Hope is fading in Jerusalem that its strike at Hamas headquarters in Doha succeeded in taking out the terrorist leaders. The meeting on which the strike was predicated may have adjourned minutes before the headquarters building was struck. What a shame.
Amit Segal writes:
[T]here’s another dramatic aspect of the assassination attempt: even if it didn’t succeed, it dealt a major blow to Qatar’s regional status. For nearly two years, Qatar has been playing both sides. If defeating Hamas is the goal, then Qatar is the enemy: Qatar funded Hamas for years, with Israel’s reluctant blessing. But if the goal is freeing hostages, then Qatar is suddenly a partner.
Even more significant than the strike itself, however, was Jerusalem’s decision to take responsibility for it. Not since Operation Entebbe in 1976 has Israel taken public credit for an operation in a country not designated as an enemy state.
Why? It’s Israel’s way of slamming the door. And Hamas leaders will certainly be reluctant to meet in Qatar going forward.
At The Scroll, Park MacDougald quotes Tablet’s anonymous geopolitical analyst about the nature of Trump’s Middle East (behind the Tablet paywall):
The appearance of power is power. Barack Obama’s policy of dealing with terror armies as states and positioning their interlocutors as key extensions of American diplomacy has allowed Qatar to punch well above its weight over the past decade and a half despite being widely loathed by the other Arab Gulf states. In the Alice-in-Wonderland world that Obama and his team created, Qatar’s deep ties to both Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood were cause not for diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions but a source of influence and power which in turn allowed the Qataris to cast a wide net of money and influence-buying across Western capitals with the de facto backing of the United States. Qatar was at once the home of the American Sixth fleet and the leadership of Hamas. With one blow, Donald Trump has powerfully signaled that the game is now over by humiliating the Qataris in the most visible way possible at the hands of the Israelis.
One imagines that the delight that the other Gulf State actors like the Saudis must feel at seeing the Qataris cut down to size is being tempered by the uncomfortable realization that the informed Beltway interlocutors who have been telling them that Trump is a blustering con man whose policies and threats can be safely disregarded were dead wrong. The demolition of the Iranian nuclear program followed by the strike on Doha shows that Trump is indeed intent on creating a new Middle East that looks nothing like the failed schemes of the past thirty years—and that he is happy to use force in pursuit of that goal. Perhaps redeveloping Gaza as a seaside paradise after leveling Gaza City and disarming Hamas isn’t such a dumb idea after all. Caught between fear of Trump and Israel and fear for their thrones, Arab leaders are unlikely to be sleeping easily for many months to come.
The best thing I read about the strike yesterday was Gregg Roman’s Middle East Forum column “The Reckoning in Doha: Why Israel’s Strike Against Hamas Was Both Justified and Overdue.” It’s long and difficult to excerpt, but this is a good chunk near the top of the column (links omitted):
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Wars end when one side loses the will or ability to continue fighting. For Hamas, that calculus has been distorted by Qatar’s provision of an extraterritorial sanctuary where its leadership could direct operations, manage finances, and plan attacks while remaining physically removed from consequences. This arrangement—in which Khalil al-Hayya, Khaled Mashal, and their lieutenants could watch October 7 unfold on television from Doha penthouses while Israeli families burned alive in their homes—represents a perversion of both warfare and diplomacy that no civilized nation should tolerate.
The principle at stake transcends Israel’s immediate security concerns. When Qatar transformed itself into a five-star command center for terrorism, it challenged the fundamental architecture of international order. The post-Westphalian system assumes that states will not provide operational headquarters for groups dedicated to the genocidal destruction of other states. Qatar’s hosting of Hamas since 2012 shattered this assumption, creating a precedent whereby wealthy nations could sponsor terrorism while maintaining diplomatic respectability through strategic ambiguity and energy leverage.
Consider the grotesque asymmetry: while Hamas fighters used Gazan civilians as human shields in tunnels beneath hospitals, their political leadership enjoyed the protection of Qatari state security. While Israeli reservists left their families for months of urban warfare, Hamas’s decision-makers conducted press conferences from air-conditioned hotel ballrooms. While Palestinian civilians in Gaza suffered under Hamas’s brutal rule and Israel’s military response, those most responsible for precipitating this suffering remained untouchable in their Doha safe houses.
This bifurcation of accountability—where those who order atrocities remain immune from their consequences—corrupts the very concept of warfare. It incentivizes maximum violence with minimum personal risk, creating moral hazards on a civilizational scale. Israel’s strike restored the principle that leadership entails vulnerability, that those who choose war must share its dangers.
From a purely military perspective, Hamas’s Doha headquarters represented what Carl von Clausewitz would term a “center of gravity”—a source of strength whose elimination fundamentally alters the conflict’s dynamics. The office served multiple critical functions that sustained Hamas’s war-making capacity long after its military infrastructure in Gaza had been decimated….
Read the whole thing here.
