The Qatari prime minister is taking a victory lap over the hostage deal his government helped negotiate. That may seem inevitable and perhaps even earned, but a wide-ranging interview that Mohammed Al-Thani gave to Israel’s Channel 12 showed precisely why the Qataris are untrustworthy interlocutors and how they operate in bad faith even when their goals ostensibly line up with those of the West.
So far, the cease-fire deal is holding but remains precarious, as always. Seven female hostages have been released and Gazans are returning to their homes in the north. By Thursday, Hamas’s arrangement of the return of hostage Arbel Yehud from another terrorist group should bring Hamas into compliance with the deal for the first time. The terrorist organization has thus far withheld information, unilaterally reordered the release plan, and engaged in other violations.
Qatar, as Hamas’s patron, has enabled this behavior from the beginning and exercised no restraint on Hamas. Thani spends some of his discussion with Channel 12 whining about the perception of his country as nothing more than a bank of fools in Hamas’s corner.
All of this is run-of-the-mill politicking until Thani crosses a particular line.
“What we really feel sad about is that it took [this long] to get to an agreement that we agreed on the framework of back in December 2023,” he said.
To which his interviewer asked: “So this is the same agreement that was agreed on then?”
Thani’s answer: “It’s almost the same. There are some details here and there.… Everyone is saying it is the same agreement as May 27.… The problem is that with every day we were delayed, we felt a sense of responsibility that [it] was costing a lot of lives, of the Gazans or of the hostages being held in Gaza.”
What Thani is doing here is insinuating that the war could’ve been over in December 2023. Because Yahya Sinwar is dead and Hamas is seen as a disorganized shell of its former self, this play is meant to leave the impression that Israel’s government was the only thing standing in the way of the return of the hostages, and that the deaths caused by the delay were preventable.
We know, and have known for some time, that the live return of all the hostages was not on the table in December 2023. We also know that the positioning of Israeli troops was so different in December 2023 that in terms of the reality on the ground, the deal would not have looked anything like the deal that was signed earlier this month.
As a reminder, here is what then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken said a few weeks ago regarding the barriers to a deal:
“The two biggest impediments to getting that over the finish line — and we’ve been so close on several occasions and as we speak today, we’re also very close — there have been two major impediments, and they both go to what drives Hamas. One has been whenever there has been public daylight between the United States and Israel and the perception that pressure was growing on Israel, we’ve seen it: Hamas has pulled back from agreeing to a cease-fire and the release of hostages. And so there are times when what we say in private to Israel where we have a disagreement is one thing, and what we’re doing or saying in public may be another. But that’s in no small measure because with this daylight, the prospects of getting the hostage and cease-fire deal over the finish line become more distant.”
Scapegoating Israel for the lack of a deal is nothing more and nothing less than a form of diplomatic sabotage. It is what Hamas was doing then, and it is what Qatar is doing now.
But to what end? What’s the purpose of Qatari misbehavior at a time like this? The answer is that Qatar is playing games with Israel’s domestic politics. Emotions are, of course, raw. And that is especially so around the hostage deals, in which Hamas and its Western chorus line have succeeded in portraying Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the roadblock.
We know now that this wasn’t the case all along—we know now definitively that it was Hamas acting as Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown each time. But we’ve known this for quite some time. Nonetheless, Israelis had one government they could petition: their own. That petitioning morphed over time, for many in the Israeli public, into an article of faith that Netanyahu was negotiating against himself. Hamas took advantage of this and poked and prodded at Israel’s internal divisions, tormenting families and constantly reopening wounds.
That is what Qatar is doing now. The Qataris want what Hamas wanted: the destabilization of Israeli politics. And so they portray Israel as the only party to the conflict with agency. And they are willing to continue doing so, even if it maximizes the suffering of grieving Israelis.