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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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”.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
Also from the interview:<\/p>\n
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 (\u00a337.2bn) range”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"US special envoy Steve Witkoff says he connected with Hamas leader Khalil al Hayya over their shared experience…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":238079,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4,450,451,3,452,453],"class_list":{"0":"post-238078","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-headlines","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-top-stories","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238078\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/238079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}