Israel’s ruling Likud party pushes back on Jared Kushner’s claim Israel’s attempt to kill Hamas leaders in Doha left Jerusalem internationally isolated, arguing that the strike increased pressure on Hamas to release the remaining hostages.
By World Israel News Staff
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party pushed back Sunday against a critical account by Jared Kushner of Israel’s 2025 strike on Hamas leaders in Qatar, insisting the operation helped bring about the eventual hostage agreement rather than merely providing Washington with leverage over Jerusalem.
Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a central figure in the administration’s Middle East diplomacy, described the September 9, 2025 attack in Doha as both a military failure and a diplomatic disaster for Israel.
Speaking remotely to the Yalta European Strategy conference in Ukraine, Kushner said the Trump administration subsequently exploited the international backlash over the strike to pressure Netanyahu into accepting the US-backed Gaza agreement.
“Israel did the strike in Doha, which was a terrible thing,” Kushner said. “It was unsuccessful as a military operation, and that led to Israel being globally isolated.”
“And we used that dynamic in order to push them into a deal that now, today, they are quite happy with,” he continued, saying the agreement ultimately proved beneficial both to Israel and to Palestinians in Gaza.
Likud offered a starkly different explanation of what brought Hamas to the negotiating table.
“The prime minister’s decision to send the IDF into Gaza City and to strike the Hamas leadership in Qatar, together with the intense pressure exerted by President Trump, are what led Hamas to drop its demands and agree to release all the hostages remaining in Gaza,” the party said in a statement Sunday night.
Israel launched the Doha strike while senior Hamas leaders were gathered in the Qatari capital, where the organization’s political leadership had long maintained a presence and where negotiations over Gaza were being mediated.
The senior Hamas figures targeted in the attack survived. The strike killed five lower-ranking Hamas members and a Qatari security officer, while triggering fury in Doha and unusually strong criticism from Washington.
Kushner acknowledged that the operation itself failed to eliminate its principal targets. But he argued that its diplomatic consequences unexpectedly created the opening Washington needed after months of preparatory work on a postwar framework for Gaza.
“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.”
“Had we not done all the prework… when the opening came, nothing would have occurred,” he added.
Other Israeli officials went further than Likud in rejecting Kushner’s account.
Officials speaking to i24NEWS argued that the attack itself fundamentally altered Hamas’s calculations by demonstrating that its leaders could no longer assume they were safe simply because they were outside Gaza.
“Quite the opposite,” the officials said. “What led to the latest hostage deal was only the attack in Qatar, which made it clear once and for all that Israel is no longer hesitating. The message was clear: Hamas has no immunity.”
They compared the policy of pursuing Hamas leaders abroad with Israel’s campaign against those responsible for the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre.
“This policy continues in Gaza, just as it did after the Munich massacre,” they said. “There is no immunity for murderers anywhere.”
Kushner later said the episode convinced Trump that the US needed to exercise tighter control over Israeli actions.
He told CBS after the Gaza deal was reached that the Doha attack led Trump to conclude “that it was time to be very strong and stop them from doing things that he felt were not in their long-term interests.”
The diplomatic repair effort culminated on September 29, when Netanyahu joined Trump in a call with Qatar’s leadership from the White House.
Netanyahu expressed regret for the death of a Qatari serviceman and apologized for violating Qatari sovereignty, while assuring Doha that Israel would not carry out another such attack, according to the White House.
At roughly the same time, Trump and Netanyahu were publicly advancing the US plan to end the Gaza war.
Ten days later, on October 9, Israel and Hamas signed the first phase of the agreement. It provided for a ceasefire, an Israeli withdrawal from parts of Gaza and the release or return of all 48 hostages who remained in Hamas captivity, including 20 who were still alive.
Kushner said Israel had initially resisted elements of the deal.
“Today, they’re quite happy with [the agreement], but at the time, they were uncomfortable with what we were pushing them to do,” he said.
“Ultimately, it turned out to be great for them; it turned out to be great for the people of Gaza,” he added.
The public dispute comes as Kushner and Netanyahu’s government are again at odds over implementation of Trump’s broader Gaza roadmap.
The administration wants the next stage to include Hamas’s demilitarization, further Israeli withdrawals, reconstruction and the transfer of civilian administration to a new Palestinian governing body. Hamas has accepted parts of the roadmap while disputing its sequencing, and Netanyahu has insisted that Hamas must fully disarm before Israel carries out further withdrawals.
Kushner has become increasingly open in criticizing Israel’s handling of that process.
Last week, he said Washington and Jerusalem broadly agree about the ultimate goal in Gaza but blamed Israel’s approaching October 27 election for complicating negotiations.
“I think we agree with them on the end state,” Kushner said. “They just have a crazy election and that makes them a little irrational in certain regards, but we’re very determined and we’re working through these things.”
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