Qatari minister calls Netanyahu’s justifications of Doha strike ‘insult to intelligence’

A Qatari minister pens a Washington Post op-ed blasting Israel’s recent strike on Hamas leaders in the Gulf state, calling it “an attack on diplomacy itself” and declaring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a major threat to peace and security in the Middle East — and to the international legal order.”

Mohammed bin Abdulaziz Al-Khulaifi, Doha’s minister of state in the Foreign Ministry, argues that “never before in modern memory has a negotiating party attacked a mediating country,” and that the strike therefore “violated the most basic principles of sovereignty and nonintervention enshrined in international law,” and was “an assault on the very practice of mediation.”

Dismissing Netanyahu’s reasoning for the strike, the minister writes: “The justifications his government has offered — comparing the attack on Qatar to America’s pursuit of Osama bin Laden, French insurgency operations in Africa and Britain’s role in the fight against the Islamic State — are distortions and deflections. To address but one example, the United States never targeted the Taliban office in Doha while it was negotiating an agreement with the group, with Qatar as mediator.”

Al-Khulaifi hails Qatar’s mediation role with Hamas to prevent conflict over the years, and to reach hostage deals during the current war, adding: “For Netanyahu to now criticize Qatar for hosting Hamas officials is to insult the intelligence of the international community, the media and even the Israeli public.”

“If mediators can be bombed with impunity, then who will host peace talks? Without safe channels for diplomacy, war becomes the only option, civilization recedes, and the rule of law is replaced with brute force.”