The IDF has launched its long-anticipated new ground offensive Monday night by sending tanks into Gaza City, after gradually expanding its airstrikes there in recent days. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz confirmed the news reports that the attack had started by declaring that “Gaza is burning. The IDF is striking with an iron fist at the terror infrastructure, and IDF soldiers are fighting bravely to create the conditions for the release of the hostages and the defeat of Hamas. We will not relent and will not retreat — until the mission is complete.”
As the attack on Gaza City continues to unfold, the IDF is expected to dispatch tens of thousands of recently called-up reserve ground troops to occupy and hunt down the Hamas leaders and fighters in the densely populated city from which it estimates that more than 300,000 Palestinian residents have fled in response to IDF calls for them to evacuate to safe zones set up in southern Gaza.
Over the previous days, the IDF had been preparing the battlefield in Gaza City by systematically demolishing all of its high-rise buildings, where it said that Hamas had placed surveillance cameras to enable it to track the movements of Israeli troops and tanks.
President Trump also issued a new warning to Hamas in a Monday post on his Truth Social account. Trump wrote, “I have just read a news report that Hamas has moved the hostages above ground to use them as human shields against Israel’s ground offensive. I hope the leaders of Hamas know what they’re getting into if they do such a thing. This is a human atrocity, the likes of which few people have ever seen before. Don’t let this happen, or all ‘bets are off.’” Trump declared ominously. “Release all hostages now!”
WISDOM OF THE IDF ATTACK ON HAMAS LEADERS IN DOHA QUESTIONED
Meanwhile, new questions have been raised about the wisdom of Israeli Prime Minister Binyomin Netanyahu’s decision to launch a precision air strike on September 9 intended to kill a group of Hamas leaders gathered at its headquarters building in the Qatari capital city of Doha. While some commentators have called the attack, which failed to kill the Hamas leaders it targeted, a blunder, others say that it marks a significant turning point in Israel’s efforts to destroy Hamas, recover the remaining 48 hostages, and put an end to the fighting in Gaza that started after the October 7 attack almost three years ago.
While Israel has previously conducted several similar attacks across the region that succeeded in killing key enemy leaders in countries like Lebanon and Iran, where they thought they were safe, the Doha strike was different. First of all, at the time of the attack, Qatar, along with Egypt, was mediating the U.S.-sponsored Gaza ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas, and the Hamas leaders had gathered together at their Doha headquarters to discuss their response to the latest White House peace proposal. That implied that the Hamas negotiators would be safe there from attack, at least while the peace talks continued. Second, this Israeli precision attack on an enemy on foreign soil apparently failed to kill any of the senior Hamas officials who were its target, although some regional news reports indicated that it might have injured two of them.
But the failed attack did anger Qatar’s leaders. Its prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, accused Israel of “state terrorism,” and declared that the air strike, which reportedly used standoff guided munitions launched from Israeli aircraft outside of Qatari airspace, was “an attack on the principle of mediation itself. . .
“The reckless and treacherous Israeli aggression was committed while the state of Qatar was hosting official and public negotiations, with the knowledge of the Israeli side itself, and with the aim of achieving a ceasefire in Gaza,” Al-Thani declared, while insisting that Doha would continue with its mediation efforts to end the fighting. The Qatari leader also said, “It is time for the international community to stop applying double standards and punish Israel for all the crimes it has committed,” without even mentioning the fact that Hamas started the war with its heinous October 7 attack, and continues to violate international law by holding civilian hostages.
QATAR HAS BEEN PLAYING A CYNICAL DOUBLE GAME
Yet it is very hard to portray Qatar as the victim of unprovoked Israeli aggression in this case, because Qatar’s leaders have long been playing a cynical double game in Middle Eastern diplomacy. In recent years, Qatar has been sending regular shipments of millions of dollars in cash into Gaza, with Israel’s knowledge and permission, to prop up the finances of the Hamas government. At the same time, Qatar has served as a luxurious sanctuary in which the members of Hamas’ international leadership have been living openly, without fear of Israeli attack.
Qatar is a member of the [Persian] Gulf Cooperation Council, along with countries like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. But at the same time, Qatar has also maintained friendly relations with the Shiite enemies of the Sunni Persian Gulf states. The radical Iranian Islamic regime and its terrorist allies made it very unpopular with the Trump administration during his first term as president. But since Trump returned to the White House in January, Qatar has spent billions of dollars to get into his good graces. For example, when Trump visited Qatar in May, its leaders signed a massive trade and defense deal with the U.S., and offered Trump the gift of a brand new, VIP-fitted Boeing 747 to serve as a temporary replacement for the two current Air Force One aircraft that have been in service for 35 years and are long overdue for retirement.
