US special envoy Steve Witkoff will meet on Wednesday in Istanbul with a delegation of senior Hamas officials led by Khalil al-Hayya to discuss efforts to maintain the ongoing ceasefire in Gaza, an Arab diplomat told The Times of Israel.
It will be Witkoff’s second meeting with Hayya after the special envoy and fellow top adviser to US President Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, 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.
In a joint interview alongside Kushner last month, Witkoff said he managed to connect with Hayya over their shared experience of losing a son.
Witkoff’s late son, Andrew, died at the age of 22 of an opioid overdose. Hayya’s son, Himam al-Hayya, was killed in the Israeli airstrike on Hamas headquarters in Doha on September 9, which failed to kill any of the senior Hamas leaders targeted in the strike.
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“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,” Kushner told CBS’s 60 Minutes.
Tents are set up inside a gutted apartment building in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, Saturday, Nov. 15, 2025. (AP/Abdel Kareem Hana)
There were no known meetings between US and Hamas before Trump’s second term, when he dispatched his hostage 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 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 is likely to raise the US desire for Hamas to disarm during the Wednesday scheduled meeting in Turkey.
He has claimed that Hamas leaders already committed to do so during their last meeting, but the terror group has publicly insisted that it is not prepared to do so, 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.
Witkoff has 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.
IDF troops operate on the eastern side of the Yellow Line in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis, in a handout photo issued on November 9, 2025. (Israel Defense Forces)
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’s also unclear whether the Hamas fighters are prepared to hand over their guns.
Witkoff has framed the stand-off 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 only focused on the ceasefire, Israel’s initial pullback from Gaza, the hostage-prisoner swap and humanitarian aid provisions.
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