Israeli strike in Qatar shakes decades-long U.S. security pact with Gulf states

Beirut – For years, the Persian Gulf nations have above all have their defense on one thing: a safety umbrella provided by the United States, paid with tens of billions of their petrodollars and agreements that have enabled the United States to sprinkle the Middle East with some of its largest military facilities.

Thought was that being users of American weapons and having an American military presence was a virtual protection guarantee if the enemies came to call.

This reflection was upset on Tuesday, when Israel, probably the best ally of the United States, sent war aircraft and launched 10 missiles to the Hamas political office in the Qatari Doha capital.

The attack, which targeted the Palestinian group’s senior negotiation team when they discussed President Trump’s ceasefire, killed five Hamas members and a Qatari security officer. Hamas denies that one of its senior leaders has been killed.

But if targeting has succeeded is unimportant for Gulf leaders to reflect on the effectiveness of security arrangements for several decades with the United States

“The message to the region seems to be:” If you think that close ties and major military support in Washington offer protection … Think again, “said Hussein Ibish, resident researcher at Arab Gulf States Institute.

“They are all vulnerable to attacks by larger and more powerful neighbors, and they expect a commitment that the United States helps militarily with a certain degree of protection. This is clearly not the case,” he said.

This satellite image of Planet Labs PBC taken Wednesday shows damage after an Israeli strike targeted a compound which welcomed the political leadership of Hamas on Tuesday in Doha, in Qatar.

(Planet Labs PBC via Associated Press)

Qatari officials were apoplectic after the strike, the loose appellant and a violation of the country’s sovereignty.

Particularly for Qatar – which houses the Al Udeid air base, the largest American military installation in the region – is that it has allowed Hamas officials to live openly in a well -designed district of its capital at the request of Washington, just as with the Taliban during the group’s negotiations to end the American war in Afghanistan.

“Everything about this meeting [with Hamas] is well known for Israelis and for Americans. This is not something we are hiding, “said Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman Al Thani on Wednesday in an interview with CNN.

“I have no words to express how much we are enraged with such an action [by Israel]. It is a terror of the state, “he said.

Other Gulf leaders – even those who house persistent reserves on Qatar and its regional policies – presented a united front in the name of Qatar.

Saudi Arabia has called a “brutal assault” and declared that the kingdom “would remain with unlimited Qatar”. Bahrain expressed his “full solidarity”.

Mohamed Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates, went to Doha the next day to meet the Qatari emir-a surprise given how water worked to improve links with Israel as part of the Abraham agreements, the Trump-Broked agreements that saw a certain number of Arab relations and the normalized gulf with Israel in 2020.

“The Gulf States consider an external attack on a member as an attack on all,” said Yasmine Farouk, director of the Gulf Peninsula and Arabia to the International Crisis Group.

Farouk added that confidence in the United States has already been reduced in recent years when Washington has not defended or responded to attacks against Saudi Arabia in 2019 and water in 2022 by Houthi rebels in Yemen. Qatar, which has undergone an Iranian missile assault on Al Udeid in June, now has a doubtful honor that its territory becomes an indirect battlefield for both sides of the largest American-Iranian conflict.

This week’s strike also represents a setback for the anti-Iranian coalition that the United States has worked to forge with its Arab allies and Israel. But the feeling among many in the Gulf is that Israel is just as bellicose and destabilizing an actor as Iran.

“Israel has misinterpreted the will of the Gulf countries to normalize relations with it in recognition of its domination in the region,” said Farouq.

“Gulf states do not want to live in a region dominated by Israel or Iran,” she added. “They reject this kind of behavior, rather than rejecting a specific country.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the immediate reason for the strike was Hamas claiming the murder of six Israelis by Palestinian armed men in Jerusalem earlier this week. He insisted that the operation was planned and entirely led by Israel.

At the same time, the distance of more than 1,000 miles between Israel and Qatar means that Israeli war planes flew over several Arab countries, almost all with American bases probably capable of detecting incoming planes. (The United States has 19 bases in the region.) The building that the Israelis have struck are less than 20 miles from Al Udeid.

Trump said he had learned the attack shortly before he started and asked members of his administration to “immediately” inform Qataris. But Al Thani said that the United States’s call came 10 minutes after the planes launched their missiles on Doha.

In May, when Trump visited Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, they celebrated it with heavy grandiose events on the pump and circumstances and promised billions of dollars for investments in the United States, the wait was that it would buy a little lever, but Trump would have done its actions. (In May also, Qatar donated a luxury Boeing 747 so that Trump can use Air Force One.)

The conclusion of the Gulf countries expecting American protection of all threats, said Abdulaziz al-Anjeri, founder of the research of recognition of reflection groups based in Kuwait, is that some threats are more equal than others.

“American security assistance is effective against Iran or its Allied armed factions, but it does not extend to Israel,” he said, adding that historic alliances with the Gulf do not have the same weight for Trump as they could have done in the past.

The problem, said Bader al-Saif, assistant professor of history at the University of Kuwait, is that there is little specificity regarding what an American security umbrella really implies.

“The American ally 1 now hits another American partner, and all they got from Trump is that they” felt bad “. The fact that this happened in this way is not in favor of America, “said Al-Saif.

He added that the Nations of the Gulf, in particular Saudi Arabia, put pressure for more formal -and well -defined -defense pacts -, but that the relationship with the United States had to reflect recent changes. “You are here as a security guarantor,” he said about the United States “we cannot be cash distributors if we think that our basic security is not guaranteed.”