President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio will meet with Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al Thani on Friday, days after Israel’s military conducted an unprecedented aerial attack in Doha targeting Hamas officials.
Rubio was set to meet with Thani at the White House on Friday at midday, according to the State Department, while Trump will meet with his Qatari counterpart in New York later in the day, a White House official told the Washington Examiner. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, will be at the Trump-Thani meeting.
While Trump has been widely supportive of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war strategy, he expressed anger about Tuesday’s strike and had Witkoff try to stop it from happening when the U.S. military informed the president.
The president spoke with Netanyahu and Thani after the strike occurred, and Trump said he told Thani that such a strike wouldn’t happen again on Qatari soil. Foreign leaders condemned Israel’s strike.
There is also skepticism in Israel that the military killed the targets of the strike.
“There should be retaliation from the whole region in the face of those barbaric actions that only reflects one thing: It reflects the barbarism of this person that is leading the region, unfortunately, to a point where we cannot address any situation and we cannot repair anything, and we cannot work within the frameworks of international laws,” Thani said earlier this week.
Qatar is a U.S. ally and houses the U.S. military’s largest base in the Middle East, but it also allows senior Hamas leaders who don’t live in Gaza to live in Doha, putting it in Israel’s crosshairs. That U.S. base came under attack in June when Iran carried out a face-saving bombing of Al Udeid Air Base following the U.S. military’s targeting of three Iranian nuclear facilities.
With two attacks on Qatari soil in recent months, Trump directed Rubio to “finalize” a defense cooperation agreement with Qatar.
QUESTIONS EMERGE ABOUT SUCCESS OF ISRAEL’S DOHA STRIKES ON HAMAS LEADERS
Qatar and the United States, alongside Egypt, have been mediators for Israel and Hamas.
Trump said he wants to see the war come to an end and called on Hamas to agree to a recent proposal he said Israel had approved. There have been two temporary ceasefires since the war began after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack that ignited the war in Gaza. Both collapsed when mediators could not figure out how to get to a long-term agreement that both sides would approve.