Qatar’s generosity was one of the reasons why Israel’s attack on the Hamas house in Doha was a source of embarrassment for President Trump. According to a White House statement issued shortly after the Doha air strike, Trump was first informed about the attack only after it was already in progress, when it was detected by the U.S. military, too late to give the Qatari government any advance warning.
The statement, which was posted on social media and read to reporters by White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, implied that Trump disapproved of the Israeli attack on Hamas leaders in Qatar, which it described as a sovereign nation and close ally of the United States, and claimed that it did not advance Israel’s or America’s goals.” But the White House statement did concede that the elimination of Hamas leaders is a “worthy goal.”
ISRAEL IS GOING ALONG WITH TRUMP’S “LITTLE WHITE LIE”
However, the Axios news service reported that at least three Israeli officials with “direct knowledge” of the events of that day told it that Netanyahu had called Trump 50 minutes before the attack took place to tell him about the air strike in plenty of time for Trump to tell him to call it off, but that the president chose not to do so.
As one of the senior Israeli officials described the phone call to Axios, “First, there was a discussion on the political level between Netanyahu and Trump, and afterwards through military channels.” As a second Axios source further explained, “If Trump had wanted to stop [the attack at that point], he could have, [but] in practice, he didn’t.”
According to the Axios sources, to avoid embarrassing Trump in the eyes of Qatar and America’s other Arab allies, Israel agreed, for diplomatic reasons, to confirm the fictional “White House rendition of events,” which said that Trump did not learn of the attack in time to tell Netanyahu to call it off, and to confirm the White House claim that Israel was solely responsible for it.
It appears that Qatar’s leaders are also willing to go along with the charade, from the fact that its prime minister, al-Thani, attended an hour-long meeting followed by dinner at the White House with President Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Trump’s negotiator, Steve Witkoff, just three days after the Israeli attack.
Both President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who visited Israel this week, condemned the Israeli attack in an apparent effort to maintain good relations with America’s allies in the region. Over the weekend, President Trump told reporters that Israel must now be “very, very careful” about how it handles Qatar, which he called a “great ally” of the United States.
TRUMP AND NETANYAHU STILL IN AGREEMENT ON GAZA
During an extended joint press conference at Netanyahu’s office in Yerushalayim earlier Monday, it became clear that Rubio, speaking on behalf of the Trump administration, and Netanyahu were in complete agreement on the need to defeat Hamas, return all 48 of the remaining hostages, both alive and dead, being held by Hamas, and to demilitarize Gaza under new, civilian Palestinian leadership, to achieve a lasting peace there.
In his opening statement, Netanyahu said that the chants of “Death to America, death to Israel” coming from Iran are much less threatening than before because of the success of the American and Israeli attacks in destroying Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile facilities.
To dispel any suspicions of American involvement in the bombing, Netanyahu again emphasized that Israel assumes “full responsibility [for the Doha strike]. We did it on our own. Period.” He also said that “Israel has no greater ally than the United States,” and no better friend in the White House than President Trump. Netanyahu also insisted that, despite reports of friction between him and President Trump over the Doha attack, the alliance between Israel and the United States today is stronger than it has ever been.
During the press conference, Rubio discreetly dodged a reporter’s question about any problems Trump may have had with Israel’s attack on Doha. The secretary of state said that instead of dwelling on the past, the Trump administration is concentrating on “what we can do with Qatar [in the future] and what its next role will be in the [peace] talks. We encourage it to continue its role,” Rubio said. He also suggested that the harsh criticism that Israel is now receiving from America’s Arab allies over the Doha attack was largely for domestic political consumption, and did not necessarily signify a long-term rupture in Israel’s relations with those countries.
Secretary of State Rubio also reiterated the American position that Hamas must not continue as an armed organization in Gaza, that all of its remaining Israeli hostages, dead and alive, must come home, and warned that the U.S. considers “a nuclear Iran ruled by radical clerics [to be] an intolerable risk.”
NETANYAHU DENIES THAT THE ISRAELI ATTACK ON DOHA WAS A FAILURE
When asked by a reporter whether he was disappointed with the apparent failure of the Israeli strike to kill the Hamas leaders in Doha, Netanyahu replied that even though Israel was still gathering information on the outcome of the attack, the strike “didn’t fail, because it had one central message and we considered it before we launched it, and that is, you can hide, you can run, but we’ll get you!” he declared.
