A new front
Israel gambles on decapitating Hamas in Qatar, shocking the Gulf
Airstrikes on Doha expand the Middle East wars further
DUBAI AND JERUSALEM
SINCE THE massacre on October 7th 2023, Israel has lashed out at Hamas across the Middle East.
It has assassinated members of the Palestinian militant group in Gaza and the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Iran.
But it refrained from going after them in Qatar.
Though the tiny Gulf emirate has long harboured the group’s leaders, it is a close American ally; it has also been the primary venue for ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas.
Attacking it was a bridge too far.
No longer.
On September 9th the Israeli air force bombed a villa in Doha, the Qatari capital, where leaders of Hamas were thought to be meeting.
Much about the strike is still unclear.
But a line has been crossed, and it will have implications not only for the war in Gaza, now approaching its third year, but for the relationship between America, Israel and the Gulf states.
Early reports from Israel claimed that a who’s who of Hamas leaders was present in the villa, from Khalil al-Hayya, the head of its negotiating team, to Khaled Meshal, a former boss of the group (and the target of an Israeli assassination attempt in 1997).
Hamas said in a statement that six people were killed in the attack, but its leaders survived.
Israeli officials will not yet say whether they believe any of the leaders were killed.
They were ostensibly gathered to discuss a new ceasefire proposal that the Trump administration floated in recent days.
The deal would have been advantageous for Israel.
It called for Hamas to immediately release the remaining 48 Israeli hostages (both living and dead) it holds in Gaza.
But it would not necessarily have ended the war: it offered a temporary ceasefire and the promise that Donald Trump would press Israel into a permanent one.
A similar promise came to naught earlier this year, when Israel agreed to a ceasefire in January only to abandon it in March.
Some diplomats think Hamas would have rejected this new offer as too wobbly.
Their dilemma was how to reject it in a way that would not anger Mr Trump.
That discussion now seems moot.
The talks are almost certainly over, at least in Qatar, which may abandon its role as mediator.
If and when they resume, it will probably be in Egypt.
If the foreign-based leaders of Hamas were indeed killed or incapacitated, the man making decisions will be Izz al-Din al-Haddad, the commander of Hamas’s military wing in Gaza, a veteran fighter with little political or diplomatic experience.
A successful strike might boost Binyamin Netanyahu’s standing at home, but it will also exacerbate the bitter debate over the war in Gaza, which most Israelis want to end.
The prime minister has resisted those calls at the behest of his far-right allies, who want to reoccupy Gaza and displace its population.
A group of hostage families put out a statement expressing their “deep fear” at “the price hostages may pay” because of the strike in Qatar.
The mother of one hostage wrote of her worry that, in trying to assassinate the Hamas leaders, Mr Netanyahu may have also assassinated her son.
In December 2023 your correspondent asked Qatar’s prime minister if he worried about Israel assassinating Hamas leaders on Qatari soil.
“To commit any crime on our territory would be unacceptable,” he said.
“We passed that very clearly to the Americans and the Israelis.”
The belief in Doha was that America would restrain Israel.
Qatar, after all, hosts the regional headquarters of America’s central command and is designated a “major non-NATO ally”.
Mr Netanyahu said the strike was a “wholly independent” act by his country: “Israel initiated it, Israel conducted it, and Israel takes full responsibility,” he said.
His choice of words seemed like an effort to give Mr Trump plausible deniability.
The attack came two days after Mr Trump gave Hamas a “last warning” to accept the deal and vowed “consequences” if it did not.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the attack “does not advance Israel or America’s goals”.
She also said Mr Trump was “notified by the United States military that Israel was attacking Hamas”, suggesting that he only found out as the mission was under way.
He then told Steve Witkoff, his Middle East envoy, to alert the Qataris.
Israeli officials were unhappy about the supposed tip-off: “It’s not done in our relationship, to do what Trump has just done,” one says.
Some also claim that Mr Trump did know in advance, and that he was distancing himself from the strike because it seemed to have failed.
But Majed al-Ansari, a Qatari diplomat, said his country was only notified as the bombs were falling.
Whenever Mr Trump knew, he either could not or would not prevent an attack on a country which, like its fellow members of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC), has long thought it enjoyed an American security guarantee.
Those guarantees had already begun to look shaky.
Iran attacked Saudi oil fields in 2019. An Iranian-backed militia killed three people in 2022 in a drone attack on Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
In June Iran fired missiles at the American air base in Qatar, retaliation for the air strikes Mr Trump ordered on Iran’s nuclear facilities (strikes that Gulf rulers opposed).
The Israeli attack will probably further devalue America’s promises.
Qatar’s support for Islamist groups has long made it the black sheep of the GCC.
But its neighbours have been quick to denounce Israel. Muhammad bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, phoned the Qatari emir and called the strike a “criminal act”.
Anwar Gargash, a diplomatic adviser to the president of the UAE, condemned the “treacherous” attack.
Criticism from the UAE is particularly notable.
It was the first Gulf country to normalise ties with Israel, in 2020, and is Israel’s closest ally in the region.
For months, officials in the GCC have harboured two growing fears: that an unbridled Israel was becoming a regional hegemon, and that the ever-widening regional war would spill over into their countries.
The Israeli strike in Qatar will reaffirm both.
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