US special envoy Steve Witkoff says he connected with Hamas leader Khalil al Hayya over their shared experience of losing a son when the pair met in Egypt earlier this month during talks to end the war in Gaza.
In a highly unusual face-to-face meeting between a US official and a member of the militant group, Witkoff told CBS’s 60 Minutes show that he found himself sitting next to al Hayya during talks.
“We expressed our condolences to him for the loss of his son,” Witkoff said. “He mentioned it. And I told him that I had lost a son, and that we were both members of a really bad club, parents who have buried children.”
Witkoff’s son, Andrew, died at the age of 22 of an opioid overdose. Al Hayya’s son, Himam al Hayya, was killed in the Israeli airstrike on Hamas headquarters in Doha on 9 September, which failed to kill any of the senior Hamas leaders it had targeted.
Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, part of the same CBS interview, described al Hayya as a “hardened” person who has “been through two years of war”.
“They greenlit an assault that raped and murdered and did some of the most barbaric things,” he said of Hamas and the October 7 massacre that sparked the two-year war in Gaza. “They’ve been holding hostages while Gaza’s been bombed. And they’ve withstood all the suffering.
“But when Steve and him spoke about their sons, it turned from a negotiation with a terrorist group to seeing two human beings kind of showing a vulnerability with each other.”
Also from the interview:
Witkoff said Donald Trump was “very, very comfortable” with the possibility of him meeting directly with Hamas;Kushner said the US was telling Israel that it must “find a way to help the Palestinian people thrive” if it wanted to integrate into the broader Middle East;Kushner said he believed Hamas was looking for the bodies of deceased hostages and not intentionally dragging out the process of returning them to Israel;Witkoff estimated the cost to rebuild and reconstruct Gaza will be “the $50bn (£37.2bn) range”.