President Donald Trump grew frustrated with Israel after its failed September 9 strike in Doha targeting Hamas’s leadership, believing the Israeli government was “getting a little bit out of control,” his son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner said.

Kushner made the comment during a joint interview with Steve Witkoff, the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, on CBS’s 60 Minutes. The two, who helped negotiate the Gaza ceasefire and hostage-release deal, described how Israel’s attempted assassination of Hamas leaders in Qatar nearly derailed the agreement. The full interview is scheduled to air Sunday.

“I think both Jared and I felt — I just feel we felt a little bit betrayed,” Witkoff said, referring to Israel’s decision to carry out the strike during ongoing U.S.-brokered negotiations. “It had a metastasizing effect because the Qataris were critical to the negotiation, as were the Egyptians and the Turks. We had lost the confidence of the Qataris. And so Hamas went underground, and it was very, very difficult to get to them.”

Kushner said Trump’s reaction marked a turning point. “The strike led him to realize that it was time to be very strong and stop them from doing things that he felt were not in their long-term interests,” he said.

Trump had said after the strike that he was “very unhappy” with Israel for targeting a “strong U.S. ally” and noted that Washington received no meaningful advance warning. The Israeli operation failed to kill any top Hamas officials but resulted in the deaths of several lower-level operatives and a Qatari security guard.

In response to the fallout, Trump committed the United States to defend Qatar in the event of future attacks and saw to it that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued an apology to Doha.

The strike also complicated Israel’s regional ties. For years, with Netanyahu’s approval, Qatar had transferred millions of dollars in cash each month to Gaza, funds that sustained the Hamas government until the terror group launched the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages.

Opposition Leader Yair Lapid called the 60 Minutes remarks an “earthquake,” saying that “no Israeli government has ever been described this way by an American administration.”

“After the failed attack on Doha, Trump thought Netanyahu had lost control and imposed a deal on him that Netanyahu didn’t want,” Lapid wrote on X. He argued that the interview showed “it could have been arranged for Egypt to govern Gaza and help us fight Hamas. Instead, Netanyahu’s lack of control led to the entry of Turkey and Qatar, two of Hamas’s ideological partners.”

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