When Israel told the Qataris in 2017 that one of the Hamas leaders they were hosting was planning attacks, they promptly showed him the door. Later, Israel contacted Qatar again to pass a message to Saleh al-Arouri, the founding commander of Hamas’s military wing, who had by then decamped to Beirut, although Arouri would not take the call.
Qatari officials have pointed to that episode in arguments they have made to increasingly hostile American politicians since last October, when the militant group’s massacre of 1,139 Israelis set off the punishing seven-month war in Gaza.
First, Qatar took in Hamas’s political leadership in 2012 with America and Israel’s blessing. Second, the US administration has privately encouraged officials to keep up their mediation role, because expelling Hamas — as some US politicians demanded — would sever a vital channel with the group.
But Doha no longer cares. In recent weeks two western diplomats and officials familiar with the matter say the Qatari government has concluded that the thankless task of hosting and mediating with Hamas’s obstinate leaders is not worth the trouble.
Earlier this year, Texas A&M University said it would close its campus in Doha, which Qatar criticised as a decision based on “disinformation”, while the Republican senator Ted Budd has introduced a bill threatening to end US recognition of Qatar as a non-Nato ally unless it expels the Hamas leaders. For a country that hosts the region’s largest American military base and invested heavily in shoring up its image when hosting the 2022 Fifa World Cup, the criticism has stung.
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The grumblings in Doha burst into the open last week when Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, the Qatari prime minister, attacked what he called “narrow political interests” and said Qatar would “re-evaluate” its role as a mediator.
People familiar with the matter say Hamas will not be asked to leave before the war in Gaza ends. If the group does quit, it is not certain which country will take it in.
Turkey has vociferously praised Hamas as a “resistance group” in the past. Hamas maintains a low-level office there, as it does in Egypt, another country involved in mediation. On Saturday President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey hosted a visit to Istanbul by Ismail Haniyeh, the Doha-based political leader of Hamas. But Turkey is also a Nato member with diplomatic relations with Israel. A brief experiment in accommodating Saleh al-Arouri did not last very long. Three regional officials said Turkey has privately dismissed the idea, but could change its mind.
Hamas could go back to Damascus, which it left in 2012 after siding with the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, surmising with many others in the region that his days were numbered. Twelve years later, Assad remains in power in Syria, and has not forgiven Hamas for the betrayal. And if he does agree to take them in again under pressure from his and Hamas’s backers in Tehran, the leadership would be sitting ducks for Israel, which has vowed to kill them — something it would not venture to do while they remain in Qatar.
Lebanon would be an unpromising choice for the same reason: al-Arouri was assassinated there in January in an Israeli airstrike. Other options include Algeria, Oman and Iran — the last an unappealing prospect for a Sunni Arab organisation that does not want to be viewed in the region as an Iranian proxy.
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The militant group itself denies that the topic has arisen in conversation with the Qataris. “This hasn’t come up. It’s nonsense. It has no bearing on reality,” a senior Hamas official told The Times. “It has not been discussed within the movement.”
American and western diplomats say their governments do not share the politicians’ criticisms, and that Doha believes the attacks are the work of lobby groups acting on behalf of the emirate’s regional rivals and Israel. Qatar has been disappointed, however, that the US administration has not come out openly to defend the country, and the criticism might grow in November should Donald Trump win the election. “They are looking at the long term,” said one western diplomat.
Trump, who is closer to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates than Qatar, supported a boycott led by those two countries against the emirate in 2017. He blunted his opposition to Doha when he learnt that Qatar hosts a major US airbase, recalled another western diplomat. Trump later found the emirate indispensable when it hosted US negotiations with the Taliban to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan.
But the criticisms against hosting Hamas, which is now seen as on a par with Al-Qaeda and Islamic State in Washington, are likely to grow under a Republican president with whom Qatar already has a complicated relationship.
The Qataris have also been incensed by the position of Israel, which had asked them to funnel money to Gaza before the war in the hope that it would pacify Hamas, which seized the territory in 2007. Israel has publicly traded barbs with Doha, saying it could do more to pressure Hamas.
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And then there is Hamas itself. The group has shown no signs of tempering its conditions for a ceasefire even as Israel lays waste to Gaza, killing more than 30,000 Palestinians over the past seven months, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. In March, its leaders insisted during interviews that they were winning the war.
When asked about the destruction in Gaza, the group’s deputy leader, Mousa Abu Marzouk, said that “living in freedom and dignity is worth a thousand times more than all the buildings” — something easier said in Doha than Gaza, where hundreds of thousands are now homeless and hungry.
The negotiations, which Doha had hoped to conclude in March before the start of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, have staggered along with no conclusion. Hamas’s political leaders in Qatar, whom western diplomats believe were not looped in on the plan to attack Israel on October 7, can only agree terms after approval from the fanatical Yahya Sinwar, the group’s de facto leader, hunkered down in Gaza.
“We are trying as much as possible to address this stumbling block,” said the visibly frustrated Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman al-Thani last week about the negotiations. But mediators “cannot provide things that the parties themselves refrain from [offering]”.