Netanyahu defended Israel’s right to attack terrorists wherever in the world they can be found, and declared that such attacks are not a violation of the sovereignty of those countries that harbor them. He noted, as an example, that after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the U.S. “acted very boldly against the terrorist havens that were given to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and the terrorist haven that was given to the chief terrorist [Osama] Bin Laden in Pakistan.”
Netanyahu has also pointed to U.N. Security Council Resolution 1373, which was ratified less than three weeks after the 9/11 attacks, and which states clearly that no country can harbor or give safe haven to terrorists. Netanyahu declared in a statement last week that Israel’s attack on the Hamas terrorists in Doha was in line with that resolution. “We went after the terrorist masterminds who committed the October 7th massacre. And we did so in Qatar, which gives safe haven, it harbors terrorists, it finances Hamas, it gives its terrorist chieftains sumptuous villas, it gives them everything.” He also wrote that the various countries of the world [condemning Israel] should be ashamed of themselves.” Because they applauded “after America took out Osama bin Laden. . . they should [also] applaud Israel for standing up to the same principles and carrying them out.”
NETANYAHU SAYS ISRAEL WILL KEEP HUNTING TERRORISTS EVERYWHERE
Netanyahu concluded by saying, “To Qatar and all nations who harbor terrorists, you either expel them or you bring them to justice. Because if you don’t, we will.”
Netanyahu also cited a precedent set by former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. She ordered the Mossad to hunt down and kill the Black September terrorists who were responsible for the massacre of eleven Israeli athletes participating in the 1972 Summer Olympic Games in Munich, Germany. Teams of Mossad agents then carried out a series of targeted assassinations of Black September terrorists in cities across Europe and in Beirut. Netanyahu argued that the same principle still applies to the leaders of Hamas today, who are not protected from attack by Qatar’s sovereignty.
At a separate meeting on Monday with a delegation of 250 visiting American state legislators, Netanyahu accused China and Qatar of “organizing an attack on Israel… [through] the social media of the Western world and the United States.” He also accused Qatar and China of having spent “enormous sums of money” to impose a “media blockade on Israel,” long before the Israeli attack on the Hamas leaders in Doha.
Netanyahu told the visiting Americans, “We value and cherish your support, [because] there is an active effort to erode it. That effort to besiege Israel, not merely isolate it… is orchestrated by the same forces that supported Iran’s effort to put a military siege on us and ultimately choke us.”
He also noted that although “The U.S. is with us, as are many other countries,” the blockade has resulted in some Western European countries cutting off deliveries of military equipment and spare parts that are crucial to the IDF, such as the British-made engines that drive Israel’s Merkava tanks.
Even Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a longtime supporter of Israel, now admits to conflicted feelings. “We did not hesitate to defend Israel, but at the same time we cannot remain silent now in the face of a [military] reaction [in Gaza] that has gone far beyond the principle of proportionality,” she said.
As a result, Prime Minister Netanyahu said, “In the coming years, we will need to strengthen our independent arms industries so that we have independence in weaponry, an armaments economy, and the industrial capability to produce them” [for ourselves].
AFTER OCTOBER 7, ISRAEL ADOPTED A MORE AGGRESSIVE MILITARY STANCE
That statement is yet another indication of a very significant change of attitude by Netanyahu and Israel’s military strategists based upon the harsh lessons they learned from Hamas’ October 7 attack. First among them is that Israel must not rely so heavily on its military deterrence, especially in the face of an enemy that is willing to sacrifice the lives of its own fighters, namely, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.
The Israeli military has also taken a very aggressive stance in Syria in the wake of the collapse of the Assad regime. The IDF has taken over the strategic observation posts on the northern slopes of Har Hermon, staged raids on stockpiles of military weapons across Syria that were abandoned by Assad’s troops to keep them out of the hands of terrorists, and has come to the rescue of the Druze community in southern Syria which has been attacked by the new government in Damascus which is led by a former al-Qaeda terrorist. In addition, the IDF has been closely supervising the efforts by the Lebanese army to disarm Hezbollah fighters, in compliance with the terms of the ceasefire agreement that Hezbollah was forced to sign after Israel defeated them last year.
However, these new, more aggressive Israeli military initiatives come at a steep price, especially in the face of an enemy that controls the mainstream media and news culture, and the college campuses, and which has legitimized open expressions of antisemitism, including Hamas’ October 7 attack, especially on the extreme political left.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed written by David Luhnow and Joshua Chaffin, they cite a recent poll which found that, “Sixty percent of Americans now say they disapprove of Israel’s military action in Gaza. Only 32% say they approve, down from over 50% in the month after October 7.”
