Politics & Diplomacy
Washington holds its Gaza roadmap while Israel demands a rewrite
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Washington spent Thursday defending the Gaza roadmap it announced as historic against the ally refusing to sign it. Israel handed the United States a list of demanded corrections, National Security Adviser Shmuel Ben Ezra confirmed, while Benjamin Netanyahu repeated that the document "was not our draft."
The architecture at stake is the most detailed Washington has produced. The drafting team around Tony Blair includes Jared Kushner, envoy Steve Witkoff and adviser Aryeh Lightstone, the Israeli daily Maariv reported, with Turkey, Qatar and Egypt mediating and the Emirates informally alongside.
The machinery already moving#
Pieces of the plan are physically assembling while the argument runs. Morocco and Uganda have agreed to send the first hundreds of a stabilization force Washington wants at five thousand, Maariv's Jacky Hugi reported, with housing built near Kerem Shalom — and a fifteen-minister technocratic government under the engineer Ali Shaath waits in Cairo for Israeli permission to enter.
Board of Peace director-general Nickolay Mladenov aired Washington's frustration openly, writing that the week's strikes on Gaza killed civilians and destroyed medical equipment "in the wake of intensive efforts" by the mediators. Within two days Israel's strikes slowed, then largely stopped — an official told the Times of Israel there were "steps in the right direction."
The pressure map#
In Michael Milshtein's reading for Ynet, Donald Trump's patience is the decisive variable: frustrated since the Iran war, likelier than before to press Israel on entry for the technocratic government, wider force deployment and reconstruction before full disarmament.
The domestic American flank is opening too. Joe Kent — the former counterterrorism chief who resigned blaming the Iran war on Israeli pressure — is campaigning against NDAA Section 219's US-Israel military integration, and a Maariv poll found 54 percent of Israelis oppose the roadmap their government also rejects.
For Palestinians the ledger stands where it stood: a plan Washington will not withdraw, an army that has not withdrawn, and a government in Cairo still waiting at the door.
