While the Israeli air raid on Hamas leaders in Doha failed in its aim of assassinating them, it was brilliantly successful in a more important respect: ending the war
October 12, 2025 12:33
Sometimes the received wisdom is correct. But sometimes it is dangerously wrong – and the received wisdom over the Gaza deal is one of those times.
According to most analysis doing the rounds, all that really happened was that President Trump decided that enough was enough after Israel’s failed attempt to assassinate Hamas leaders in Doha last month, and told Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to the same deal that has effectively been on the table for over a year.
It's no wonder that this is the take: it fits perfectly with other received wisdom that because Netanyahu had to keep Smotrich and Ben-Gvir in his coalition to save his own political skin, he needlessly prolonged the war and the ‘genocide’.
It's all very convenient, since this version of events also brings together many of the threads that form the basis of so much of the hostility towards Israel. It is indeed correct that Netanyahu has strived to keep his coalition together. But it does not follow that this meant he kept the war going for longer than was necessary. Convenient it may be: it’s also wrong.
I have spent the past few days speaking to military and political sources in Israel and elsewhere and a very different picture emerges – one which makes far more sense than the version of events which has taken hold. Central to all of it is that while the Israeli air raid on Hamas leaders in Doha failed in its aim of assassinating them, it was brilliantly successful in a more important respect: ending the war. Far from being the final straw that turned Trump against Netanyahu, the air raid was the moment the corner was turned towards peace.
First, the Israeli bombing showed Hamas’ leadership that there is nowhere where they can be truly safe from either the IDF or the Mossad. Qatar has long been Hamas’ refuge, where its leaders can live in luxury with their billions, safe in the knowledge that the US ally, with its US airbases and role as mediator and honest broker in the region, is off limits. The air raid destroyed that safety cushion for Hamas leaders.
But even more significantly, it put the fear of God into the Qataris themselves. They immediately went running to Trump for protection. Which put the Qataris exactly where they needed to be. You can have your guarantee of US protection, Trump responded, on one condition: you deliver up Hamas.
The Qataris are nothing if not realists. They were not going to risk their own security, and US wrath, for a denuded Hamas, so they had no hesitation in doing this. Hamas may still exist. It may still have weapons. It may still have terrorists. But it is as close to being wiped out (for now) as is realistic – all the more so since the IDF entered its last significant enclave in Gaza City, a move which was opposed by almost all those purveyors of the received wisdom.
The idea of the Qataris as honest brokers has always been a fiction. Both sides played along with it because it worked for them, and in international diplomacy such realpolitik – what works – is always more significant than what is real.
For the Qataris, obviously, it allowed them to get away with behaviour that would otherwise have placed them firmly in the ‘enemy of the West’ camp – protecting Hamas and spreading poison in the region through their Al Jazeera propaganda mouthpiece.
For the West, it worked because it allowed the pretence that it was fine for us to suck at the teat of Qatari money. The fact that by doing so we allowed one of the world’s top funders of terror to buy up large parts of our infrastructure, our economy and our universities has been deliberately ignored. Trump’s visit to Doha in May, for example, was portrayed as a symbol of the strength of the relationship between Qatar and the US, but in reality it was no more than realpolitik, securing more Qatari investment in the US and staving off the increasing lures of China, which has been seeking to step up its influence in the region.
Even before the Israeli air raid on 9 September the Qataris had started to overplay their hand. Beyond Al Jazeera they have built an extensive media and lobbying operation (not least in Israel, where the influence of Qatari money is becoming a big scandal). In recent months these people have started to attack Trump’s involvement in the region as a betrayal of his America First mantra, over both his backing of Israel’s strike against the Iranian nuclear programme and more broadly in seeking a Gaza deal. The Qataris tried to turn his MAGA base against him.
It was clear at the beginning of September that Trump could see what they were up to, and that it had backfired. On 4 September, for example, Adam Boehler, Trump’s special envoy for hostages – the lynchpin of the diplomacy with Hamas through Qatar – went public with his anger at their behaviour. “Sounds right to me” was his response on Twitter/X to a post which read, “It's time to pressure QATAR, Hamas's bosses to release ALL hostages and hostages bodies. #LetThemGoNow”.
Five days later the Israelis struck Doha. It is, of course, possible that all this is a coincidence: that the US had no idea about the Israeli plans and that Trump simply took advantage of the Qataris’ sudden fear over their security to pressure them into tackling Hamas. But how realistic is it to think that the Israelis would strike a target in Qatar just a few miles from a huge and pivotal US base and not tell the Americans first? I am speculating here, but even the obviously choreographed ‘apology’ by Netanyahu to Qatar was more likely part of a ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine with Trump, giving the president deniability (and he notably did not apologise, merely expressing ‘regret’).
Amusingly in this context, the anti-Israel polemicist Mehdi Hasan tweeted after the Gaza deal was announced, “Israel bombed Qatar just weeks ago, and yet Qatar still helped get this deal done and the potential release of all the Israeli hostages.” Typically he had this completely the wrong way round: the ‘yet’ should have been ‘which is why’.
The Qataris have not only turned over Hamas. It has been barely reported but last week the senior editorial team of Al Jazeera was removed. And its website has replaced its previous stock-in-trade incitement with relatively neutral actual news. As the Israeli analyst Amit Segal has written: “An Al Jazeera correspondent in Gaza recently came across locals who wanted to protest against the war. Ordinarily, when Palestinians try disrupt the pro-Hamas narrative on live air (you’d be surprised by how often this happens), Al Jazeera’s “journalists” are very quick to cut them off. But this time, they stood silently by as the man shouted, amongst other things, “take Jerusalem — we don’t want it any more”. Al Jazeera now — instead of praising and boasting about the actions of Hamas’ military wing — is focusing more on the humanitarian situation in Gaza.”
Segal reports an intelligence source telling him: “Yesterday I read several times that Hamas is very unhappy with the changes at Al Jazeera.” The two even had “an apology call,” according to the official, during which they “agreed upon” the fact that “Trump and Netanyahu forced the Qataris to change direction.”
All of this is positive. As anyone who knows anything about the Middle East knows, it could all fall apart. Everything could change. But Trump’s handling of Qatar to date ranks as one of the greatest diplomatic and strategic masterstrokes ever seen. Books will be written about what we are now witnessing.
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