ISRAEL HEMORRHAGING AMERICAN SUPPORT FROM THE LEFT AND THE RIGHT
Furthermore, the hemorrhaging of support for Israel is not a phenomenon limited to the political left. In the same poll, half of Republican or Republican-leaning voters under age 50 said they have negative views of Israel, many of them spread by prominent figures in President Trump’s MAGA movement, such as Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon.
In Europe, the decline in Israel’s popularity is even worse. In Britain, where Luhnow is the Wall Street Journal’s bureau chief, “nearly half of adults say Israel is treating the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews in the Holocaust, and [openly] antisemitic attitudes have doubled in the past five years.”
Luhnow and Chaffin also raise another serious problem. While they concede that “Israel has made itself safer in the short-term by decimating Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as setting back Iran’s nuclear program,” they worry that “the last two years of war could end up undermining [Israel’s] long-term security by heightening hostility in the Arab and Muslim world, including among moderate Gulf states, and weakening support among Israel’s allies, especially the U.S., the U.K. and Germany.”
Similarly, Michael Koplow at the Israel Policy Forum in Washington, D.C., warns that “When the war [in Gaza] stops, things won’t go back to status quo ante. People’s image of Israel is going to change in enduring ways, and that brings all kinds of impacts on Israel economically, diplomatically, [and] militarily.” Koplow also warns that continued American support for Israel is likely to become the most important foreign policy issue in the 2028 presidential election and that the next Democrat to be elected president is likely to end further arms sales to Israel.
Luhnow and Chaffin also note that the rise of antisemitism on the political left “has also fueled the rise of Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old socialist and vocal critic of Israel who is currently the clear favorite to win New York City’s mayoral race in November,” despite concerted efforts by his main opponent in the Democrat mayoral primary this summer, former governor Andrew Cuomo, to expose and attack Mamdani’s long record of anti-Israel rhetoric and pro-Palestinian activism.
ISRAEL IS LOSING THE WAR FOR HEARTS AND MINDS
According to Howard Wolfson, a veteran Democrat strategist, who served as a deputy mayor of New York City under Michael Bloomberg, “The war for hearts and minds is lost. The reality here is that public opinion is shifting very quickly and very dramatically away from Israel.”
Wolfson counts himself as one of the many longtime friends of Israel, including both Jews and non-Jews, who are now upset by the Israeli government’s apparent disregard for the deterioration of its image in the rest of the world since the war in Gaza started. “Either they don’t understand what’s happening, or they don’t understand the implications of what’s happening,” Wolfson said.
During the previous Israeli conflicts with Hamas triggered by its terrorist attacks from Gaza, Netanyahu had argued correctly that the negative world opinion of Israel’s military tactic of using overwhelming force would recover quickly once the fighting ended. But the current conflict in Gaza is different because it has dragged on for almost two years, far longer than any previous Israeli war.
According to Luhnow and Chaffin, “There are two battlefields in any war: a kinetic one where the fighting takes place, and an information and public relations war to win hearts and minds. In the Gaza war, Israel clearly has the upper hand on the battlefield, but it faces longer odds in the information space.
“The October 7 killings, and the sheer scale and barbarity of the attacks, lasted one day, compared with nearly two years of Israel’s military response. The [relatively] few public images of the [initial] Hamas attack were displaced within days by [gruesome] pictures of destruction in Gaza and dead civilians, [which have continued over the past] 23 months.” These have now largely erased the pro-Israel impressions that were generated by the accounts of the horrific October 7 Hamas attack.
As a result, former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami has written, “The orchestrator of one of the most atrocious terror attacks in memory, Hamas, is now viewed [on social media] as an emblem of heroic resistance.”
Peter Lerner, a former IDF spokesman, has argued that Israel has a strong case to make justifying the military tactics it has used in Gaza, even if we accept the statistics provided by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health, which claims that 60,000 Palestinians have died since the war started. But if we also accept the IDF estimate that more than 20,000 of them, or approximately one-third of those killed, were Hamas fighters, that is still a relatively low 2-1 proportion of civilian to combatant deaths compared to other modern wars, especially those fought in crowded urban environments where civilians often have no safe place to which they can flee.
