negotiation, because the real news is not the details of what was agreed (and is so unlikely to be carried out anyway); it is the fact of the meeting.

 

In April and in June President Trump sent his vice president to meet with Iranian representatives, in Pakistan and Switzerland. Nothing positive came of either meeting, despite Vance’s mentions of “great progress” and the possibility of a “new leaf.” It seems no lesson was learned, and the Kushner meeting with Hamas went forward. It is a far worse case than the Iran meetings, because for those meetings there were precedents (think of the many negotiations under Obama), and Iran is a country and a U.N. member state.

 

Would a refusal to meet with the leader of Hamas be standing on ceremony, or refusing to see reality? On the contrary it would be acknowledging the reality that Hamas is a murderous terror organization that has committed bestial massacres — and then celebrated them. The sad truth is that the Kushner meeting is a real victory for Hamas, which will use it to demand a larger role as a diplomatic and political presence in the Middle East. This is exactly what the United States should be against and should be preventing, not encouraging.

 

In June, the Jerusalem Post reported that a French delegation had held a “top secret” meeting with Hamas officials and that this meeting was “the first reported meeting of Hamas leaders with European officials since the October 7 massacre.” Those days are over, thanks to Kushner. Count on seeing many more such meetings now, all with plenty of publicity, and all resulting in the increasing legitimization of the murderers of October 7.