The United Kingdom should sanction Qatar, not Israeli leaders, a former spokesman for the Israeli government says.
“I think if the U.K. wanted to use its sanctions power to promote peace in the Middle East, they would sanction the leaders of Qatar,” Eylon Levy told The Daily Signal after the U.K.’s sanctioning of Israeli government Cabinet ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, both described in the legacy media as “far right.”
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, along with counterparts in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway, have accused the two Israeli ministers of incitement of “extremist violence and serious abuses of Palestinian human rights.”
Levy is originally from London and served as Israeli government spokesman from after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel until March 2024. While Levy made clear he doesn’t condone anything Ben-Gvir and Smotrich have said, the move to sanction the two men is a “deeply unfortunate and counterproductive decision,” he said.
Instead, in order to promote peace in the region, the U.K. should “tell the Qatari leadership that unless and until they force Hamas’ leaders, who are resident in Doha, to release the [Oct. 7] hostages immediately, they will be sanctioned until Hamas’ leaders are put on a plane and extradited to face trial for crimes against humanity,” Levy said.
But the U.K. won’t sanction Qatar, according to Levy, because “Qatar owns too much of the U.K.”
The U.K. government did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.
In the fourth quarter of 2024, total trade in goods and services between the U.K. and Qatar was more than $7 billion, according to the U.K.’s Department for Business and Trade.
“Qatar was the U.K.’s 46th-largest trading partner” in the fourth quarter of 2024, “accounting for 0.3% of total U.K. trade,” according to the U.K. government. .
Qatar, along with the U.S. and Egypt, have worked to negotiate hostage and ceasefire deals between Israel and Hamas since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that left 1,200 people dead and 251 hostage in Gaza.
Now more than 20 months after the attack, 53 hostages remain in Gaza, about 20 of whom are thought to still be alive, and fighting continues between Hamas terrorists and the Israel Defense Forces.
Hamas maintains a political office in Doha, though leaders were reportedly asked to leave toward the end of 2024. Qatari Foreign Ministry spokesman Majed Al-Ansari said the office was created for the sake of negotiations.
Khaled Mashal, a top Hamas leader, lives in Qatar, the BBC reported in January.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the news outlet Al Jazeera, which is partially funded by the Qatari government, is a “terror channel,” accusing the outlet of encouraging violence against the Jewish state.
“I think that this war could have gone very differently,” Levy said, “if the world had treated Qatar at the beginning, not as a neutral mediator, but as Hamas’ patron that is housing Hamas’ leaders, that is using its global media network Al Jazeera to poison minds against Israel and run Hamas propaganda, and has taken a side in this war while framing itself as a peacemaker, and that’s deeply unfortunate.”