But Lerner also admits that such statistical arguments in Israel’s defense do not have the emotional appeal of the heart-wrenching, Hamas-supplied images of suffering Palestinian children in Gaza, which the mainstream media has been distributing without even bothering to check their authenticity.
ISRAEL SUFFERING FROM A MESSAGING FAILURE
According to Lerner, Israel’s image has also suffered because it has failed to deliver “a coherent and consistent story [to explain] why it is fighting in Gaza. The [government’s] official [war] goals of freeing the hostages and ensuring Hamas’ control of Gaza is over. . . have been repeatedly undermined by [irresponsible] comments from various [right-wing] Israeli officials about moving Palestinians out of Gaza or annexing the West Bank.”
For Israel to win the public relations war for hearts and minds, Lerner says, “You need a clear endgame, an attainable goal that people understand, synchronized across all [spokesmen for the] state. Otherwise, it’s every man for himself, sowing confusion and mistrust [even] among Israel’s allies.”
Lerner also argues that continuing the war against Hamas at this point by going through with the IDF’s announced plan to destroy Gaza City might be counterproductive because: “Hamas in its current state poses no strategic threat to Israel. It can only gain from a continued war effort, one which isolates Israel further, adds to deeper distrust in the region, and permanently derails normalization with Saudi Arabia and others. So from Hamas’ perspective,” Lerner concludes, “it is succeeding in its strategic goals [just by keeping Israel at war with it].”
ARAB SUMMIT MEETING IN DOHA CONDEMNS “THE BRUTAL ISRAELI ATTACK”
Meanwhile, the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation called an emergency summit meeting that was held this week in Doha on the Israeli attack. The meeting approved a formal statement which condemned “the brutal Israeli attack on Qatar and the continuation of Israel’s hostile acts, including genocide, ethnic cleansing, starvation, siege, and colonizing activities and expansion policies that threaten prospects of peace and coexistence in the region.”
The “colonizing” and “expansion” remark was a reference to the Israeli government’s recent approval of more than 3,000 new Jewish housing units to be built in a strategic area of the West Bank connecting Yerushalayim and Maale Adumim called E-1, which has long been viewed as an essential part of any future Palestinian state. In a clear reference to the Abraham Accords, the joint summit statement said that the attack on the Hamas headquarters in Doha also threatens “everything that has been achieved on the path of normalizing ties with Israel, including current agreements and future ones.”
However, the summit statement was silent about Hamas’ culpability for starting the war with Israel with its October 7 attack, and provoking the Israeli government into going forward with its plan to destroy Gaza City by claiming credit for a September 8 shooting attack on a public bus in the Ramot neighborhood of Yerushalayim, which killed six of its passengers.
At the summit meeting itself, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi condemned the Israeli air strike on the Hamas leaders in Doha “in the strongest terms” and stated that it “crossed all red lines.” The Egyptian president added that, “What is happening right now hinders the future of peace, threatens your security and the security of the peoples in the region and adds obstacles to chances for any new peace agreements and even [threatens] existing ones,” presumably including the Israeli peace treaty with Egypt, which was signed 45 years ago.
King Abdullah II of Jordan, whose nation signed a peace agreement with Israel 30 years ago, also said at the summit that Israel’s strike aimed at Hamas leaders in Qatar “is proof that the Israeli threat knows no bounds, and our response must be clear and deterrent.”
The summit’s closing statement urged “all states to take all possible legal and effective measures to prevent Israel from continuing its actions against the Palestinian people,” including “reviewing diplomatic and economic relations with it, and initiating legal proceedings against it.” It also urged the states participating in the summit to “coordinate efforts aimed at suspending Israel’s membership in the United Nations.”
ISRAEL’S REMARKABLE STRING OF MILITARY SUCCESSES
Since Hamas caught Israel unprepared with its devastating October 7 attack three years ago, the IDF and Israel’s security services have enjoyed a remarkable and dramatic series of military and intelligence successes against its enemies. After the IDF systematically attacked and defeated Hamas’ organized military formations in Gaza, Israel hunted down and assassinated the members of the Hamas political and military leadership who masterminded the October 7 attack.
Then, after harassing missile attacks forced the residents of northern Israel to evacuate their homes, Israel fought back effectively. First, it detonated the Mossad’s explosive pagers and walkie-talkies, demoralizing Hezbollah’s fighters. Then, a series of pinpoint IDF air strikes decimated its military leadership and finally killed its longtime leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, forcing a defeated Hezbollah to accept a ceasefire on Israel’s terms.
