Kushner calls Israel’s Doha strike ‘terrible,’ says US used fallout to push Gaza deal

“Israel did the strike in Doha, which was a terrible thing,” Kushner said. “And obviously, it was unsuccessful as a military operation. And that led to Israel being globally isolated.”

Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and special adviser and one of the administration’s key figures in diplomacy surrounding the Gaza Strip, delivered sharp criticism over the weekend of Israel’s strikes in Doha, Qatar, last year, while also acknowledging that Washington used the international fallout from the attack to increase pressure on Israel and push it toward an agreement.

Speaking by video at a conference in Kyiv, Kushner described the Israeli operation bluntly.

“Israel did the strike in Doha, which was a terrible thing,” Kushner said. “And obviously, it was unsuccessful as a military operation. And that led to Israel being globally isolated.”

Kushner went further, saying the Trump administration saw a diplomatic opportunity in the crisis and used the new dynamic to push Israel toward a deal.

“We used that dynamic in order to push them into a deal that now today they’re quite happy with,” he said. “At the time, they were a little uncomfortable with kind of what we were pushing them to do," Kushner said.

In Kushner’s telling, the pressure ultimately paid off.

“Ultimately, it turned out to be great for them,” he said of Israel. “And it turned out to be great for the people of Gaza, because now we have a new government there.”

Trump administration regards Israel's Doha strike as a failure, Kushner says

He added that the new governing structure is expected to take over as demilitarization progresses.

“That’s obviously looking to take over soon once we advance on the demilitarization,” Kushner said.

Kushner’s account offers a rare public glimpse into how the Trump team views the path that led to the Gaza agreement. What at the time appeared to be one of Israel’s most serious diplomatic setbacks became, from Washington’s perspective, an opening that could move the parties toward a broader arrangement.

He stressed, however, that such an opening would not have been enough on its own without extensive preparatory work carried out beforehand.

“We had to both find the opening in order to put in place,” Kushner said. “But had we not done all the pre-work before, when the opening came, nothing would have occurred.”

The remarks shed unusual light on the Trump administration’s internal view of the Gaza diplomacy: not as a purely linear or predetermined process, but as a combination of months of groundwork and the ability to capitalize on an unexpected crisis created by an Israeli military action.

Kushner’s language was also strikingly direct. Describing the Doha strike as “a terrible thing” and “unsuccessful as a military operation” amounts to a relatively rare public acknowledgment from a senior figure close to Trump that the administration regarded the operation not merely as a tactical failure, but as an event that inflicted broader strategic damage on Israel by leaving it internationally isolated.

Until now, assessments along those lines had largely surfaced in private conversations and background briefings rather than in such explicit public language.

At the same time, Kushner made clear that, in his view, the damage eventually became part of the route to a better outcome. Israel may have been uncomfortable with some of the pressure applied by Washington at the time, he said, but is now “quite happy” with the resulting agreement.

His message was therefore twofold: the Doha strike weakened Israel diplomatically, but that weakness gave Washington leverage — leverage the Trump administration says it then used to push forward a broader restructuring of Gaza and the postwar arrangement.