The deep fury – and even deeper concern – felt in Qatar right now is unprecedented and not to be underestimated.
It matches the unprecedented nature of its cause: Israel’s stunning bombing of Qatar’s capital city, without warning Doha, without consulting the US – which hosts America’s largest regional military base there – and without setting off Qatar’s defence system: the planes evaded radars.
A deadly bombing, which Israel claimed was targeting Hamas’s senior leadership, and which Qatar – the main host and mediator of ceasefire talks on Gaza – said occurred while Hamas negotiators were in meetings discussing Donald Trump’s latest ceasefire proposal for the besieged strip.
The Trump administration was apparently caught unaware, and had no idea that one of its closest allies in the region – Israel – would act against another of its close allies, Qatar.
Trump was not happy. He said that bombing a close ally of the US, “a country working very hard and bravely taking risks with us to broker peace, does not advance either Israel’s or America’s goals”.
In a sign of how seriously both Qatar and Trump are taking the situation, the US president is due to meet Qatar’s prime minister and foreign minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, in Washington on Friday.
The Qatari leader is in the States after requesting an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council.
A diplomat with knowledge of the visit told me that a key focus would be on the US and Doha, “only looking to grow their security partnership” – and that despite Israel’s relationship with the US, Israel bombing Doha does not impact Doha and Washington’s ties.
Top of the agenda will be how the US and Qatar can “explore joint efforts to deter a future Israeli strike”.
And this is what Qatar is most worried about. As Majed al-Ansari, spokesperson and adviser to Sheikh al-Thani, told me in an extraordinarily frank interview, “it is the impunity that the international community [affords] Netanyahu” that is the problem.
That has allowed “Israel to take a direct political decision to put Qatar in the target zone – and basically put our lives at risk, just because of his own narcissistic ideas”.
The fear in Doha is that Netanyahu now feels so emboldened that even the Trump administration, which supplies most of Israel’s weapons, cannot rein him in.
The fear is that any country in the Gulf, or further afield, involved in trying to mediate peace in the Middle East could find itself becoming a theatre of war. The fear is that Israel’s raids are pushing a fractured region to the very brink.
Qatar says Israel bombed multiple cities on the same day it struck Doha, including targets in Syria. In recent days, it has also repeatedly bombed Yemen. This follows a worrying exchange of missiles between Israel, together with the US, against Iran, alongside Israel’s war in Lebanon – and, of course, Gaza.
That concern has only been ignited further by Netanyahu’s response to the attacks, in which he effectively threatened more action.
Likening the bombing of Doha to the US’s raid on Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden, Netanyahu threatened Qatar directly:
“I say to Qatar and all nations who harbour terrorists: you either expel them or you bring them to justice. Because if you don’t – we will.”
Qatari diplomats have told me that, at various points, Doha considered stepping back from its mediating role and asking Hamas members to leave, feeling that neither side of the Gaza conflict was seriously interested in a ceasefire, and that continuing would ultimately be a net negative for the Gulf state.
But Qatari diplomats added that the US and Israel had specifically requested that Doha, at different points, not take that step – that it continue to host Hamas and keep the talks alive.
By throwing that out of the window and targeting Doha, Netanyahu has made it clear he is not interested in peace, the security of his own people, or the lives of the hostages still in Gaza, Dr Ansari told me recently.
He said Qatar wants Netanyahu to be held “personally accountable for putting Qatar – and the region, and international peace and security – at risk for political gains on his side”.
Or more violence will follow.
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