Finally, when Iran’s leaders went too far in defying calls by the international community and President Donald Trump to stop before it crossed the nuclear weapons threshold, Israel got a green light from Trump to launch a devastating attack. With vital assistance from American B-2 bombers, the joint attack destroyed Iran’s air defenses and, more critically, devastated its nuclear weapons program, setting it back by at least a year or two.
This impressive series of victories did much to restore Israel’s tarnished reputation as the dominant local military force in the region. The success of the Israeli attacks against its enemies, Iran and its terrorist allies, which had struck at Israel first, in support of Hamas, tended to silence any criticism that Israel had totally disrupted the uneasy military status quo in the region. Those decisive Israeli victories, combined with the sudden collapse of Syria’s Assad regime, undermined Iran’s dominating influence over the region and enabled Israel to eliminate the threat to its national security of being forced to fight Iran and its terrorist allies simultaneously in a multi-front war.
But Israel’s military successes in Lebanon and Iran were unable to stifle the growing international outrage over Israel’s military operations in Gaza, based largely upon the exaggerated civilian casualty reports and falsified war crime accusations by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health. Israel has also been falsely accused in mainstream media news reports of trying to commit genocide against Palestinian children in Gaza through a deliberate policy of starvation. Despite the clear evidence of Israel’s innocence of these charges, the liberal-dominated news media and most of the international community remain in stubborn denial of the obvious fact that the real cause of the war and suffering has been Hamas, ever since its violent takeover of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in 2007, and most recently its October 7 attack three years ago.
THE GAZA STARVATION BLOOD LIBEL AGAINST ISRAEL
Hamas is also responsible for the alleged starvation for which Israel has been unjustly blamed, because the terrorists have been hijacking the more than adequate food and humanitarian aid shipments that Israel has been permitting to enter Gaza. Hamas has been using its control over those shipments and the ever-present threat of violence to maintain its hold over Gaza’s civilian population. It has also used the profits that it has made by selling some of the stolen food at inflated prices on Gaza’s black market to help finance its continuing guerrilla-style military operations against Israeli forces.
The growing international calls on Israel to halt the war in Gaza, as well as the ongoing weekly street rallies in Israel by Netanyahu’s domestic political opponents, has given the current Hamas leadership reason to believe that they and their fighters can hold out indefinitely in the remains of their tunnel network, while waiting for the internal or external pressure to force Israel to stop its attacks. That is why, instead of agreeing to the latest ceasefire proposal, which was tailored by President Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, to meet its demands, Hamas keeps coming up with new excuses to reject it, while still falsely claiming that it is not responsible for prolonging the war.
When it then became clear that the negotiations were going nowhere, both Israel and the U.S. changed their approach. While the IDF began to implement its announced plans to destroy Gaza City by demolishing its high-rise building, despite the knowledge that the assault would likely put some of the surviving hostages known to be held there at risk, Israel, with Trump’s backing, insisted that to end the war, Hamas must meet its demands to return all the remaining hostages, disarm its remaining fighters, and agree to send its surviving leaders into exile, in much the same way that Yasser Arafat was forced to lead the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) into exile in Tunisia in June of 1982, after Israel invaded Lebanon and laid siege to the terrorists’ enclave in West Beirut.
ISRAEL’S PRESIDENT HERZOG WARNS AGAINST ISRAEL’S GROWING ISOLATION
However, Israel’s growing isolation in the international community, due to the inflated reports of civilian casualties in Gaza, as well as the hostility from a growing number of left-wing congressional Democrats, is a serious source of concern. Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, warned last week about the importance of “protecting Israel’s extensive and significant ties. . . including important economic ties,” with some countries with which it has “very deep disagreements.” Herzog stressed that Israel must not “accept the isolation our enemies seek to impose upon us.” At the same time, he acknowledged that “Israel has never experienced such hostility. Certainly not in the most strategic and influential arenas. The hatred of Israel is rearing its ugly head with full force…
“We must not forsake our [foreign] ties. We must not burn our bridges,” Herzog insisted.
Israel does not have diplomatic relations with Qatar, in large part because Qatar has been one of Hamas’ most generous supporters in recent years. On the other hand, Qatar is considered to be an important regional ally of the United States, as the host of Al-Udeid Air Base, the largest American military installation in the region. Qatar has also been promoting itself as the region’s diplomatic peacemaker, due to its willingness to talk to both sides in every dispute. However, according to a Times of Israel report, Israeli leaders are much more concerned about a negative reaction to the Doha attack by its regional partners, such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which are signatories to the Abraham Accords.
