Revealed: direct meeting between Hamas leaders and Trump’s envoys led to completion of prisoner exchange deal

An extraordinary meeting held last Wednesday in Sharm el-Sheikh between President Trump’s envoys and Hamas leaders helped produce an agreement to end the war in Gaza, Channel 12 reported.

One of the main obstacles to the deal was Hamas leaders’ fear that Israel would return to war after the release of the hostages. To reach the agreement, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner had to meet Hamas leaders in person and reassure them directly that Trump would not allow that to happen, provided they honored their commitments under the deal.

The day before, during a meeting in the Oval Office before his departure for Egypt, Trump privately gave Witkoff and Kushner permission to meet Hamas leaders, if necessary, to finalize the deal. After arriving in Sharm el-Sheikh, Witkoff informed Qatari, Egyptian and Turkish mediators that Trump had given the green light for this step.

On Wednesday evening, at around 11:00 p.m., Qatari mediators arrived at Witkoff’s villa at the Four Seasons hotel and told the American delegation that negotiations had reached a deadlock, and asked whether the U.S. envoys were willing to meet Hamas leaders, according to one source.
A senior Qatari official told Witkoff: “We believe that if you meet them and shake their hands, there will be an agreement.”

Minutes later, Witkoff and Kushner entered another villa at the Red Sea resort. Inside, they were met by the chiefs of Egyptian and Turkish intelligence, senior Qatari officials, and four senior Hamas leaders involved in the negotiations.
The Hamas team was led by Khalil al-Hayya, who survived an Israeli assassination attempt in Doha three weeks earlier. During the roughly 45-minute meeting, Witkoff told Hamas officials that the hostages had shifted from being an asset to a burden on the movement, and therefore “it is time to move forward with the first phase of the agreement and return people to their homes on both sides of the border,” according to a source.

Al-Hayya asked whether Witkoff and Kushner had a message from Trump. Witkoff replied, according to the same source: “President Trump’s message is that you will be treated fairly, that he supports all twenty points in his peace plan, and will ensure they are all implemented.”
After the meeting, Hamas leaders moved to a separate room with Egyptian, Qatari and Turkish mediators. Minutes later the head of Egyptian intelligence, Hassan Rashad, returned with his Turkish and Qatari counterparts. The Egyptian official told Witkoff and Kushner: “Based on the meeting we just held, we have reached an agreement.”

The Sharm el-Sheikh meeting was the second significant direct contact between the Trump administration and Hamas. In March, the president’s special envoy for hostages, Adam Boehler, held unprecedented meetings with Hamas leaders in Doha in an effort to free American hostage Eidan Alexander and to return the bodies of four other Americans taken by the movement.