Either way, the operation is a marked change in the war, signaling Israel’s willingness to strike targets inside a U.S. ally—and seemingly without White House sanction. According to reporting in the Wall Street Journal, Israel only informed the administration of the strikes minutes beforehand, without providing the exact target or location. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff gave advance warning to the Qataris, but Qatari Foreign Ministry spokesperson Majed al-Ansari dismissed this, writing on X that the communication arrived as the attack was ongoing.
On Wednesday, Netanyahu emphasized that the attack sends a clear message: “I say to Qatar and all nations who harbor terrorists, you either expel them or you bring them to justice. Because if you don’t, we will.”
According to Jonathan Schanzer, the executive director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former Treasury Department official who froze Hamas funding schemes, Netanyahu determined “probably two years ago, that eventually this was going to happen.” But the target of Israel’s strike “are not political figures as it is commonly advertised,” he told TMD. “Every one of them has operational history with Hamas. Every one of them has blood on their hands. … So it was, in my view, inevitable.” Al-Hayya is one such example, he added. Hamas’ chief negotiator currently serves as one of the five leaders that comprise the terrorist group’s acting leadership council and—as the New York Times reported in October 2024—was involved in planning the October 7 attack on Israel.
In recent years, Israel has demonstrated it will not shy away from targeting exposed terrorists, even if they’re within a foreign country’s borders. On August 28, Israel killed the Houthi government’s prime minister, Ahmed al-Rahawi, and other unnamed high-ranking officials in a targeted strike on Yemen’s Houthi-controlled capital of Sanaa, the terrorist group confirmed at the time. In September 2024, Israel struck the underground Hezbollah terrorist command center in Lebanon’s capital city, Beirut, killing the group’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah. A month earlier, when Hamas’ top-ranking political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, traveled to Tehran to attend the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Israel carried out a successful assassination by detonating explosives that were previously planted inside his guesthouse.
“I think it is the product of October 7,” Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations who served in the three presidential administrations, told TMD. “The Israelis have made the decision that leaders of Hamas are simply not going to gain immunity based on geography. They can be hidden in Gaza, they can be hidden in Doha.” He added, “I think we’ll find out over the next year they can be hit elsewhere as well.”
Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at King’s College London and fellow at the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies, pointed out another possible reason: that Netanyahu is attempting to “undermine Qatar’s standing in Washington, because Qatar is very relevant in Washington because of its mediation role,” he told TMD. “So, if you torpedo the mediation, you basically relegate Qatar’s importance in Washington.”
In May, Trump signed an economic deal with Qatar “to generate an economic exchange worth at least $1.2 trillion,” the White House stated in a fact sheet at the time. Meanwhile, Qatar also gifted Trump a luxury jumbo jet—an “unconditional donation,” per the White House, valued at approximately $400 million—which, as CBS News reported in late July, is currently being prepared to serve as Air Force One.
The largest U.S. military base in the Middle East is also in Qatar, located approximately 20 miles southwest of Doha, where about 10,000 U.S. service members are stationed. As Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a Baker Institute fellow for the Middle East who specializes in the Persian Gulf region, similarly told TMD, “The Qataris have put a lot of investment into making sure the relationship was stronger, but now we’ll probably test the durability, the resilience, of that relationship.”
Responding publicly to Israel’s strike in a social media post on Tuesday, Trump said he gave his assurance to Qatari leaders that “such a thing will not happen again on their soil.” He wrote, “Unilaterally bombing inside Qatar, a Sovereign Nation and close Ally of the United States, that is working very hard and bravely taking risks with us to broker Peace, does not advance Israel or America’s goals.” Still, the president added, “eliminating Hamas, who have profited off the misery of those living in Gaza, is a worthy goal.” However, he displayed a more disgruntled tone later that night, telling reporters he was “very unhappy about every aspect.”
Unnamed senior U.S. officials told Axios on Tuesday that, in a phone call with Netanyahu on Tuesday, Trump said the attacks within Qatar’s borders are “unacceptable,” adding, “I demand that you do not repeat it.” The Wall Street Journal also reported that the two leaders held a second call later that day, which it described as “cordial.” Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani is expected to meet with Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the White House later today.
Trump may be displeased at Israel’s incursion into Qatar’s territory, but, as Schanzer noted, “The president does not seem to be particularly beholden to Qatar when it comes to their support for Hamas,” adding that his statements have been “very carefully crafted.” The broader concern is that, even as Qatar works to strengthen ties with the U.S., it’s still associating with—and hosting—the wrong crowd. “Hamas is not the only terrorist organization that they host,” Schanzer said, but one of many others, including the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
“Qatar is a country which tries to position itself between adversaries: Between Iran and Israel, between the U.S. and Iran, [and] between the Taliban and the United States,” Michael Singh, the managing director and senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, explained to TMD. “And it tries to carve out—and frankly, has tried with success—to carve out this role for itself as a sort of neutral, mediating party, as a country which is useful to all sides, and that has afforded Qatar a measure of protection.”
Still, Krieg questioned why Israel would take such aggressive action, given that it could further imperil the hostages while Qatar is mediating ceasefire negotiations. Hamas holds an estimated 20 living Israeli hostages, and protesters across Israel continually call for the government to prioritize bringing them home over any other objective. During a televised speech on Thursday, Hamas official Fawzi Barhoum called the strike “an assassination of the entire negotiation process.”
“If your policy is, ‘We want the hostages back and we realize the military alone cannot deliver,’” Krieg explained, “then you can’t kill the only mediator or negotiator that you have on the Hamas side, whether he’s part or not part of a terrorist organization, because you cannot kill every single Hamas operative.”
Perhaps it’s because Netanyahu no longer believes that Hamas is willing to release most or any of the captives. “The Israelis began to realize that there was very little risk in targeting these leaders, from the perspective of the hostages,” Schanzer said, “that the outcome was very likely going to be the same.”
As Raphael Cohen, director of the RAND Corporation’s Public Policy National Security Program, told TMD, “The bottom line takeaway of the is that the event sort of underscores how Israel’s conception of how this war ends looks very, very different than how Europe believes that this war was going to end, and how the Arab States believe this war is going to end, and how elements of the United States think this war should end.” The key difference, Cohen said, is that the “Netanyahu government believes the war should result in Hamas’ capitulation.”
“And, if they don’t capitulate,” he added, “then … well, they’ll die.”