The UAE has been warning Israel privately and publicly that any move to annex part of the West Bank would cross a red line that would “end the vision of regional integration,” which is the basis for the Abraham Accords. In fact, it was an Israeli promise that it would not go forward with such an annexation in 2020 that convinced the UAE to sign on to the Abraham Accords, even though the “Palestinian question” remained unresolved. If Israel now proceeds with such an annexation, UAE officials have said, it would not just jeopardize the future of the Abraham Accords but put them at risk of being canceled.
However, Prime Minister Netanyahu and his Defense Minister, Israel Katz, do not seem to share President Herzog’s concerns about Israel’s growing diplomatic isolation, nor are they at all apologetic over the failure of the September 9 Doha attack to kill the targeted Hamas leaders. Instead, they are confident that the IDF will get them with its next attack, and if not, it will continue until they succeed. They also believe that most of the same Arab states that are now complaining so loudly about the Doha attack will not be upset at all, privately, if and when Israel finally does eliminate or send into exile the last of Hamas’ leaders.
Netanyahu also rejected the advice of the IDF chief of staff, General Eyal Zamir, to accept another short-term ceasefire deal with Hamas rather than going forward with the scorched-earth assault on Gaza City, which has already resulted in the call-up of tens of thousands of reserve troops from civilian life, further disrupting Israel’s civilian economy.
NETANYAHU IS STILL CONFIDENT IN TRUMP’S FRIENDSHIP
Despite Trump’s complaint to reporters last week that he was “very unhappy” with Israel’s attack on Doha, because, he said, it “does not advance Israel or America’s goals” Netanyahu still appears to be confident in his friendly working relationship with President Trump, and their shared desire, according to Secretary of State Rubio, to see Hamas defeated and the hostages returned, even though Rubio confirmed that “the president wants this [the war in Gaza] to be finished with” as quickly as possible.
By approving the new Jewish housing project in the E1 corridor, Netanyahu has taken revenge against the foreign ministers of France, Germany, and Great Britain, who condemned Israel’s September 9 attack on the Hamas leaders in Qatar for violating Qatar’s sovereignty and posing “a serious risk to achieving a negotiated deal,” to end the war in Gaza. The E1 move is also seen as a rebuke to the members of the U.N. General Assembly who voted over the weekend to recognize a Palestinian state, in retaliation for Bibi’s decision to continue Israel’s war in Gaza until it achieves total victory over Hamas.
Both Israeli officials and a statement released by Trump’s State Department have condemned the U.N. vote and the condemnation of Israel by the European foreign ministers because they will be seen as a reward to Hamas for having initiated the war in Gaza by mounting the October 7 attack on Israel.
NETANYAHU’S E1 APPROVAL MAKES A PALESTINIAN STATE MORE DIFFICULT
By approving the housing construction project in the E1 corridor, which had been delayed for many years due to previous American presidents advocating for the two-state solution, Netanyahu has made the eventual creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank even more unlikely. In fact, he declared last week at the celebration for the completion of a new settlement in the West Bank, “We said there will be no Palestinian state — and indeed there will be no Palestinian state. This place is ours!” The explicit statement delighted Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition partners, who are now calling openly for Israel’s formal annexation of most, if not all, of the West Bank.
Finance Minister, Betzalel Smotrich, declared, “The fact that a diplomatic attack on Israel is met with Israeli silence is unacceptable and cannot continue. France and other countries are openly acting against Israel. Israel must assert Israeli sovereignty [over the West Bank] as a preventive measure against the reckless attempt to establish a terror state in the heart of our land.”
Israel’s Likud Justice Minister, Yariv Levin, said that the General Assembly’s vote to recognize a Palestinian state amounted to “a reward for [Hamas] terrorism,” but he insisted that such a state will never be established. “The Land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel,” Levin declared. “Even the U.N. decision will not change that.” Instead, the Justice Minister said it is now time for Israel to claim its sovereignty over the entire West Bank as the appropriate “Zionist response” to the U.N.’s vote. Predictably, these statements have further alarmed the diehard antisemitic enemies of Israel, who are still advocating for the mythical two-state solution that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians really want.
Presumably, the Israeli annexation of the West Bank would only go forward with President Trump’s approval, as was the case when Israel annexed the Golan Heights during Trump’s first term as U.S. president. However, Trump’s blessing for such a move now seems unlikely, due to the high level of public resentment against Israel among America’s allies both in Europe and the Arab world, over the high number of civilian casualties in Gaza, for which they unfairly hold Israel, instead of Hamas, entirely to blame.
