Israel struck the headquarters of Hamas’ political leadership in Qatar amid ceasefire talks.Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters
Hussein Ibish is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute.
Israel’s reckless air strike in Qatar on Sept. 9 appears to have failed to kill the senior Hamas leaders who were primarily targeted. Nonetheless, a great deal of damage to many presumably unintended targets was inflicted, with the wreckage still piling up at many registers.
First – and this may have been a deliberate effort on the part of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – it’s going to be very difficult to restart the indirect talks on a ceasefire and hostage-release deal in Gaza. The Hamas leaders had come to Qatar to consider a proposal from U.S. President Donald Trump when the attack happened.
It is going to be tough to convince Qatar, which lost a security officer in the bombing, to resume hosting negotiations and again get attacked. And even if it did, why would senior Hamas figures go back, only to be killed next time by Israel?
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Mr. Netanyahu may not care about damage to ceasefire talks, as he benefits politically from prolonging the war. But Israel has deeply damaged its standing with Gulf Arab countries it has been courting over the past 20 years. Even the United Arab Emirates – Israel’s closest Arab friend and Qatar’s harshest critic – rushed to the defence of its neighbour.
Some might imagine that tensions over Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Qatar’s controversial policies of support for such radical Islamist groups around the region would lead some of these countries to welcome the Israeli attack in Doha. They would be completely mistaken. Israel’s further integration into the region was already badly damaged by the Gaza war, and now, the harm has been further escalated by this brazen attack against Qatar.
The U.S. role in the Persian Gulf is also suddenly at a crisis point. Doubts among Gulf Arab countries about the reliability of Washington as a security partner and guarantor have been growing amid earlier inflection points like the Iranian attacks on Saudi Aramco facilities in September, 2019, and the deadly 2020 Houthi drone strikes in the UAE.
Both of them went unanswered by Washington, to the amazement and chagrin of these countries. Now Qatar has been struck – by Israel no less – and the American response is exactly the same: nothing at all. At best, the White House issued mixed messaging that seemed to simultaneously approve and disapprove of the attack. But the bottom line is, Washington did nothing to stop Israel, and nothing to extract a subsequent price.
Finally, few Israelis seem to be aware of their growing reputation in the rest of the Middle East and beyond as an out-of-control rogue state that has become a primary source of regional instability and insecurity.
The war in Gaza has long since passed any point of response to the Oct. 7 attack, and now appears to be little more than an open-ended and possibly genocidal vengeance against an entire population. The continuous escalation against Hezbollah in Lebanon forced a second and most probably avoidable war last year.
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Most alarming has been Israel’s insistence that Syria not recover as an integrated, stable and secure state but must remain fragmented and unstable. To that end, Israel is actively intervening to support a new Syrian Druze militia group, which is undermining national reintegration. To cap it off, Israel took advantage of the downfall of the previous dictatorship to grab large chunks of strategic territory in Syria, which it appears determined to hold onto in perpetuity.
Israel has been stealthily moving toward annexation in the West Bank. It is building a key settlement in the strategic E1 area its Finance Minister says is designed to “bury” any hope for a Palestinian state. In January alone, 40,000 Palestinians in the northern West Bank were displaced, apparently permanently, by the Israeli military – quite possibly a preview of what may accompany the annexation Israel’s radical government keeps promising. Mr. Netanyahu recently affirmed he believes he’s on a “historic and spiritual mission” to create a “greater Israel.”
In short, Israel now looks like a predatory, out-of-control rogue state that is willing to routinely attack its neighbours and grab their territory, while adopting the old Iranian game of destabilizing Arab countries by creating and arming communal militia groups.
The bombing in Qatar didn’t kill any of its primary intended targets. But it did kill hopes for a ceasefire and hostage release in Gaza. It also killed confidence in Washington as a security partner in the Gulf region and Israel’s own reputation as a rational actor that avoids unnecessary aggression, territorial expansion, and destabilization.
And that’s just the initial reckoning. The final bill may prove even larger.