DOHA, QATAR — In what regional analysts are describing as the most aggressive counteroffer in the history of multilateral diplomacy, Israeli warplanes on Tuesday struck a residential compound in the Qatari capital where Hamas’s political leadership had been gathered to review the latest U.S.-brokered ceasefire proposal, eliminating, among other things, the people the proposal was being delivered to.
Officials in Jerusalem confirmed the strike was both unprecedented and, in the prime minister’s view, long overdue, given that the targets had been living openly at an address well known to every intelligence service on earth, including the one that arranged for them to live there.
“This is what a serious negotiating posture looks like,” said Itamar Ben-Roth, a senior fellow at the Levant Security Forum, a think tank whose entire funding was disclosed in a footnote nobody read. “You don’t get a Nobel by sending a fruit basket. Sometimes you get one by sending an F-35 to the room where the other delegation is sitting.”
The Qatari government, which has spent the better part of two decades hosting Hamas’s political bureau at the explicit and repeated request of the United States so that there would be someone to call when somebody needed to be called, expressed what its foreign ministry described as “a level of surprise normally reserved for being shot by your own attorney.”
Pressed for comment at a Tuesday briefing, a senior White House official said the United States had been notified of the strike with what she characterized as “sufficient lead time to update our talking points,” and clarified that while Washington did not authorize the operation, it also did not specifically un-authorize it, and at some point grown countries have to make their own decisions.
The official added that the strike would not derail ceasefire negotiations, which she said remained “on track,” pending identification of any surviving Hamas officials who could be reached at a forwarding address.
Doha, which serves as the forward operating base for Al Udeid Air Base, U.S. Central Command’s largest installation in the region, was reportedly assured by State Department officials as recently as last week that its status as a major non-NATO ally and indispensable American partner remained “basically pretty solid,” provided no one looked at it too directly.
Hamas, in a statement released through a spokesman who was not in the building at the time and would like that fact emphasized, condemned the strike as a violation of “every norm of diplomacy, hospitality, and the basic understanding that you do not murder a guy holding your draft document,” and indicated the group would be reconsidering its participation in talks pending a roll call.
Netanyahu, addressing the nation Tuesday evening, called the operation “a message,” which observers noted was technically accurate, given that the Hamas delegation had in fact been in the middle of receiving one.
At press time, Qatari officials were still attempting to determine whether the United States considers a country it asked to host a problem, and then bombed for hosting that problem, to be an ally, an adversary, or, as one senior diplomat put it, “whatever the word is for the guy holding the coats.”