The Trump administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Witkoff’s meeting with hostage families.
Daniel Lifshitz’s grandparents Oded and Yocheved Lifshitz were among the around 250 people taken hostage in the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023.
Yocheved Liftshitz, 86, a peace activist, was released by Hamas later in October 2023. Oded Liftshitz’s body was returned to his family earlier this year as part of the ceasefire, which lasted two months before Israeli forces resumed their campaign in Gaza in March. He was 84.
Images released by Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group, appearing to show visibly gaunt Israeli hostages Evyatar David and Rom Braslavski, have also sparked alarm among hostage families about the conditions of their loved ones.
Details of Witkoff’s meeting with dozens of hostage families emerged as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would convene his security Cabinet to “instruct” the Israeli military on how to achieve the war’s aims.
More than 60,800 people have been killed since the war began, with hundreds killed over the span of days, according to the health ministry in Gaza.
Netanyahu and Witkoff have said repeatedly that Hamas is not interested in agreeing to a truce. Hamas says it does want an agreement but continues to call for a Palestinian state with a capital in east Jerusalem, which is among a handful of concessions Israel says it cannot make.
Over the weekend, far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called for Israel to “conquer the entire Gaza Strip” and encourage “voluntary migration” from the territory. He made the comments in a video statement published to his X account, repeating similar calls he has made in recent months.
During his visit to Israel, Witkoff made a brief and rare stop in Gaza amid growing starvation in the enclave and rising numbers of deaths from malnutrition.
Witkoff and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, escorted by the Israeli military, stopped at an aid distribution site in southern Gaza run by the U.S. and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Hundreds of desperate aid-seekers have been killed, largely by Israeli forces, trying to access GHF’s aid sites, according to witnesses, doctors and officials in Gaza.
“It was a PR stunt, a controlled visit supervised and dictated by the Israeli military,” Ellie Burgos, an American critical care nurse volunteering at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, said of Witkoff and Huckabee’s visit. “What they saw was not the reality.”
Nearly 170 people in Gaza — more than 90 of them children — have died from malnutrition since the war began, according to the Palestinian health ministry in the Hamas-run enclave.
The world’s leading body on hunger, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, warned last week that the “worst-case scenario of famine” was playing out in Gaza under Israel’s military offensive and aid restrictions.
Over the weekend, the World Health Organization led condemnation of an Israeli attack on the Palestine Red Crescent Society’s headquarters in Gaza that killed a staff member and injured several other people.
The society, which provides emergency medical services in the besieged enclave, said in a statement that artillery struck the upper floors of its building in the southern city of Khan Younis early on Sunday. The building was clearly marked with its emblem, it said.
The PRCS says at least 51 staff members and volunteers have been killed since Israel launched its offensive in Gaza following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in which some 1,200 people were killed and around 250 taken hostage.
Matt Bradley contributed.
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