WASHINGTON: US envoy Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s chief negotiator on the Middle East, has said that he felt “betrayed” when Israel launched a strike targeting Hamas negotiators in Qatar last month.
In a CBS interview alongside Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law who worked with Witkoff on the brokering of a Gaza ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, the presidential envoy said he learned of the September 9 attack in Doha the morning after it happened.
Qatar is a key US ally and acted as mediator in the push to end the Gaza war.
“I think both Jared and I felt, I just feel we felt a little bit betrayed,” Witkoff told the CBS news program “60 Minutes” in excerpts released Friday. The full interview is scheduled to air on Sunday.
At the time, the strike halted the indirect negotiating process to end the fighting in the devastated Gaza Strip, triggered by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
