Israel’s strike in Qatar scrambles Trump’s ceasefire plans
For much of the world, Israel’s Tuesday airstrike in Qatar against Hamas officials negotiating over an end to the Gaza war was a dangerous and counterproductive act that has set back the prospects for peace and the release of what Israel says are 20 living hostages still held by Hamas.
In the Arab world, the strike was seen by many as a cynical move by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to scuttle ceasefire negotiations and extend the war to allow Israel the time and space to continue its offensive in Gaza.
Wider possible consequences include undermining President Donald Trump’s goal of building pro-U.S. regional integration through expansion of the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements he brokered between Israel and four Arab states during his first term. In addition to Saudi Arabia and others in the Persian Gulf, the Trump administration has envisioned eventually adding Lebanon, Syria, Azerbaijan and more to the accords.
That “vision is under heavy strain,” a senior Persian Gulf official said at a conference this week in Washington, where most participants spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive diplomacy. “This is a time when, after two years of war, we need to de-escalate. Many Israeli military operations have succeeded tactically, but the region doesn’t look any better.”
“This is a complication we did not need,” the official said.
Not all Arab governments have been happy about Qatar’s hosting of Hamas officials - an arrangement made at least partly in response to a U.S. request to facilitate indirect negotiations with the militant group. But many said the strike set a disturbing precedent indicating that none are immune from attack - regardless of diplomatic niceties and ongoing negotiations - should Israel deem its own national security interests at stake.
Negotiations with Hamas officials have also taken place in Egypt, and some have residences in Turkey. The day after the Qatar bombing, Israeli warplanes also attacked several sites in Yemen, targeting leaders of Iranian-backed Houthi militants in strikes that unconfirmed reports said had killed dozens of civilians.
“We pounded them today again from the air - in their terror facilities, their terror bases with a great many terrorists and other facilities as well,” Netanyahu said of the Yemen strikes in a video statement. “Whoever attacks us, we will reach them.”
An Israeli official said that the government was not concerned about diplomatic blowback from the Qatar strike, noting that after Israeli agents in several European countries assassinated Palestinians whom it said participated in a terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, the Europeans did not alter their relations with Israel.
The Doha attack “wasn’t an attempt to disrespect Qatar,” the Israeli official said at the conference, held by the Middle East American Dialogue. “We saw an opportunity and we took it. … I think will bring the end [of the war] closer … [but] it could go in the other direction.”
The airstrike on a Doha apartment building left six people dead - none of them the senior Hamas negotiators who were targeted.
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid echoed support for eliminating Hamas operatives, but criticized the lack of strategy.
“These were bad people who should have been killed long ago,” said Lapid, who spoke on the record at the conference. “But as the hours pass, it’s clear this was not as successful as first thought, and it wasn’t part of a strategy - it was just an operation. Worse, the president of the United States nearly called the prime minister reckless, and leaders in the region echoed that sentiment.”
After a phone conversation with Netanyahu following the Doha strike, Trump told reporters Tuesday that he “was very unhappy about it, very unhappy about every aspect.”
Trump has been deeply invested in the Gaza ceasefire negotiations and expansion of the Abraham Accords that some consider the primary foreign policy achievement of his first term. But the strikes may have damaged Trump’s credibility as well as Israel’s.
“If you’re an Arab leader, and you’re an ally of the United States and doing things at the behest to the United States like hosting Hamas and mediating talks and that still doesn’t protect you?” said Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Middle East Policy. “You’re going to be anxious about that relationship and about the U.S. being a guarantor of regional order.”
Arab officials and Washington-based analysts expressed doubts about the administration’s insistence that it had no prior knowledge of the Doha attack and was informed by the Pentagon just as it began.
“There’s no way Prime Minister Netanyahu would have ordered the Israeli air force to bomb a building in Qatar without having closely coordinated with the United States,” said Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Experts noted that the massive al-Udeid U.S. air base in Qatar monitors all aircraft in the region and would have surely seen an attack heading in that direction long before it arrived on target.
U.S. officials have said that the Pentagon alerted Trump that an Israeli strike had been launched toward Doha, although it remained unclear if Israel had informed the United States or if an incoming attack had been technologically detected by U.S. forces in the region.
Trump immediately instructed special envoy Steve Witkoff to warn Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, one U.S. official said. Unable to reach Mohammed, Witkoff spoke to his deputy just as the explosions began in Doha.
In a phone call to Mohammed later Tuesday after the attack, Trump assured him that “such a thing will not happen again on their soil,” according to White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt.
Just days earlier, Trump had said a deal for release of all of the hostages could come “very soon,” perhaps within a week, and gave Hamas a “last warning” to accept the proposal on the table.
That proposal reportedly calls for the release of all hostages - including the remains of 26 people the Israelis have officially declared dead - in exchange for Israel’s release of Palestinian prisoners and eventual withdrawal from the enclave, with the United States taking charge of Gaza. Hamas negotiators were reportedly considering that offer, which Trump said Israel had accepted, when the missiles landed in Doha.
With Trump’s apparent displeasure at the unilateral strikes on an important regional partner - and a country that has gifted him a new Air Force One jumbo jet - there are new rumblings that it might be time for a change in U.S. policy or a tougher line with Netanyahu.
A senior Biden administration official, who long backed U.S. military support for Israel, suggested that as the Israel Defense Forces launches yet another offensive in northern Gaza, U.S. assistance should be limited to defensive weapons. The time may have come, the official said, to “stop giving [Israel] the keys to the car to run into the wall over and over again.”
Mohammed, the Qatari prime minister, said he hoped for a “collective response” to the Israeli strike. “This response is currently under consultation and discussion with other partners in the region,” he said in a Wednesday interview with CNN. He said that an Arab-Islamic summit will be held in Doha in the coming days to decide on a joint course of action.
In his video message Wednesday, Netanyahu said Qatar should “either expel [Hamas] or you bring them to justice. Because if you don’t, we will.” Mohammed dismissed “someone like him trying to lecture … about the law.” Netanyahu, he said, had “killed any hope” for hostages still alive in Gaza.
Even if the ceasefire negotiations continue in some form, there is little agreement on whether they will lead to an end of the war, or what should happen after the fighting is over. Arab governments have proposed an interim government of Palestinian technocrats alongside a trained local security force, leading to the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
The White House is deeply involved in creating its own plan. A senior administration official said they were talking to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and others about a “receivership,” in which the U.S. would take some form of control over Gaza to give people “a better life.”
“It is an enormous grand master plan development. Think of the Marshall Plan coming to Gaza,” the official said, referencing the U.S. postwar development of Germany. “That’s how we’re thinking about this.”
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Gerry Shih in Jerusalem contributed to this report.