Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday compared his controversial choice to militarily target Hamas leadership in Qatar to the United States’s decision to wage war on the Taliban after the 9/11 attacks.
“What did America do in the wake of Sept. 11?” Netanyahu asked in a video posted to social media on Wednesday. “It promised to hunt down the terrorists who committed this heinous crime, wherever they may be. And it also passed a resolution in the Security Council of the U.N., two weeks later, that said that governments cannot give harbor to terrorists.”
Israel’s strike targeting senior Hamas leadership in Doha, Qatar’s capital, is “exactly what America did when it went after the al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan and after they went and killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan,” Netanayu claimed, warning that Qatar must “expel” Hamas members or “bring them to justice, because if you don’t, we will.”
Netanyahu received global criticism for authorizing strikes on terrorist targets in Doha earlier this week, with the Trump administration pledging that similar attacks would “not happen again” because the U.S. has relied on Qatar, which holds strong ties both to Washington and Hamas, to help mediate an end to the war in Gaza.
Despite concerns that his efforts to eliminate Hamas leadership staking out in Qatar could derail peace negotiations, Netanyahu has refused to back away from the Tuesday attack. Instead, he suggested that further strikes could ensue if Qatar does not target Hamas members in the country, and argued that Israel’s efforts to eliminate Hamas members in Doha mirrored U.S. efforts to wipe out the Taliban in Afghanistan after an Islamist terrorist group orchestrated the 9/11 attacks.
Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks when terrorists hijacked commercial airlines and flew them into the two World Trade Center towers. Netanyahu compared the attack on U.S. soil to Hamas’s surprise attack on a music festival in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed roughly 1,200 civilians and triggered the war in Gaza, where Hamas holds power.
It remains unclear how successful the Doha strike was. Hamas claims that its top leaders survived and only some lower-level officials were killed.
“Right now there’s no indication that the terrorists were killed,” an Israeli source said, according to reports earlier this week. “We continue to hope they were assassinated, but optimism is fading.”
Israeli officials believe the attacks were warranted to eliminate members of Hamas who were resistant to a peace deal ending the Gaza war. During a meeting in London on Wednesday with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Israeli President Isaac Herzog argued that the strikes were necessary to “remove some of the people if they are not willing to get a deal,” suggesting that just one person saying no removes the possibility of advancing peace.
Qatari officials have argued the opposite, saying the Tuesday strikes removed “killed any hope” for an estimated 48 hostages remaining in Gaza, including around 20 believed to still be alive, whom Hamas is holding captive.
Netanyahu has “undermined any chance of stability, any chance of peace” by targeting Hamas leadership in the Qatari capital, Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani told CNN during an interview Wednesday.
“I’ve been rethinking, even about the entire process for the last few weeks, that Netanyahu was just wasting our time,” he said. “I was meeting one of the hostages’ families the morning of the attack. … They are counting on this (ceasefire) mediation. They have no other hope for that.”
ISRAEL TARGETS HAMAS LEADERSHIP IN ‘PRECISE’ QATAR STRIKE
Qatar has demanded retaliation against Israel in the wake of the Doha strikes, and Trump reportedly called Netanyahu to say the strikes were “unacceptable, I demand that you do not repeat it.”
Although Qatar is known for its security partnership with the U.S., because Doha is host to the al Udeid Air Base, the largest U.S. military facility in the Middle East, the country is conducting a deep evaluation of its security alliance with the U.S. to “maybe find some other partners,” according to an Axios report.
