For nearly two years, the Arab states that maintain uneasy relations with Israel have managed the war in Gaza as a political crisis, keeping up contacts despite their simmering frustrations.
The Israeli attacks on Qatar and Gaza City, within one week, now have some of those states wondering whether their own security may also be at risk.
Across the Middle East and beyond, Israel drew harsh condemnation for its Sept. 9 strike on Hamas leaders in the Qatari capital, Doha. The Gulf nation of Qatar is a firm U.S. ally that has played a leading role in trying to mediate a peace agreement to end the Gaza war.
“For Egypt, Jordan and Turkey, it would be foolish not to be concerned that there could be attacks on their country,” H.A. Hellyer, a Middle East security expert at the Royal United Services Institute in London and at the Center for American Progress in Washington.
The attack in Qatar was followed by a ground invasion last week of densely populated Gaza City, which sent hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing to southern Gaza.
Israel has said it attacked Qatar as part of its policy of allowing no safe haven to Hamas, after its militants led the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that set off the Gaza war. It said it was pursuing the Gaza City offensive to root out Hamas in one of its last strongholds.
Some of the angriest responses to these actions have come from Egypt, the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1979. Like Qatar, Egypt has also acted as a mediator in Gaza cease-fire negotiations.
The attack on Doha raised questions of whether Egypt, too, could be vulnerable to Israeli strikes — and whether any country in the region is truly off limits, analysts said.
At an emergency regional summit in Doha last week, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt called Israel an “enemy.” Diaa Rashwan, the leader of Egypt’s state media agency, said that was the first time he could recall an Egyptian president using that word since the peace process with Israel began in the late 1970s.
The choice, he said, was intentional.
“Our national security is under threat, and only an enemy can threaten national security,” Mr. Rashwan told the Egyptian television program Studio Extra.
Last week, as Israeli troops advanced on Gaza City with hundreds of Palestinians still sheltering there, Egypt’s Foreign Ministry warned of “catastrophic dangers.” It called the operation a “new phase of chaos as a result of Israeli recklessness and excessive arrogance.”
Like much of the Arab world, Egyptians were already seething over the war, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Egypt shares a border with southern Gaza in the Sinai Peninsula. Egyptian officials fear that the latest escalation of the war, which leaves people almost nowhere to flee to, could create pressure on their border by Palestinians desperate to escape.
Such a mass flight of people has long been feared by Egyptian officials, for a number of reasons. For one, they do not want to be accused of helping Israel to displace Palestinians.
Domestic security concerns are just as critical. If Hamas militants managed to cross the border with refugees, it could provoke an Israeli attack on Egyptian soil. (Egypt has accepted at least 100,000 medical evacuees and others who fled Gaza during the war. But it is already struggling economically and fears the added burden of taking in large numbers of additional refugees.)
And Israeli news media reported that Israel raised concerns to Washington about an Egyptian buildup of military forces in the Sinai Peninsula. The Egyptian government has neither confirmed nor denied such a buildup, and The New York Times could not independently verify it.
But Yehia el-Kadwani, a lawmaker on the Egyptian Parliament’s defense and national security committee, told The Times that such measures, if taken, would be a warning.
Displacing Palestinians “is a red line,” he said. “Egypt will take a stance if this occurs.”
Jordan, another neighboring Arab country that has had a longstanding peace treaty with Israel, is also watching Israel’s actions nervously. It shares a border with the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where roughly three million Palestinians live.
As more countries recognize a Palestinian state in response to the Gaza war, Israel has intensified its threats to annex large parts of the West Bank.
Jordan is concerned that Israel could then try to push Palestinians across its border with the West Bank, according to Mr. Hellyer, the Middle East security expert.
Gulf nations, too, are weighing their options in light of the latest Israeli attacks.
For decades, they saw their principal rival in the Middle East as Iran and had, in recent years, found common cause with Israel in that shared enemy. In 2020, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, two Gulf nations, were among several Arab countries that normalized relations with Israel.
But the mood is rapidly changing, said Mr. Hellyer.
“Now, they see Israel as a bigger threat to Gulf and regional security,” he said.
Qatar never established diplomatic relations with Israel but maintained cordial ties, which included visits by Israeli officials during the Gaza cease-fire negotiations. Those ties were shattered with the attack on Doha.
Some Gulf countries are making moves that go beyond condemnations.
On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia announced a new “strategic defense pact” with Pakistan — a nuclear-armed country — declaring that an attack on one country was an attack on both.
Analysts said the agreement reflected, in part, a growing sense of frustration with the United States for not doing more to protect the Gulf.
In an article published on his website last week, Andreas Krieg, a Middle East expert at King’s College London, said the whole region was now at risk of plunging into the type of wider conflict not seen since the era of Arab-Israeli wars from 1948 to 1973.
In the decades since, Israel’s normalization of ties with a number of Arab countries has narrowed the conflict into an Israeli-Palestinian fight. With every Israeli escalation now, he said, the risk of drawing Arab countries into a wider conflict grows.
“Arab publics, already inflamed by Gaza, now see Israel as a concrete threat to Arabs collectively,” he wrote.
Rania Khaled contributed reporting.
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