Israel has attacked a meeting of Hamas officials at the capital of Qatar, Doha, including the chief negotiator of ceasefire talks in the group; the White House claimed this attack is not serving the interests of Israel or America.
Hamas reported the killing of six people, including the son of its exiled Gaza leader, Khalil al-Hayya. It claimed that its leading personnel, such as the negotiations team, survived.
The Israeli attack was hours following the encouragement by its military on all occupants of the city of Gaza to move out before a scheduled attack to seize what it perceives as the last stronghold of Hamas, which is being occupied by hundreds of thousands of people living in famine.
White House officials said the attack had been preannounced on the soil of one of the most critical regional US allies and the most significant in efforts to secure a ceasefire in Gaza.
Trump posted on social media to disassociate himself with the attack and claimed that he had nothing to do with the attack of a close US ally against another ally.
“This was a decision made by the prime minister Netanyahu, it was not a decision made by me,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social network.
Trump said his administration had attempted to inform Qatar about the attack to no avail.
Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman AL Thani said, “Qatar reserves the right to respond to this blatant attack and will take all necessary measures to respond.”
Keir Starmer denounced the assault, and according to him infringed the sovereignty of Qatar and endangered further development in the region. Yet UK sources affirmed that the prime minister was still scheduled to meet the Israeli President, Issac Herzog, in London on Wednesday.
Israel claimed that it had attacked Doha in retaliation for a shooting by Hamas in Jerusalem on Monday, which killed six Israeli people. Gaza health officials reported that Israel killed over 65,000 Palestinians in the coastal land.
Like the US and Egypt, Qatar has been at the forefront in various efforts to discontinue the war in Gaza, which has been instigated by an unprecedented raid by the Palestinian militants on 7 October 2023.
The US has a giant airbase, AI Udeid, which had been targeted by Tehran in the Israeli-US attacks on the Iranian nuclear programme earlier this year. In that episode, the US supplied important real-time intelligence to the armed forces of Qatar.
Witnesses recounted various explosions in the Katara area in Doha, which is a tourist attraction. According to AL Jazeera, the sources of Hamas said that the explosions hit a gathering of a delegation of the talks.