US special envoy Steve Witkoff canceled a planned Wednesday meeting with top Hamas negotiator Khalil al-Hayya in Istanbul, a senior Arab diplomat told The Times of Israel.

Witkoff had planned the trip to Turkey primarily around a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and had tacked on the meeting with Hayya after the fact. But when the former sit-down didn’t pan out, Witkoff decided not to take the trip at all, the diplomat said, confirming a report in the Axios news site.

The diplomat denied a report in the Hezbollah-linked Lebanese channel Al-Mayadeen that claimed Witkoff had canceled the meeting due to Israeli pressure.

The meeting would have been Witkoff’s second with Hayya, after the special envoy, along with Jared Kushner, a fellow top adviser to US President Donald Trump, 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.

There were no known meetings between the US and Hamas before Trump’s second term, when he dispatched an 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........

© The Times of Israel