The news that Qatar is ‘re-evaluating’ its role as mediator in the ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas, amid claims by the Qatari Prime Minister that its efforts are being ‘misused for narrow political interests’, will have been met with consternation in many western and Middle Eastern capitals. Qatar’s potential withdrawal comes at a time when talks to secure a truce and the release of the hostages still being held in Gaza have stalled. A ground assault into the final Hamas stronghold of Rafah looks likely to be the next chapter in a gruelling war.
The threat is most likely a negotiating ploy to force progress in the talks
Should Qatar cease its mediation efforts, this might also spell the end of the West’s backchannel with Hamas. Prior to 2012, speaking with senior figures in Hamas – which governs the more than two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip – was extremely difficult. Decades of conflict with Israel had led to a leadership under constant threat of assassination by Israel’s intelligence services, and fearful of being out in the open. Egypt had been complaining about the practical problems of sharing a border with an area governed by people who were reluctant to meet you or even speak on the phone, lest they be wiped out by an Israeli strike.
There were also fears that Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s self-exiled leader, was considering choosing Iran or Lebanon for Hamas’s political bureau, where western governments would have no oversight or control over them. The United States proposed that Qatar host Hamas’s top team in its capital Doha, a country with the largest US military base in the Middle East and the headquarters of Centcom, which has command authority over US forces right across the Middle East and West/Central Asia. In Doha, the Americans could monitor Hamas leaders and establish a backchannel of communication with its governing bodies and its even more secretive military wing, the al-Qassam brigades – headed by the notorious Yahya Sinwar. Haniyeh was persuaded to choose Doha over Tehran for Hamas’s political headquarters, bringing him into the orbit of western intelligence services.
Much like Washington’s Occidental Grill restaurant during the Cuban missile crisis (the venue for secret talks between the chief of Soviet intelligence in the US and an ABC news correspondent acting as a negotiator for the Kennedy White House), Doha has become critically important since the 7 October massacre. The four-day Gaza truce back in November 2023, brokered by Qatar, Egypt and the United States, which saw 105 civilian hostages released by Hamas, would have been very difficult to achieve without Hamas being hosted there.
Backchannels between deadly rivals have a long history. Richard Nixon conducted backdoor negotiations with the Soviet Union on arms control through his long-time aide Robert Ellsworth without informing his own secretary of state, the British government held secret talks with the IRA as early as 1972, Spain ran negotiations with the Basque separatist movement through an independent organisation in Switzerland, and the then-newly elected President Obama dispatched Jake Sullivan, chief foreign policy adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to the Port of Muscat in Oman to negotiate secret concessions that laid the groundwork for the Iran nuclear deal.
Some Israeli officials and US politicians have said that Qatar is not doing enough to wring concessions from Hamas – in the hope that Qatari mediators would pressure the terrorist group by threatening to expel its leaders from Doha or close its bank accounts. What would happen if the Qataris gave Hamas the order of the boot and the back channel was cancelled? Given David Barnea, the current head of Mossad, has vowed to ‘put our hands on them wherever they are’, Haniyeh and Hamas’s political bureau would likely flee to Tehran to try to escape Israeli vengeance, seeking shelter under the protective wing of their Iranian patron. Lebanon will be a much less appealing location following Israel’s successful drone strike on Saleh al-Arouri, a senior Hamas official living in the Lebanese capital Beirut, earlier this year. The targeted killing, in a dense suburb dominated by Hezbollah, showed that outside of the Doha backchannel, nowhere is safe for Hamas officials.
Once the Hamas leadership is ensconced in Tehran, the question would then be: who do the US and Israel speak with to get to them? Iran would control the flow of information, while intelligence operations to keep an eye on Haniyeh and others would prove very tough to pull off in Iran’s hostile police state. There would almost certainly be further delays to negotiations on recovering those hostages still left alive in Gaza, agreements on getting humanitarian aid into Gaza would be parked, and there would be no chance of even a temporary ceasefire being agreed until lines of communication could be reestablished.
The consequences of cutting off mediation efforts with Hamas at this stage are so dire, both for regional stability and for the hostages languishing in Hamas bunkers, that Qatar’s threat to pull the plug on the whole arrangement is most likely a negotiating ploy to force progress in the negotiations. William Burns, the CIA director, has put the blame for the impasse squarely on Hamas intransigence after they rejected what he called a ‘far-reaching proposal’. The risk of losing their safe haven in Doha may help to concentrate minds in Hamas’s upper echelons. Whether Qatar’s threat is a ruse to restart talks, or a genuine storm-off by the hosts in exasperation at offstage sniping, the West’s backchannel with Hamas is a reminder of the inescapable need to talk to our enemies, no matter how repugnant we find them.
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