Two real estate developers turned advisers to President Donald Trump’s second presidential administration helped close the landmark ceasefire agreement between the State of Israel and Hamas.
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law who served in his first administration, played key roles in brokering the deal with Benjamin Netanyahu’s government this week, according to The New York Times.
“In New York real estate, you’re always negotiating back and forth,” Kushner said of the deal. “But there’s a lot to be negotiated before you get the contract and you put money up hard. I think we’re just used to complex deals that are very dynamic, and with complex characters as well.”
Witkoff and Kushner spent the recent critical days of talks in in-person meetings, arriving in Egypt on Tuesday to meet a group of mediators who had already been working there for days to convince Hamas to disarm and to return Israeli hostages who were taken in October 2023. The duo reportedly spent the flight discussing ways the deal could collapse and what they could do to save it in such a case, with Witkoff doing direct negotiating over the phone while Kushner would draft up plans.
“The experience that Steve and I have as deal guys is that you have to understand people,” Kushner added. “You have to be able to kind of get the bottom line out of them, and then see who do you think is playing games, and how much room do you have to push things?”
“A lot of the people who do this are history professors, because they have a lot of experience, or diplomats,” Kushner said. “It’s just different being deal guys — just a different sport.”
Kushner and Witkoff’s roles in the discussions have drawn criticism from some who view their role as being personally rather than politically driven.
Along with their personal ties to Trump are potentially huge business gains.
Affinity Partners, Kushner’s private equity firm, has raised billions from wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
“In order for the next stage of this agreement to be successful, Jared Kushner needs to stop approaching this issue as a real estate deal and start focusing on political and human rights,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland.
The deal marks the second ceasefire agreement in the region signed this year, the first being in January shortly before Trump took office. Israel reportedly violated that agreement more than 1,000 times, leading to the collapse of that ceasefire in March, according to a letter sent to the United Nations from Riyad Mansour, the State of Palestine’s Permanent Observer in the body. In the hours since the new agreement was announced, Israel has reportedly not ceased its bombing campaign.
— Chris Malone Méndez
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