Meeting Qatari PM, Sullivan urges ‘all possible efforts be brought to bear on Hamas’

US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan urged visiting Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani that “all possible efforts be brought to bear on Hamas to secure the release of hostages without delay,” according to a White House readout.

The message was relayed during their meeting at the White House earlier today and appears to be the closest the Biden administration has come to publicly urging Qatar to put pressure on Hamas.

Al-Thani reiterated yesterday that such calls are unhelpful because Doha doesn’t actually hold leverage over the terror group, whose political leaders it hosts in Doha.

“We don’t see that Qatar is a superpower that can impose something on this party or the other party to bring them to that place,” al-Thani said at an event in Washington.

“It doesn’t mean that… hosting them is a leverage that we have over them… We see [hosting them] as a channel of communication that we are using for good causes,” al-Thani says.

While critics of Qatar dispute this defense, analysts note that once the war began, Hamas’s primary decision-makers have been its leaders on the ground in Gaza — Yahya Sinwar, Muhammed Deif and Marwan Issa — not its politburo chiefs in Doha and elsewhere. Accordingly, Sinwar is seen as less beholden to Qatar than its Doha-based leader Ismail Haniyeh.