What Drove Israel’s Attack on Hamas in Qatar?

Since Hamas killed and abducted hundreds of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has assassinated leaders of the Palestinian militant group in Lebanon, Iran and Gaza.

But Qatar, where some of Hamas’s top leaders have been living, was long seen as off-limits.

The wealthy Gulf nation hosts the largest U.S. military installation in the Middle East and has maintained informal relations with Israel. It has also been mediating between Israel and Hamas to end the Gaza war.

So it was startling when Israel set all those considerations aside and sent warplanes on Tuesday to try to assassinate Hamas’s leadership in the Qatari capital, Doha, targeting a burnt orange building in broad daylight in a residential neighborhood with schools and embassies.

Hamas said no senior leaders were killed in the attack. The son of Khalil al-Hayya, a leading figure who helped plan the 2023 attack, was killed, along with four other people associated with the group and a member of Qatar’s internal security forces.

A number of civilians were also wounded, according to Qatar’s interior ministry. Israeli officials have not publicly commented on their own assessments as to whether any of its Hamas targets were killed or injured.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented the strike as a part of Israel’s oft-stated mission to avenge the Hamas-led October 2023 attack, and make sure it can never be repeated.

“The days in which terrorist chiefs enjoy immunity anywhere have ended,” Mr. Netanyahu said on Tuesday night, hours after the strikes. On Wednesday, he expanded on his reasoning, condemning Qatar for giving “safe haven” to Hamas.

Qatar “harbors terrorists,” he said in a statement. “It finances Hamas. It gives its terrorist chieftains sumptuous villas.”

Qatari officials have said they hosted Hamas officials at the request of the U.S. government, so as to facilitate channels of communication with the group. Mr. Netanyahu has in the past relied on Qatar to send millions of dollars a month to Gaza, a policy intended to buy quiet and keep the peace but that also helped prop up Hamas’s rule over the territory.

The prime minister of Qatar, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, described Israel’s attack as “state terror” in an interview with CNN on Wednesday, and said Mr. Netanyahu should be “brought to justice.” He said the strike had “killed any hope” for the hostages.

Current and former Israeli officials said the attack in Doha underscored Israel’s determination to hold its adversaries accountable.

Yaakov Amidror, a retired major general who served as Mr. Netanyahu’s national security adviser, said that Israel had limited its actions in the past to avoid provoking conflicts or upending delicate relations with states like Qatar.

“Now, we’re saying if you’re trying to kill Israelis, you’ll be killed wherever you are,” he said.

Since the October 2023 attack, Israel has taken military action against its enemies in a way that is more aggressive than before, killing the leader of Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon and conducting a large-scale attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

But pursuing this strategy could have significant and unwanted repercussions at a precarious time in the Middle East, including undermining Israel’s effort to expand its ties with the Gulf Arab countries.

Some Israeli observers said the attack illustrated that Mr. Netanyahu prioritized the dismantling of Hamas over the release of the hostages, or the development of a plan for the future governance of Gaza.

“He’s making it clear that destroying Hamas is his first and most important goal,” said Adi Rotem, a retired Israeli intelligence officer who served on Israel’s Gaza war negotiating team until December 2024.

And Hamas has made the release of all remaining captives conditional on agreeing to a permanent end to the war — a scenario that Mr. Netanyahu has rejected as long as it allows the group to retain weapons and continue to wield power over Gaza.

Former officials and experts familiar with the government’s thinking said the strikes in Qatar were also intended to shake up the long-stalled negotiations with Hamas for a cease-fire and the release of hostages.

The idea, they said, was to try to shift the focus of decision-making from the Hamas leadership in Qatar to other figures in the movement, including the remaining commanders on the ground in Gaza. These commanders, they said, hold the hostages and stand to lose from Israel’s threatened ground invasion of Gaza City, which is said to be one of Hamas’s last strongholds.

Qatari and Egyptian officials have said that Hamas’s commanders on the ground in Gaza have had the most say in decisions about the war.

President Trump pressed Hamas on Sunday to accept a new, American-backed proposal. It called for Hamas to hand over all the hostages at once in return for a cease-fire and further negotiations to end the war.

The group did not agree, but gave a general response saying it was ready to immediately enter negotiations.

Shalom Ben Hanan, a former official of Israel’s Shin Bet internal security agency who is regularly briefed on the cease-fire talks, said the talks were not progressing.

“There was a desire to move the negotiations along with the only tools Israel has,” he said, meaning greater pressure and military force. What Israel views as Hamas’s strategy of stalling, he added, “doesn’t work anymore.”

There were widespread fears in Israel that the strike in Qatar could backfire, and put the lives of surviving hostages at risk should their captors wish to avenge the attack.

Hamas has often demonstrated in the past that the killing of its leaders does not soften its positions. Earlier in the war, the group refused Israeli demands to surrender, even after its top officials and commanders were killed, including Yahya Sinwar, one of the architects of the 2023 attack.

“He who thinks that assassination attempts can terrorize Hamas and push it to reverse course is delusional,” said Ibrahim Madhoun, a political analyst close to Hamas. “The movement was founded on the culture of sacrifice and its leadership realizes that being in a decision-making position always makes one subject to becoming a martyr.”

Ehud Yaari, an Israel-based fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the political intent of Tuesday’s strike was “to change the structure of the negotiations,” alongside the goal of eliminating important officials that have long been in Israel’s sights.

“It was clear everything was stuck,” Mr. Yaari, who is regularly briefed on the government’s thinking, said of the truce negotiations. “So they needed to change the dynamic.”

That meant not only shifting the balance of power from Hamas’s leaders in Qatar to its commanders on the ground, but away from Qatar itself, he said. Israel wants to strengthen the role of Egypt, another mediating country, he added.

Mr. al-Thani, the prime minister of Qatar, suggested in his interview that Mr. Netanyahu had not been serious about negotiations in recent weeks, adding that he “was just wasting our time.”