The attack, which targeted the Palestinian group\u2019s senior negotiation team as it was discussing a ceasefire proposal from President Trump, killed five Hamas members and a Qatari security officer. Hamas denies any of its senior leadership was killed. <\/p>\n
But whether the targeting succeeded is irrelevant to Gulf leaders pondering the effectiveness of decades-old security arrangements with the U.S.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe message to the region appears to be, \u2018If you think close ties with and major military support for Washington provides protection\u2026 think again,\u2019 \u201d said Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re all vulnerable to attack by larger and more powerful neighbors, and they expect a commitment that helping the U.S. militarily comes with a certain degree of protection. It clearly doesn\u2019t,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This satellite image from Planet Labs PBC taken on Wednesday shows damage after an Israeli strike targeted a compound that hosted Hamas\u2019 political leadership in Doha, Qatar, on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
(Planet Labs PBC via Associated Press)<\/p>\n
Qatari officials were apoplectic after the strike, calling it cowardly and a violation of the country\u2019s sovereignty. <\/p>\n
Especially galling to Qatar \u2014 which houses the Al Udeid Air Base, the largest American military installation in the region \u2014 is that it allowed Hamas officials to openly live in a well-appointed district of its capital at Washington\u2019s request, just as it had with the Taliban during the group\u2019s negotiations to end America\u2019s war in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything about that meeting [with Hamas] is very well known for the Israelis and for the Americans. It\u2019s not something we\u2019re hiding,\u201d said Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, in an interview with CNN on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have no words to express how enraged we are from such an action [by Israel]. This is state terror,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Other Gulf leaders \u2014 even those harboring lingering reservations about Qatar and its regional policies \u2014 presented a united front on Qatar\u2019s behalf. <\/p>\n
Saudi Arabia called the strike a \u201cbrutal aggression\u201d and said the kingdom would \u201cstand with Qatar without limit.\u201d Bahrain expressed its \u201cfull solidarity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mohamed Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates, traveled to Doha the next day to meet the Qatari emir \u2014 a surprise given how assiduously the UAE has worked to improve ties with Israel as part of the Abraham Accords, the Trump-brokered agreements that saw a number of Arab and Gulf nations normalize relations with Israel in 2020.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Gulf states view an external attack on one member as an attack on all,\u201d said Yasmine Farouk, the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Project director at the International Crisis Group. <\/p>\n
Farouk added that trust in the U.S. was already diminished in recent years when Washington failed to defend or respond to attacks on Saudi Arabia in 2019 and the UAE in 2022 by Yemen\u2019s Houthi rebels. Qatar, which suffered through an Iranian missile assault on Al Udeid in June, now has the dubious honor of having its territory become a proxy battleground for both sides of the larger U.S.-Iran conflict. <\/p>\n
This week\u2019s strike also represents a setback for the anti-Iran coalition the U.S. has worked to forge with its Arab allies and Israel. But the feeling among many in the Gulf is that Israel is just as belligerent and destabilizing an actor as Iran. <\/p>\n
\u201cIsrael has misinterpreted the willingness of Gulf countries to normalize relations with it as an acknowledgment of its dominance in the region,\u201d Farouq said. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe Gulf states do not want to live in a region dominated by either Israel or Iran,\u201d she added. \u201cThey reject that kind of behavior, rather than rejecting a specific country.\u201d<\/p>\n
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the immediate motive for the strike was Hamas claiming responsibility for the killing of six Israelis by Palestinian gunmen<\/a> in Jerusalem earlier this week. He insisted the operation was planned and conducted entirely by Israel.<\/p>\n At the same time, the more than 1,000-mile distance between Israel and Qatar means Israeli warplanes flew over multiple Arab countries, almost all of them with U.S. bases presumably able to detect incoming aircraft. (The U.S. has 19 bases across the region.) The building the Israelis struck is less than 20 miles away from Al Udeid.<\/p>\n Trump said he learned about the attack shortly before it began and instructed members of his administration to \u201cimmediately\u201d inform the Qataris. But Al Thani said the call from the U.S. came 10 minutes after the planes lobbed their missiles on Doha.<\/p>\n In May, when Trump visited Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, they feted him with grandiose events heavy on the pomp and circumstance and pledged trillions of dollars for investments in the U.S. The expectation was that this would buy some leverage, but Trump is reported to have done little more than scold Netanyahu over Tuesday\u2019s strike, even while stopping short of condemning his actions. (Also in May, Qatar donated a luxury Boeing 747 aircraft<\/a> for Trump to use as Air Force One.) <\/p>\n The conclusion for Gulf countries expecting U.S. protection from all threats, said Abdulaziz Al-Anjeri, founder of the Kuwait-based think tank Reconnaissance Research, is that some threats are more equal than others.<\/p>\n \u201cU.S. security assistance is effective against Iran or its allied armed factions, but it does not extend to Israel,\u201d he said, adding that historical alliances with the Gulf don\u2019t carry the same weight for Trump as they may have in the past.<\/p>\n The issue, said Bader Al-Saif, an assistant professor of history at Kuwait University, is that there\u2019s little specificity as to what a U.S. security umbrella actually entails.<\/p>\n \u201cAmerica\u2019s No.1 ally is now striking another American partner, and all they got from Trump is that they \u2018felt badly.\u2019 That it happened this way is not in America\u2019s favor,\u201d Al-Saif said. <\/p>\n He added that Gulf nations, especially Saudi Arabia, have been pushing for more formal \u2014 and well-defined \u2014 defense pacts, but that the relationship with the U.S. needed to reflect recent changes. \u201cYou\u2019re here as a security guarantor,\u201d he said of the U.S. \u201cWe cannot be cash dispensers if we feel that our basic security is not guaranteed.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BEIRUT\u00a0\u2014\u00a0For years, Persian Gulf nations staked their defense on one thing above all: A U.S.-supplied security umbrella, paid…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":417642,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[99112,11413,81177,143061,835,774,837,132624,143062,6860,7475,6506,1757,1017,49,978,659,6709],"class_list":{"0":"post-417641","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-al-udeid-air-base","9":"tag-attack","10":"tag-gulf","11":"tag-gulf-state","12":"tag-hamas","13":"tag-iran","14":"tag-israel","15":"tag-israeli-strike","16":"tag-israelis","17":"tag-qatar","18":"tag-region","19":"tag-saudi-arabia","20":"tag-trump","21":"tag-u-s","22":"tag-united-states","23":"tag-us","24":"tag-usa","25":"tag-washington"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115189660152764355","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/417642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}