Trump’s Mideast envoy to visit Qatar, claiming hostage deal on verge of completion

Incoming US envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff announced Tuesday that he will travel to Doha later this week, saying a hostage deal being mediated by Qatar is on the verge of completion, as US President-elect Donald Trump again warned “all hell will break loose” in the region if an agreement between Israel and Hamas is not reached by his January 20 inauguration.

“We’re making a lot of progress, and I don’t want to say too much because I think they’re doing a really good job back in Doha. I’m leaving tomorrow to go back to Doha, but I think that we’ve had some really great progress, and I’m really hopeful that by the inaugural, we’ll have some good things to announce on behalf of the president,” Witkoff said, after Trump called on him to provide an update on the negotiations during a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

Witkoff said he would leave for Qatar either Tuesday or Wednesday night. Delegations from Israel and Hamas have been in the Gulf state since the weekend.

While Trump and his team are not formally part of the ongoing negotiations, they have been cooperating with the outgoing Biden administration, and Witkoff has traveled to the region several times since his appointment in November.

“We’re working in tandem in a really good way; but it’s the president — his reputation, the things that he has said — that [is] driving this negotiation; so hopefully it’ll all work out, and we’ll save some lives,” Witkoff added. “The red lines [Trump] put out there — that’s driving this negotiation.”

Witkoff appeared to be referring to Trump’s December 3 Truth Social post in which he threatened “ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East,” if the 100 remaining hostages in Gaza weren’t released by January 20.

Pressed on what has been holding up the talks to date, Witkoff declined to get into specifics. “I believe we’ve been on the verge of [a deal]. I don’t want to discuss what’s delayed it — no point to be negative in any way.”

Asked whether the parties are waiting to reach a deal until Trump is in office, Witkoff responded, “No, I think they heard him loud and clear. [This] better get done by the inaugural.”

At this point, Trump piped back in to reissue his threat to Hamas.

“All hell will break out in the Middle East, and it will not be good for Hamas, and it will not be good — frankly —for anyone,” Trump said.

Witkoff addressed several reporters after the press conference, and one quoted him as saying the deal that the mediators are trying to ink before the inauguration would last 42 days, in what would be the first time that someone involved in the negotiations has gone on the record to specify the exact number of days that the ceasefire agreement would last. The deal was previously understood to extend for around six or seven weeks.

The Trump envoy said Qatar is leading the mediation effort along with the Biden White House’s Mideast czar Brett McGurk, who is also in Doha. Witkoff made a point of praising Qatar’s mediation efforts, while not mentioning Egypt, which is another mediator, but has apparently played less of a central role in this latest round of talks.

Witkoff is a real estate executive who also has business ties to sovereign wealth funds in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Hamas official urges Trump to be more ‘diplomatic’

Israel and Hamas meanwhile accused each other of blocking a deal by adhering to conditions that torpedoed all previous negotiations.

Hamas said it would free its remaining hostages only if Israel agrees to end the war and withdraw all its troops from the Gaza Strip. Israel says it will not end the war until Hamas is dismantled and all hostages are free.

“Hamas is the only obstacle to the release of the hostages,” the director general of Israel’s foreign ministry, Eden Bar Tal, told a briefing with reporters, saying Israel was fully committed to reaching a deal.

Hamas official Osama Hamdan, who held a news conference in Algiers, said Israel was to blame for undermining all efforts to reach a deal.

While he said he would not give details about the latest round of negotiations, he reiterated the Hamas conditions of “a complete end to the aggression and a full withdrawal from lands the occupation invaded.”

Commenting on Trump’s threat that there would be “hell to pay” unless all hostages were freed before the inauguration, Hamdan said, “I think the US president must make more disciplined and diplomatic statements.”

Hamdan added that Hamas and its supporters in Gaza are not afraid of Trump’s threats “because they already live in hell” in the Strip.

On Monday, a forum representing the vast majority of hostage families held a press conference during which relatives of four captives called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to pursue a comprehensive deal that would see all of their loved ones released, blasting the framework Jerusalem is currently pursuing that would only free roughly one-third of the captives during a temporary ceasefire.

While Hamas has long pushed for a permanent ceasefire, officials familiar with the talks have told The Times of Israel that the terror group has indicated willingness in recent weeks to prioritize the first stage of the three-phase deal that has been under discussion since May.

A senior Arab diplomat said on Sunday that Hamas had approved a list of 34 hostages it was prepared to free as part of the deal. The list included female Israeli soldiers, plus elderly, female and minor-aged civilians, Reuters reported, citing a Hamas official.

