White House special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, son-in-law of U.S. President Donald Trump, are back in Israel a little over a week after brokering the Gaza ceasefire. This is time, they’re there one day after the ceasefire nearly blew apart.
After arriving this morning, Oct. 20, Witkoff and Kushner met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The leaders discussed “the developments and updates in the region,” a spokeswoman for the Prime Minister’s Office told journalists, without providing any further details, reported the Times of Israel. She added that U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and his wife were due to visit Israel “for a few days and will be meeting with the prime minister.”
The meeting also came after CBS News’ “60 Minutes” aired an interview with the two negotiators, in which they wove a narrative of breakthroughs that led to the Oct. 9 ceasefire agreement. The first was the apology that Trump pressured Netanyahu into making to Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani over the Israeli airstrike on Doha targeting Hamas leaders there. “The apology needed to happen. It just did. We were not moving forward without that apology,” Witkoff said. “And the President said to him, ‘People apologize.'”
The second breakthrough came when Trump gave Kushner and Witkoff permission to speak directly with Hamas, despite its designation as a terrorist group. They met directly with top Hamas negotiator Khalil al-Hayya, whose son was among six killed by Israel’s airstrike on Qatar.
“We expressed our condolences to him for the loss of his son. 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 said. Witkoff’s son, Andrew, died of an opioid overdose at the age of 22.
“When Steve and him spoke about their sons, it turned from a negotiation with a terrorist group into seeing two human beings kind of showing a vulnerability with each other,” Kushner said. Kushner and Witkoff said Mr. Trump had guaranteed that the U.S. would stand behind the deal, that both sides would be treated fairly and that the U.S. would not allow the deal to be violated.
