Qatar PM: Palestinian party violated ceasefire, Doha is pushing Hamas to acknowledge need to disarm

Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani suggests that Hamas committed a violation of the ceasefire yesterday in attacking IDF soldiers, calling it “very disappointing and frustrating for us.”

“What happened yesterday was a violation,” he says during an onstage interview at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, adding that the mediators expected Israel to respond to the killing of one of its soldiers, while noting that both sides subsequently expressed their desire for the ceasefire to hold.

Pressed on who specifically was responsible for the Tuesday “violation,” Al-Thani responds, “What happened yesterday — the attack on the Israeli soldiers — that’s basically a violation by the Palestinian party.”

“Hamas has put a statement that those they are not in communication with this group [that carried out the attack]. We don’t know yet [if that’s true],” he adds.

The Qatari premier later says that Hamas has offered “conflicting statements” regarding the attack on Israeli troops, with one claim being that the gunmen responsible “lost communication” with the Hamas leadership and “didn’t know what they were doing.” Another claim voiced by Hamas was that those responsible for the violation were a different “group that is not related to them.”

“It doesn’t matter for us who did what, what matters to us… is making sure that this event doesn’t… make this agreement collapse,” Al-Thani says.

Asked about Hamas’s reluctance to disarm, the Qatari premier acknowledges that this will be “complex” to implement.

“It will be a complicated process… to go through the disarmament and the decommissioning, but it’s part of the agreement,” Al Thani says, referring to US President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan for ending the Gaza war.

However, the agreement signed by Israel and Hamas in Egypt on October 9 only focused on the first half of that plan pertaining to the initial ceasefire, IDF pullback, hostage-prisoner swap and humanitarian provisions.

Nonetheless, Al-Thani says that the mediators are pushing Hamas and all Palestinian factions in Gaza to “to get to a point where they acknowledge that they need to disarm.

The purpose of the disarmament goal is ensuring that both Palestinians and Israelis feel safe, Al-Thani says, arguing that the way to ensure that is by “creating a political horizon for the Palestinian people.”