Whether the senior Hamas officials Israel tried to kill in a surprise missile strike in Doha yesterday are still alive is an open question. But the U.S.-brokered peace deal they were meeting to consider is almost certainly dead.
The diplomatic calculation is not difficult.
“When one party bombs the negotiating team of the other party, it’s hard to see a path forward,” Dana Shell Smith, the former U.S. ambassador to Qatar, told us. Qatar, the tiny Gulf nation that has housed Hamas political leaders for years at the request of the United States, and had been the indispensable mediator in ongoing talks to end the nearly two-year-old war, was uncharacteristically livid in its condemnation of the Israeli strike. Even if peace talks continued, Qatar seems unlikely to play go-between after the Israeli missile strike on its sovereign territory.
“This is terrible for regional stability, terrible for U.S. interests, and above all, terrible for the remaining hostages” Hamas holds in Gaza, Smith said.
Israeli officials speaking on the condition of anonymity to share candid assessments agreed. Although none we spoke with mourned the members of the Iranian-backed terrorist group who had potentially been killed, they failed to see the strategic benefit of an operation that all but assures the hostages will not go free anytime soon. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may yet pay a political price for the operation, particularly if it did not actually kill senior Hamas leaders as intended, one senior Israeli official said.
A former Mossad officer captured the sentiment among Israeli security experts, and no doubt many exhausted Israeli citizens, who are desperate for an end to the war but unsure how to find any lasting peace with Hamas: “The targets are evil. The world is a better place without them. The timing is political and stupid.”
The families of those hostages still in Gaza—alive or dead—will be left to wonder why Netanyahu took such drastic action when it appeared only days ago that negotiations might pay off. Indeed, Hamas leaders were meeting in Doha to consider the latest proposal that President Donald Trump had put on the table, which envisioned a hostage release.
“Why do this when the president himself said he’s negotiating?” asked Ruby Chen, the father of Itay Chen, a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen held by Hamas. “The prime minister is playing Russian roulette with the hostages.” (Israeli officials have determined that Itay was killed defending civilians near the border of Gaza on October 7, and that Hamas has possession of his remains.)
Officially, the Qatari government has not abandoned its role as a mediator between Israel and Hamas. But Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammad bin Abdulrahman al-Thani left little doubt that his government cannot view Israel as a trustworthy partner.
“Stability in the region will not be achieved unless there is intense diplomacy and diplomatic work,” he said in a briefing with journalists, “and will never be achieved through wars or conflict.”
Publicly, Trump has said he was “very unhappy” with the Israeli strike. Privately, U.S. officials told us, the president and his advisers were furious.
The Israeli strike “could potentially disembowel” the White House’s ongoing work on a truce, one U.S. official told us. Some of the president’s most senior aides believe that may have been Netanyahu’s exact intent. Israeli forces are poised to enter Gaza City, which Netanyahu has declared the last remaining stronghold of Hamas, and they have ordered residents to evacuate.
The week had begun with signs of progress in U.S. efforts to secure a cease-fire and a release of hostages. On Monday, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s all-purpose envoy, met in Miami with Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s top adviser. They were joined by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a key participant in the planning for postwar Gaza. Kushner’s involvement, after months of back-and-forth with the Israelis, was intended to signal Trump’s personal interest in getting a deal, U.S. officials told us.
The same day, the Qatari prime minister joined Hamas leaders in Doha to consider Trump’s latest proposal, which involved the release of the remaining hostages in exchange for a cease-fire and an end to the Israeli military’s operations in Gaza City, among other terms.
Yesterday, Hamas leaders reconvened in Doha to discuss the U.S. proposal. Trump officials were confident that they could get the two sides to reach an agreement.
At midday, as Hamas officials were meeting, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine received a call from his Israeli counterpart that an attack from Israel was imminent. The U.S. would learn only minutes later that by the time Caine had received the call, the missiles were already in the air. “There was nothing we could do,” one defense official told us. “There wasn’t enough time to intercept.”
Caine called the White House, which was the first time Trump officially learned about the attack, according to White House officials. Caine also called Navy Admiral Brad Cooper, the commander of U.S. Central Command, who was traveling in Egypt. By the time the two men spoke, the attack was over.
Pentagon officials provided conflicting accounts of when troops on the ground in Doha learned about the attack. Roughly 10,000 troops are based in Qatar, home to al Udeid Air Base, which houses the largest U.S. military installation in the Middle East. Despite the size of the attack and its proximity to so many troops and scores of military aircraft, the United States never engaged its air defenses, officials told us.
Military personnel offered various explanations as to why. Troops manning U.S. Patriot missile air defenses may have never seen the impending attack, because their systems were aimed at protecting U.S. infrastructure, not Doha’s diplomatic section, where the strike hit. The Qatari military didn’t engage their air defenses either, U.S. defense officials told us.
Today, a feeling of resignation set in across the Pentagon that peace talks were over and relations with Qatar would never be the same. Many U.S. military personnel remember how essential Qatar was to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan four years ago, allowing thousands of Americans and Afghans to land in the Gulf state and for military cargo planes to take off minutes apart in order to bring more people out. The Qatari prime minister focused his anger on Netanyahu, not Trump. But many in the region wondered whether the U.S. president could have done more to stop his Israeli counterpart.
One Pentagon commander who sought to be diplomatic about the Israeli attack shook his head and described it as “brazen.” A more frustrated commander at Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, blurted, “What the fuck?”
Trump now finds himself in a bind, U.S. officials told us. He doesn’t want to be seen as defending Hamas or criticizing Israeli efforts to eliminate the people accused of plotting the October 7 attacks. Publicly, the White House took issue only with the manner and location of the attack. But privately, Trump advisers don’t see the logic of assassinating senior Hamas officials, because they know that the organization will be restocked with “guys who are just as strong and as heinous,” as one U.S. official put it.
Even if the strike had been successful, Hamas was unlikely to capitulate in its war with Israel. Early reports that Israel may not have killed the intended targets only added to Trump’s frustration.
Some in the administration and in Israel held out hope that Israel’s rogue attack could cause the president to put Netanyahu’s government on a tighter leash, or to try to convince the prime minister that taking Gaza City won’t create the conditions for victory and that he needs to accept other terms.
But when it comes to Netanyahu, hope has never been a winning strategy. Speaking of the Israeli prime minister, one defense official told us, “There is a real frustration with a partner that seems to be acting for personal political gain at the expense of our partnership with other nations.”
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