Israel Attacks Qatar’s Relevance
The strikes against Hamas in Doha suggest a natural limit to Qatar’s role as an intermediary.
Israel attacked Hamas, apparently targeting its lead negotiator, Khalil al-Hayya, in Doha, the capital of Qatar. This tactic is not endorsed in Getting to Yes or in any other guide to negotiation or international law. It is, however, consistent with the stated view of Israel’s leadership, which is that avowed members of a group engaged in ongoing acts of terror are valid targets wherever they happen to be. Israel demonstrated the sincerity of that last part—that it would strike wherever it wished—with its assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s then–political leader, in Tehran last year. Even after that, Hamas considered Qatar safe, because it is the site of the U.S.-backed negotiations over the war in Gaza, and as long as Israel’s closest ally was encouraging talks, Israel would need a living Hamas member to avoid a one-sided conversation. Hamas claims that its leaders in Qatar survived but that some lower-level figures, including al-Hayya’s son, did not. Israeli officials claim that they attacked Hamas in Doha with American consent. White House officials say that Donald Trump learned about the operation just this morning and directed his envoy Steve Witkoff to tip off the Qataris. The Qataris say that they took his call just as the explosions were under way.
Back in February, Trump said that if all of the Israeli hostages were not released within days, “all bets are off, and let hell break out.” (His threat raised the question of what, if not hell, he thought had broken out in Gaza since October 7, 2023.) Trump added that it was Israel’s choice whether to take advantage of its new latitude. Just this weekend, he suggested that Hamas’s negotiators mull a deal he had proposed to them, according to which all of the Israeli hostages would be released in exchange for a cease-fire and the release of many Palestinian prisoners. “I have warned Hamas about the consequences of not accepting,” he wrote on Truth Social. If Trump was in fact aware of the operation, this tactic—lie about whether negotiation is still ongoing—resembles the ruse that preceded America’s bombing of Iran in June, just days after Trump said he’d spend “two weeks” deciding whether to attack.
Those who view America and Israel cynically will point to perfidy in these fake-outs, which amount to inviting Hamas’s leaders to mull a deal and then killing them while they ponder it. Cynics on the other side will say that Hamas has never pondered any deal since the beginning of the so-called negotiation. Every deal it envisions is a tactical retreat to set up more war. Because Hamas is plotting Israel’s annihilation under the guise of considering peace, the Israelis would have to be suckers to wait around for Hamas to perfect its plot and put it into action. Last week, Hamas said that it would accept a deal under which it would free the hostages in exchange for a cease-fire, the freedom of Palestinian prisoners, and Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. But on Friday, it released a video of two Israeli hostages, as if to confirm that the group remains remorseless for its war crimes and will commit more as soon as it can. Both sides’ cynics are very astute.
The assassination is gloomy news for the Israeli hostages, of whom roughly 20 are thought to be alive. But spare a different kind of pity for Qatar. It’s not easy being an insanely rich petro-emirate. During the past two decades, it went from a wealthy but minor airstrip and gas station for other countries, including the United States, to an important player in international relations. It somehow danced between the geopolitical raindrops and made itself a useful partner to so many opposing factions that everyone stood to lose something if it ceased to flourish. The assassination on its territory is not an assault on Qatar itself or the first salvo in a war between it and Israel. But it is a challenge to Qatar’s relevance.
The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, once told me that his country’s dispute with Qatar from 2017 to 2021 was a family affair—a squabble among cousins that would eventually conclude. He had blockaded Qatar, the equivalent of building a barrier of burning tires in front of your cousin’s driveway, and accused it of subverting the Saudi monarchy by fomenting Islamism. He was not making those charges up. For years, Qatar had been the Arab Gulf’s main depot for political Islamists, a transit point and home for those who thought the Muslim Brotherhood and the Taliban deserved to be heard out. MBS’s view was that they should be heard only through heavily reinforced cell doors. And Saudi senior officials were appalled that this country, tiny and insignificant compared with Saudi Arabia, would have any say at all in matters of importance. The leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates despise Hamas and resent their uppity neighbor. They have condemned today’s killings but are not likely to be entirely displeased.
Qatar insisted on its own relevance, and eventually its necessity, by inserting itself in the middle of every conflict and offering itself as an intermediary. The Americans needed an air base. They needed a place where the Taliban could sit down to negotiate an American withdrawal. Iran and various Sunni jihadists needed a non-pariah country as a pass-through for negotiations with the rest of the world. If Qatar had not volunteered for these duties, another country would have had to have been persuaded to take them on instead.
Israel’s strike suggests a natural limit to Qatar’s role as an intermediary. The United States needed Qatar to deal with the Taliban, because the Taliban and the United States shared a goal of getting the United States out of Afghanistan. But now that it is clear that the goals of extinguishing Israel and Hamas are incommensurable—it should not have taken 22 months to figure this out—Qatar no longer looks indispensable. It looks instead like an enabler, a time waster in a conflict whose every month kills more innocents. Killing negotiations by killing one of the negotiators is confirmation (hardly the first) that Israel and the United States, if it approved the hit, view mediation as a ruse. Now they will see whether negotiating with cynics was better than negotiating with no one at all.