A Saudi news outlet subsequently published what it said was the aforementioned list. Netanyahu’s office says it has yet to receive any list from Hamas, which it says is a precondition for any deal to advance.

Some of the names on the list published in Arabic media were of slain hostages. Hamas has insisted that it does not know where all of the hostages are, but would be able to ascertain their locations and conditions if Israel agrees to a brief ceasefire. Israel has rejected the idea, insisting that Hamas knows where all of the hostages are.

Israel is seeking to maximize the number of living hostages who will be released as part of the deal, while Hamas is looking to hold onto as many hostages as possible, as long as Israel plans to resume fighting once the temporary ceasefire is over. Israeli intelligence assesses that as many as half of the hostages are still alive.

The deal being discussed would see the release of the remaining female, elderly and wounded hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian security prisoners and a partial IDF withdrawal from Gaza.

Netanyahu’s office has preferred the temporary ceasefire framework, with the premier arguing that ending the war permanently in exchange for all of the hostages would allow Hamas to regain control of Gaza. Repeated polls have indicated that the majority of the Israeli public rejects Netanyahu’s approach.

Much of Israel’s security establishment has maintained that Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war contains no exit strategy since he has refused to advance a viable alternative to Hamas’s rule, thereby allowing the terror group to repeatedly return to areas briefly cleared by the IDF. The security establishment and the international community have pushed for allowing the Palestinian Authority, which enjoys limited governing powers over parts of the West Bank, to gain a foothold in Gaza in order to replace Hamas.

Netanyahu has rejected the idea out of hand, likening the PA — which backs a two-state solution — to Hamas. His far-right coalition partners have backed collapsing the PA entirely and would likely threaten to collapse the government if he considers empowering Ramallah.

The security establishment has also backed a more comprehensive deal to free the hostages, arguing that the IDF can return to Gaza if need be and that putting off the release of two-thirds of the hostages not freed in a temporary deal would likely be a death sentence for them.

The ceasefire that US, Qatari, and Egyptian mediators are trying to advance is still within the three-staged framework, but Israel this time around is much more open about the second and third phases not coming immediately after the first one.

Hamas is demanding assurances from the mediators that there will be some linkage between the first and subsequent phases, as it seeks a permanent ceasefire. Qatar hosted Israeli and Hamas delegations over the weekend for talks, but no breakthroughs have been reported.

IDF threatens more military pressure to break Hamas

Earlier Tuesday, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi told officers during a visit to northern Gaza’s Jabalia that the military was working to bring Hamas “to the point where it will understand that it needs to [release] all the hostages, otherwise the very professional work you are doing will continue and continue, and it means more prisoners and more dead operatives.”

“I look at the situation that Hamas is in, they see every day what you are doing to them and they understand that this thing is close to being unbearable,” Halevi said.

For over a year, Israeli officials have insisted that military pressure is what will convince Hamas to release the hostages. Military pressure has indeed intensified since the first hostage deal was reached in November 2023 when over 100 captives were released during a week-long pause in the fighting. Since then, though, the only hostages freed were seven in three separate rescue operations. Other hostages were executed by Hamas as they identified IDF troops approaching, and some were accidentally killed in Israeli airstrikes. The IDF did recover the bodies of roughly three dozen slain hostages.

Israeli military strikes killed at least 10 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, medics said, as the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza called for international donors to immediately provide fuel it said was needed to maintain medical services.

One of those strikes killed four people in a house in Beach camp in Gaza City, while the remaining six were killed in separate strikes across the enclave, medics said.

The health ministry said hospitals were running out of fuel to operate generators and maintain medical services across Gaza because of Israeli restrictions.

Israel has repeatedly said it facilitated the delivery of fuel and medical supplies to hospitals in the enclave, even in areas where forces have active operations.

On Tuesday, the military said its forces had detained 240 Palestinians in a raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza last month, and they had provided “substantial intelligence.”

The military released footage of the interrogation of a purported Hamas militant who detailed how militants “operated from the hospital area” and transferred weapons to and from it.

Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel killed 1,208 people, mostly civilians, according to official Israeli data. Two hundred and fifty-one people were also taken hostage during the onslaught.

Since then, Israel’s military offensive has killed 45,854 people in Gaza, according to Hamas figures, which cannot be verified and do not distinguish between combatants and civilians. The IDF claims it had killed some 18,000 combatants in battle as of November and another 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.

Agencies contributed to this report.