Steve Witkoff and Tucker Carlson: Key Middle East points from US envoy interview

In a frank and wide-ranging interview with Tucker Carlson on Saturday, US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff said that negotiations to end Israeli attacks on Gaza were ongoing and that if Hamas “demilitarised” then “maybe they could stay” in the Palestinian enclave and “be involved politically”.

“What does Hamas want? I think they want to stay there till the end of time. And they want to rule Gaza,” Witkoff said. “And that’s unacceptable."

"What’s acceptable to us is they need to demilitarise. Then maybe they could stay there a little bit. Be involved politically. But they can’t be involved militarily," he told Carlson, a conservative media personality closely associated with the US President Donald Trump's Make America Great Again movement.

In January, billionaire real estate developer Witkoff was charged by Trump, then the incoming president, with negotiating a ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel. That ceasefire was broken by Israel on 18 March, when it killed over 400 people in Gaza in a series of air strikes. 

During the interview Witkoff described Trump as "the master" and said that when he went into the real estate business, “I wanted to be him, everybody wanted to be him.”

“We can’t have a terrorist organisation running Gaza because that’s unacceptable to Israel,” he said, referring to Hamas.

'I don’t think anyone has a feeling that you can just sort of kill off Hamas. It’s an idea, right? That’s what Hamas is about'

- Steve Witkoff, US Middle East envoy

Asked about how he communicates with the Palestinian movement, the American diplomat was fulsome in his praise for mediators Qatar, and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim al-Thani.

“He’s a special guy, he really is,” Witkoff said of al-Thani. “I think in the case of the Qataris, they’re criticised for not being well motivated. It’s preposterous. They are well motivated. They’re good, decent people… they’re a small nation and they want to be acknowledged as a peacemaker.”

Witkoff said that negotiations are taking place “right now to maybe stop some of these Israeli strikes and maybe finish this conflict with dialogue”. Asked what Hamas wanted, he said that he had told Trump he did not think the Palestinian movement was “ideologically intractable”.

“I don’t think anyone has a feeling that you can just sort of kill off Hamas. It’s an idea, right? That’s what Hamas is about. It’s an ideological idea, but they can’t be allowed to ever again foment alongside the Muslim Brotherhood, alongside Islamic Jihad, Witkoff said. 

Carlson described the real estate tycoon as “the most effective negotiator in my lifetime".

“You speak for the president,” Carlson said of Witkoff, “you’re honest and people like you personally.”

“The boss is President Trump. President Trump sets the table,” Witkoff said of US negotiating strategy.

“This whole peace through strength thing - it’s not just a slogan, it actually works… So when he dispatches you to the Middle East, people are almost a little bit intimidated before you actually get there.”

Reconstructing Gaza

Witkoff said that when Trump asked him how long it would take to reconstruct Gaza, he replied by saying 15 or maybe 20 years.

Having spoken about turning Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East”, on 26 February Trump shared on social media a bizarre AI-generated video showing the decimated Palestinian enclave as a luxury beach resort complete with skyscrapers, a huge golden statue of the US president and a “Trump Tower”.

In February 2024, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner said that Gaza’s “waterfront property, it could be very valuable”. “It's a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but I think from Israel's perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up,” Kushner said.

'Maybe it’s about blockchain and robotics coming there. Maybe it’s about pharmaceutical manufacturing coming there'

- Steve Witkoff on the US vision for Gaza

Witkoff told Carlson that he had been into Gaza and seen how difficult any reconstruction would be.

“It’s been decimated, it’s been destroyed, there are tunnels underneath, so think Swiss cheese underneath. And then they got hit with bunker buster bombs, so there’s no rock there anymore,” he said.

Witkoff said that criticisms of Trump for “looking to create a beachside community with gleaming towers and casinos" were "preposterous. He was being realistic about what Gaza needed.”

Expanding on what a Trump-backed US vision for Gaza might actually look like, Witkoff said that when people talked about a two-state solution, he thought of it as “how do we have a better living prescription for Palestinians who are living in Gaza?”

“It’s not just about housing. Maybe it’s about AI coming there. Maybe it’s about hyperscale data centres being seeded into that area because we need to have that and these people can now take advantage and we can create jobs for them there,” he continued.

“Maybe it’s about blockchain and robotics coming there. Maybe it’s about pharmaceutical manufacturing coming there. We can’t rebuild Gaza and it be based on a welfare system.”

Netanyahu 'decapitated Hamas'

Asked about what Israel’s government wanted and how it was strategising, Witkoff said: “I think they’re well motivated. I think there are things that they’re trying to get done.”

“You know, as an example, we would not be as effective in what we’re doing there if Bibi did not get Nasrallah out of the picture in Lebanon, if he did not decapitate - because he’s effectively decapitated - Hezbollah,” he said, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. 

“He’s decapitated Hamas,” Witkoff said of Netanyahu. “Hamas is nowhere close to the terrorist organisation that they were beforehand.”

In January, the outgoing US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, said that Hamas had been able to recruit almost as many new fighters as Israel killed during its war on Gaza.

Witkoff told Carlson that Netanyahu’s approach to Hamas and Hezbollah informed his “relationship with Iran” and its use of proxies in the region. “And so that sort of Iranian crescent or that Islamist crescent that everybody thought was going to be effective, it’s been largely eliminated,” claimed Witkoff.

The US diplomat said, however, that he could understand why some people thought Netanyahu was more concerned “about the fight than he is about the hostages”.

“I think Bibi feels that he’s doing the right thing. I think he goes up against public opinion mostly because public opinion there [in Israel] wants those hostages home.”

Egypt is a 'flashpoint'

Witkoff did not confine his remarks to the situation in Gaza or the war in Ukraine.

Praising Qatar, he laid out an American vision for the Gulf in which US security guarantees and a peace deal in Gaza would lead to a point where American banks like JP Morgan could underwrite hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in things like AI data centres.

He said that younger generations in the Arab world witnessing the destruction of Gaza on their phones was a “huge factor” when it came to the possibility of government collapse in Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere.

“I think Egypt is a flashpoint,” Witkoff said. “Egypt has a very restive population. The stats in Egypt are huge - unemployment among under-25s is like 45 percent. A country can’t exist like that. They’re largely broke. They need a lot of help. If we have a bad event in Egypt, it could take us back.”

While referring to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as an “amazing leader”, Witkoff said this was also an issue in Saudi Arabia, where a “young population” was witnessing the war on Gaza. This is “why we’ve got to solve Gaza”, Witkoff said.

“Because if we solve Gaza, which is the condition precedent to Saudi normalising, then Saudi can normalise.”