There are doubts emerging about whether Israel‘s strike in Doha, Qatar, on Tuesday that targeted senior Hamas leaders killed the people it intended to.
The strike targeted Hamas‘s chief negotiator, Khalil al Hayya, and others, but the group said it did not kill its negotiating delegation; instead, five lower-ranking members, including al Hayya’s son and his office director, were killed. The group hasn’t offered proof that he’s alive and has, in the past, said a leader was alive only to announce their deaths months later.
“Right now there’s no indication that the terrorists were killed,” a source told Channel 12 news, a local outlet, according to the Times of Israel. “We continue to hope they were assassinated, but optimism is fading.”
The Israeli military and political leaders have yet to comment publicly on whether they killed the intended target.
Aaron David Miller, a career retired U.S. diplomat who focused on the Middle East, told the Washington Examiner that carrying out an attack in Doha and not killing the intended targets would amount to an “own-goal trifecta.” First, it would anger the Qataris; second, it would upset Americans; and third, it would fail to accomplish what they attempted.
President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he was unhappy with Israel carrying out a strike in a U.S.-allied country, even if it targeted Hamas leaders. However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared unapologetic on Wednesday in a video published on social media.
“I say to Qatar and all nations who harbor terrorist, you either expel them or you bring them to justice. Because if you don’t, we will,” Netanyahu said on Wednesday.
Netanyahu compared the effort to target Hamas’s external leaders, who are based in Qatar, to the U.S. military’s hunt for Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.
“What did America do in the wake of Sept. 11? It promised to hunt down the terrorists who committed this heinous crime, wherever they may be. And it also passed a resolution in the Security Council of the UN, two weeks later, that said that governments cannot give harbor to terrorists,” Netanyahu said. “Well, yesterday, we acted along those lines. We went after the terrorist masterminds who committed the Oct. 7 massacre. And we did so in Qatar, which gives safe haven, it harbors terrorists, it finances Hamas, it gives its terrorist chieftains sumptuous villas, it gives them everything.”
Despite his comments, even Trump, a staunch ally of Netanyahu’s, expressed his unhappiness with the strike against a key U.S. ally in the region.
Trump said in a lengthy social media post that he was informed about the impending strikes from the U.S. military, not the Israelis directly, and that when he found out, he had his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, tell the Qataris about it. The U.S. tried to stop the Israeli operation, according to the president, an indication of a divide between Trump and Netanyahu about where Israel should and shouldn’t go after Hamas officials.
Trump spoke with both Israeli and Qatari leaders after the strike, and he told the latter that such strikes would not “happen again on their soil.”
Miller, now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called Trump’s statement supporting Israel’s effort to eliminate Hamas but condemning Israel for going after them in Qatar “convoluted.”
“I think it was convoluted and reflects one takeaway, that as much as he is annoyed at Netanyahu’s tactics, whether it comes to humanitarian assistance or what happened in Doha, he is pretty closely aligned with Netanyahu on the strategic objective, that is, the decimation, if not destruction, of Hamas. That’s what explains it,” he said.
It’s unclear how the strike will affect the negotiations over the release of the roughly 50 hostages Hamas has held now for nearly two years, and Israel has not come up with a suitable plan for other Arab countries for postwar governance of Gaza.
The strike “killed any hope for those hostages,” Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim al Thani told CNN.
It’s also unknown if it could affect Israel’s intention to start a new offensive in Gaza City, one of the last remaining Hamas strongholds in the Gaza Strip.
Qatar has played a very unique role in the Middle East since the war began after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack, and the widespread battles have now been brought into the country twice this year. It has operated as one of three primary mediators between Israel and Hamas, alongside the U.S. and Egypt.
ISRAEL TARGETS HAMAS LEADERSHIP IN ‘PRECISE’ QATAR STRIKE
U.S. forces at Qatar’s al Udeid Air Base came under heavy Iranian fire in June following the U.S. military’s strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities amid the Israel-Iran war. However, the Iranians tipped off the U.S. about the face-saving attack, so the U.S. was able to evacuate personnel who were not needed to intercept the incoming missiles.
Within the last week, the Israelis have carried out military operations in Qatar, Gaza, Yemen, and Lebanon. Simultaneously, Hamas fighters killed four Israeli soldiers in Gaza on Monday and took credit for a bus stop shooting in Jerusalem that killed six Israelis on the same day.
