60 Minutes (CBS News)

Overview

On October 19, 2025, 60 Minutes aired an interview that functioned as the first detailed public account of America’s direct channel to Hamas (Al Jazeera). The guests were Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. What made the segment travel wasn’t the ceasefire timeline they laid out — it was the scene they described from inside the negotiations: Witkoff, in Egypt ahead of the ceasefire signing, sitting across from a Hamas delegation led by chief negotiator Khalil al-Hayya and finding, in the middle of a war negotiation, that he and the Hamas leader had buried sons of their own (Anadolu Agency). “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 (Matzav). The interview also carried the administration’s bluntest on-the-record admission about the September 9 Israeli strike on Hamas negotiators in Doha: Witkoff said he and Kushner felt “a little bit betrayed” (The News).

The program

60 Minutes has been on CBS since September 24, 1968, when producer Don Hewitt launched it with correspondents Mike Wallace and Harry Reasoner (AMAC). Hewitt — who joined CBS News in 1948 — built the show on a magazine idea: several shorter stories per hour instead of one subject per broadcast, letting investigations, interviews and features share the same hour (AMAC). The early years were shaky, with the program bouncing through weeknight slots before it settled on Sunday evenings in 1975 and grew into one of television’s most popular shows (AMAC). Over Hewitt’s 36-year run it collected 73 Emmy Awards, 13 DuPont/Columbia University Awards and nine Peabody Awards, and it remains the only news program ever to finish a season as TV’s top-rated show — four times over (Editor & Publisher). The October 2025 broadcast fit the program’s oldest habit: putting newsmakers in front of a camera and letting the exchange itself become the story.

The Hamas meeting

The meeting Witkoff described took place in Egypt as the ceasefire push reached its final stage, and it was the highest-profile direct encounter yet between the United States and Hamas — talks Trump had personally authorized (Anadolu Agency). Kushner gave the most granular account of the room: “We go into a room and you have the Qataris, the Turks, and the Egyptians. And then we meet the four representatives of Hamas,” he said — then described himself looking at them as hardened men who had green-lit the October 7 assault, held hostages through two years of bombing, and withstood the suffering (Matzav). What shifted the temperature, in his telling, was the exchange of condolences. Witkoff’s son Andrew had died of an opioid overdose in 2011; al-Hayya’s son Himam had been killed in the September Israeli strike on Doha that targeted al-Hayya and other senior Hamas officials (Anadolu Agency). “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 said (Matzav).

The channel did not end with the ceasefire. In mid-November 2025, Witkoff was reported to be planning another meeting with al-Hayya to address the October truce — a sit-down that, as reported, would show he was “not deterred by Israeli and American critics who say that U.S. engagement with Hamas offers the group unwarranted legitimacy” (Anadolu Agency).

The Doha strike and the “betrayed” admission

The strike that shadowed the interview had come on September 9, when Israel fired on a Hamas building in Doha where officials were meeting to discuss Trump’s proposed ceasefire and hostage exchange (The Libertarian Institute). Witkoff told 60 Minutes he learned of it the morning after it happened (The News). Qatar is a key U.S. ally and had been mediating the push to end the Gaza war alongside Egypt and Turkey (The News). “I think both Jared and I felt, I just feel we felt a little bit betrayed,” Witkoff said — and he described the damage in diplomatic terms: “It had a metastasizing effect because the Qataris were critical to the negotiation… We had lost the confidence of the Qataris. And so Hamas went underground, and it was very, very difficult to get to them” (The News).

Kushner, asked how Trump had reacted to the strike, offered the interview’s most quoted line about the president: “[Trump] felt like the Israelis were getting a little bit out of control,” he said, adding, “It was time to be very strong and stop them from doing things that he felt were not in their long-term interests” (The Libertarian Institute). The truce still followed: Israel and Hamas accepted Trump’s 20-point plan, calling for hostage and prisoner releases and a ceasefire after two years of war, and Netanyahu — under pressure from Trump during a White House visit — called Qatar’s prime minister to apologize for the Doha strike (The News).

What this profile does not claim

• It does not resolve whether Trump had advance knowledge of the Doha strike: Witkoff said the president did not know, while Israeli officials have disputed that account. The dispute is reported in a single lower-tier source and is stated here only as an open question.
• It does not claim the planned follow-up Witkoff–al-Hayya meeting took place — only that it was reported as planned in November 2025.
• It does not assert the exact date of the October Egypt meeting beyond “October 2025, ahead of the ceasefire signing.”
• It does not characterize al-Hayya’s later leadership role inside Hamas; it uses only the titles its sources support (“Hamas chief negotiator,” “Hamas leader”).
• It does not claim Trump signed an executive order giving Doha security guarantees — that appeared in a single lower-tier source and was not independently verified.
• A companion profile, 60 Minutes (CBS), covers the same program through a different lens: the November 2025 Norah O’Donnell interview with Donald Trump and the conflict-of-interest questions that were cut from it.