Hamas terrorists carry grenade launchers at the funeral of Marwan Issa, a senior Hamas deputy military commander who was killed in an Israeli airstrike during the conflict between Israel and Hamas, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in the central Gaza Strip, Feb. 7, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed

With media outlets, and particularly NBC, the devil is in the lack of details.

In the Aug. 17 article, “Kushner and Netanyahu agree US general should oversee Hamas ‘demilitarization,’ source says,” NBC reporters Chantal Da Silva and Matt Bradley have once again attempted to portray Israel as the sole obstacle to a magically attainable peace in the Gaza Strip while refusing to report on incessant Hamas ceasefire violations inhibiting the deal’s progress.

Da Silva has a history of withholding context about the truce. In early July, she asserted that the disarmament of Hamas was “a key requirement by Israel,” while omitting that the disarmament requirement is enshrined in UN Security Council Resolution 2803 and was crafted by the US-led Board of Peace.

Now the situation has changed. Covering presidential envoy Jared Kushner’s visit to the Middle East, Da Silva and Bradley reported that both Kushner and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had agreed on July 17 that Hamas’ disarmament should precede any IDF withdrawal.

But this is hardly news. On Aug. 3, the Board of Peace asserted the same thing following a meeting between Netanyahu and the Board’s High Representative to Gaza Nickolay Mladenov.

The most problematic bit of reporting came toward the beginning of the article, where the NBC journalists asserted that:

The agreement came during an hours long meeting, which followed rare talks between the leader of Hamas, Kushner, and other members of Trump’s Board of Peace — part of a renewed push to revive a Gaza peace plan endorsed by Trump and Hamas but rejected by Israel.

But this is only part of the story. While it’s true that Netanyahu did reject the 15-point plan, the notion that Hamas had ever stated that it would fully disarm simply doesn’t hold water, as CAMERA has written about before. This represents NBC’s third time at least in recent weeks where it had reported Hamas’ supposed agreement to disarm as an unqualified factual description of the group’s own stated position.

Hamas itself even disputed that characterization, when Hamas senior official and spokesman Ghazi Hamad told The Wall Street Journal on July 30 that the group “didn’t say disarmament, didn’t say handing over the weapons, and didn’t agree on any Israeli involvement.” Instead, Hamad clarified that Hamas has agreed to “place its weapons in storage,” under the control of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), Gaza’s proposed transitional, technocratic government.

But the Board of Peace does not trust the group any more than Israel does. Netanyahu and Kushner both agreed that the initial handover of Hamas’ weapons should take place under the supervision of the American commander of the International Stabilization Force, the proposed peacekeeping mission in Gaza, Gen. Jasper Jeffers, instead of being stored in Gaza under the NCAG.

Kusher echoed this distrust of Hamas, saying in an interview with Fox News’ Trey Yingst that the terrorist organization has “said all the right things,” but that any agreement and Israeli concessions that come with it are “going to have to be based on actions,” i.e., whether the group actually disarms.

But obviously, the terrorist group is not carrying out these actions. Da Silva and Bradley could have taken the time to explain to their readers that Hamas just last week detonated an explosive device near the Yellow Line delineating IDF and Hamas-held territory in Gaza and fired weapons in the same area. Or that on Aug. 15, an IDF tank ran over an improvised explosive device (IED) planted by Hamas in southern Gaza.

Da Silva and Bradley did not dive into these nuances, nor did they detail just how aligned Israel and the Board of Peace seem to be on the future of Gaza. Kushner himself said that he held no animus toward Netanyahu when asked about the prime minister’s apprehension regarding the 15-point plan, instead acknowledging that “there were some valid concerns that [Israel] raised that we were able to address, and we were able to go through some of the misunderstandings and misinformation about [the plan] as well.”

Instead, Da Silva and Bradley continue to make it seem that the Board is bending over backwards to accommodate Netanyahu, while presenting Hamas’ position as one of cooperation. But reality tells a different story.

The author writes for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), where a version of this article first appeared.