Witkoff scraps planned meeting with senior Hamas official — diplomat

US special envoy Steve Witkoff canceled a planned Wednesday meeting with top Hamas negotiator Khalil al-Hayya in Istanbul, a senior Arab diplomat told The Times of Israel.

Witkoff had planned the trip to Turkey primarily around a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and had tacked on the meeting with Hayya after the fact. But when the former sit-down didn’t pan out, Witkoff decided not to take the trip at all, the diplomat said, confirming a report in the Axios news site.

The diplomat denied a report in the Hezbollah-linked Lebanese channel Al-Mayadeen that claimed Witkoff had canceled the meeting due to Israeli pressure.

The meeting would have been Witkoff’s second with Hayya, after the special envoy, along with Jared Kushner, a fellow top adviser to US President Donald Trump, met with senior members of Hamas’s ceasefire negotiating team hours before an agreement was inked in Egypt on October 9.

That meeting was said to have been critical in bringing the deal across the finish line, with Trump’s advisers assuring the Hamas leaders that the US would hold Israel to the terms of the deal as long as the terror group kept its side of the bargain.

There were no known meetings between the US and Hamas before Trump’s second term, when he dispatched an envoy to secretly meet with Hamas officials earlier this year to help secure the release of American-Israeli hostage soldier Edan Alexander.

Sources familiar with the matter told The Times of Israel at the time that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s envoy Ron Dermer had fumed upon learning of the secret US-Hamas talks after the fact and leaked them to the press, contributing to their collapse in March. Witkoff and Kushner’s October 9 sit-down with the Hayya-led team was the next in-person meeting between the sides.

Witkoff had been expected to raise the US demand for Hamas to disarm during the planned Wednesday meeting.

He has claimed that Hamas leaders already committed to doing so during their last meeting, but the terror group has publicly refused, including as recently as Tuesday, when it issued a statement condemning the UN Security Council resolution establishing an International Stabilization Force to help secure postwar Gaza.

In addition, terrorists are still holding the bodies of three slain hostages: Dror Or, Master Sgt. Ran Gvili and Thai national Sudthisak Rinthalak.

Witkoff has also been working in recent weeks to negotiate the safe passage of 100 to 200 Hamas fighters who have been holed up in a tunnel network underneath the southern Gaza city of Rafah, on the Israeli side of the Yellow Line to which the IDF withdrew at the start of the ceasefire on October 10.

The US has been trying to convince Israel to grant the fighters safe passage either to the other side of the Yellow Line or to a third country if they agree to give up their weapons. Netanyahu has rejected the idea to date, and it is also unclear whether the Hamas fighters are prepared to hand over their guns.

Witkoff has framed the standoff as a potential model for a larger decommissioning and amnesty program that the US is trying to advance for all of Hamas’s roughly 20,000 fighters, as envisioned by Trump’s 20-point plan for ending the Gaza war.

While Netanyahu publicly embraced the plan when it was unveiled in September at the White House, neither Israel nor Hamas has actually signed it. Instead, they agreed on October 9 to a different document that focused on the ceasefire, Israel’s initial pullback from Gaza, the hostage-prisoner swap and humanitarian aid provisions.

In a joint interview alongside Kushner last month, Witkoff said he had managed to connect with Hayya over their shared experience of losing sons.

Witkoff’s son, Andrew, died at the age of 22 of an opioid overdose. Hayya’s son Himam was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Hamas headquarters in Doha on September 9, which failed to kill any of the targeted senior leaders of the terror group.