Clearly, it will take some time for Israel’s badly damaged international reputation to recover. That process will not be able to start until Hamas is finally defeated, Gaza is fully disarmed and pacified, and the remaining threats from a weakened Iran and its terrorist proxies, as well as its badly damaged nuclear weapons and ballistic programs, are fully and permanently neutralized.
NETANYAHU’S BOLD DOHA STRIKE GAMBLE
On the other hand, Yaakov Katz writes in the Jerusalem Post, it is clear that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision to approve the air strike on the Hamas compound in Doha was a major gamble, on several levels.
“It was not just another operation in Gaza or a routine bombing in southern Lebanon. This was different. It was a strike carried out on the soil of Qatar – a country often described as one of the closest non-NATO allies of the United States and a country with whom Israel has cultivated one of its most discreet but important regional relationships.”
Israeli officials have argued that the risk of carrying out the attack on Doha was justified because its top targets, Khalil al-Hayya and Khaled Mashaal, lead one of the most hardline factions within Hamas, which has blocked for more than a year any peace agreement that could have freed the rest of the Israeli hostages being held in Gaza.
Removing them was necessary, these Israeli officials argued, for a viable Gaza peace agreement to ultimately be reached with Hamas.
Katz suggests that even though the attack apparently failed to achieve its goal of eliminating the targeted Hamas leaders, it still sent Hamas a useful message. It was a tacit announcement that the Israeli government is now “all in” and willing to do things to end the war quickly that were previously unthinkable. These include risking the wrath of a volatile American president, risking harm to or the death of the last 20 living hostages in Gaza, and violating the principle of diplomatic immunity from attack while considering whether to reject or approve the latest peace offer from the trusted envoy of that volatile American president.
He also argues that the biggest gamble that Netanyahu took by approving the Doha attack was not whether it would kill the hardline Hamas leaders who were targeted, but rather s strategic one: “Will the move, whether successful or not, pressure Hamas into striking a [peace] deal?”
SUCCESS OR FAILURE WILL BE DETERMINED BY WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
According to Katz, whether the attack will turn out to be a failure or a success will depend upon “what happens next. If talks collapse entirely, if Hamas retaliates by abusing the hostages still in captivity even more, if the Gaza City offensive resumes with no parallel diplomatic track, then Israel’s gamble will look reckless and possibly even self-defeating.”
Katz also concedes that Khaled Mashal and Khalil al-Hayya were legitimate targets for assassination in their own right, regardless of their opposition to the latest American peace proposal. Not only were they senior Hamas political figures, they were also among the architects of the dastardly October 7 attack. They helped Yahya Sinwar to build Hamas into the military machine that invaded Israel, killed 1,200 people, and dragged 251 more into captivity.
Mashal and al-Hayya can also be seen in chilling video footage taken while the October 7 attack was in progress, kneeling in prayer on the floor of the same luxury office in Doha that Israel bombed last week, as they watched the ongoing massacre in southern Israel that Qatar’s Al Jazeera news channel was broadcasting in real time.
But that still does not answer the most crucial question about the Doha attack. Will Israel’s attempt to remove those Hamas leaders, whether it succeeded or not, help to bring the remaining hostages home, or convince Hamas’ leaders to improve their odds for survival by finally agreeing to end the war on President Trump’s terms? “At stake,” Katz reminds us, “are the 20 hostages who [are] still believed [to be] alive. Each day that passes without a deal puts their lives in greater peril.” For many Israelis, Katz writes, that is the only criterion through which the Doha air strike will ultimately be judged. But other Israelis will argue that any peace agreement that leaves Hamas still in Gaza will only guarantee an eventual repeat of the October 7 attack, as Hamas leaders have repeatedly promised.
None of this means Netanyahu’s gamble by approving the Doha attack cannot still pay off, even though the targeted Hamas leaders survived. “Did this operation move the country closer toward ending the war and bringing the hostages home, or did it push both goals further away?” Katz asks.
If military pressure from the looming Gaza City offensive, combined with a newfound desire for their own survival, forces Hamas leaders to begin negotiating a peace deal for Gaza in good faith, then the risk will have been justified.
But if the hostages remain in captivity, or are executed by their Hamas captors, if the peace talks in Doha collapse, if the Arab states that signed the Abraham Accords disavow them, or if the cooperation and trust between Trump and Netanyahu breaks down, Netanyahu’s decision to attack on the Hamas office Doha will be go down in history as a bold but reckless overreach.
