In Israel, relations with the small Gulf state of Qatar are front and center of a bitterly contested election season. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett—who is seeking to unseat Benjamin Netanyahu in the October elections—recently advocated that Qatar be designated an enemy state while alleging that multiple Israeli “influencers” and “research organizations” are on Doha’s payroll. This fits Bennett’s political playbook of trying to out-hawk Netanyahu while also projecting a catchall appeal as a centrist alternative. And Qatar fits this bill perfectly. Suspicion of Doha and its relationship with Hamas is one of the few things that supporters and opponents of Netanyahu share.
But Israel and Qatar are unlikely to become outright enemies anytime soon. For over a decade, Israel has used Doha as a channel to Hamas. The Oct. 7, 2023, attack made this dynamic more controversial but did not end it. The Qataris, meanwhile, have positioned themselves as key players in the present and future of the Gaza Strip. To keep its agency on the ground, Qatar needs to maintain cordial ties with Israel at least at an elite level. In short, despite the increasingly mutual public hostility (Qatari officials have also recently increased their criticism of Israel), both states still need each other.
In Israel, relations with the small Gulf state of Qatar are front and center of a bitterly contested election season. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett—who is seeking to unseat Benjamin Netanyahu in the October elections—recently advocated that Qatar be designated an enemy state while alleging that multiple Israeli “influencers” and “research organizations” are on Doha’s payroll. This fits Bennett’s political playbook of trying to out-hawk Netanyahu while also projecting a catchall appeal as a centrist alternative. And Qatar fits this bill perfectly. Suspicion of Doha and its relationship with Hamas is one of the few things that supporters and opponents of Netanyahu share.
But Israel and Qatar are unlikely to become outright enemies anytime soon. For over a decade, Israel has used Doha as a channel to Hamas. The Oct. 7, 2023, attack made this dynamic more controversial but did not end it. The Qataris, meanwhile, have positioned themselves as key players in the present and future of the Gaza Strip. To keep its agency on the ground, Qatar needs to maintain cordial ties with Israel at least at an elite level. In short, despite the increasingly mutual public hostility (Qatari officials have also recently increased their criticism of Israel), both states still need each other.
The hostility that surrounds the relationship today obscures a very different history. In the 1990s, Doha was an outlier for the opposite reason: Israel was arguably closer to Qatar than any other Gulf state. In 1995, shortly after Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani took power as emir, Qatar allowed Israel to open a trade office. One year later, Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres visited Qatar and met the emir. The relationship suffered after the outbreak of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. Yet it endured: As late as 2008, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni delivered a keynote speech at a Doha conference. This was billed as part of the effort to establish ties with “moderate Arab nations”—a far cry from how mainstream Israeli politicians would describe Qatar today.
Subsequent events derailed the deepening of overt relations. The first was Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007. This was seen by the United States and Israel as a crisis. Qatar, by contrast, saw the new reality in Gaza as an opportunity to expand its diplomatic role and influence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Qatar accordingly undertook a strategic shift away from public engagement with Israel and toward openly cultivating ties with Hamas. Sheikh Hamad became the first world leader to visit Gaza after Hamas’s takeover. After subsequent conflicts in Gaza in 2012 and 2014, Doha became the primary principal external funder of reconstruction and humanitarian support in Gaza. This allowed Qatar to challenge Egypt’s traditional role as the primary mediator for any flare-ups between Israel and Gaza.
Contrary to many Israeli assertions, however, the more than $1 billion that Qatar invested in Gaza was not directly funneled to Hamas. Qatari officials were at pains to illustrate that the money went instead toward Gaza’s civilian needs. In response to criticism that Hamas was skimming some of the money that was delivered to Gaza in suitcases, Qatar later changed its delivery method to bank transfers, coupled with the direct provision of materials such as fuel and humanitarian aid.
More controversially, Qatar funded the salaries of Gaza’s civil employees, many of whom Israel would later assert were Hamas-affiliated. Some commentators have also argued that even if they did not go to Hamas’s military wing, Qatari funds kept the group in power by stabilizing the status quo in the territory. The Qataris, by contrast, would argue that they prevented a humanitarian crisis and were funding Gaza, not Hamas.
What is indisputable is that all of this was agreed to by both Israel and the United States. Qatar consented to a request by the Obama administration in 2012 to host Hamas’s exiled political leadership to open a back channel and explore whether the group could moderate. Qatar also only started providing funds to Gaza after it received a U.S. guarantee that it would not be labeled a state supporter of terrorism. Israel directly facilitated all of this, such as by delivering money and aid into the blockaded territory. In early 2020, Netanyahu even sent Mossad Director Yossi Cohen to Doha to persuade the Qataris to keep up the payments, which were then increased.
Overlapping interests drove this new paradigm. Ties to Hamas were less ideological and more part of Qatar’s broader grand strategy of cultivating relations with actors that others deemed beyond the pale. This gave Qatar a unique selling point as a mediator or a moderating influence. It also allowed Doha to maximize its influence beyond its small size and gave it agency to shape events in flashpoints around the world. From Israel’s perspective, bankrolling Gaza after the Hamas takeover fulfilled the twin goals of separating the Gaza Strip from the West Bank both geographically and politically while also stabilizing the status quo and preventing an outright collapse within the territory.
Both these sets of assumptions came crashing down on Oct. 7. The Hamas-led attack disabused Israel of the notion that the group could be contained. It undermined the Qatari assertion that engagement would push Hamas toward moderation. The attack also exposed Qatar to unprecedented scrutiny and criticism of its ties to Hamas. But the ensuing war demonstrated why Doha had cultivated those ties in the first place. Its credibility with Hamas, Israel, and the United States alike allowed Qatar to project an outsized diplomatic role, which eventually helped deliver two cease-fires.
And then came “Qatargate.” In early 2025, multiple Israeli media outlets reported on a shocking claim: several of Netanyahu’s aides had received money from Qatar to promote Doha’s image and interests while they served in the Prime Minister’s Office. Qatar has denied that it was guilty of any wrongdoing, but the scandal allowed Netanyahu’s opponents to connect several existing lines of criticism: his long-running corruption trial, his relationships with wealthy foreign benefactors, and his government’s dealings with a country widely regarded in Israel as Hamas’s patron. According to this narrative, Netanyahu’s alleged complicity crossed the line from corruption and into treason. Stickers reading “Bibi and Qatar against Israel” became commonplace in Tel Aviv.
It was this domestic political climate that enabled Netanyahu to do what had previously seemed unthinkable: order a strike on Doha. The September 2025 attack targeted senior Hamas figures who were, ironically, meeting to consider a cease-fire proposal.
But as unprecedented as the strike was, it did not substantively redefine the creative ambiguity that has long defined Israel-Qatar relations. Qatar did not follow through with its threats to end its mediation in its aftermath. Instead, one month later, the two negotiating teams shook hands as the Gaza peace plan was announced. Earlier in 2025, an Israeli business delegation participated in a diamond industry conference in Doha, while this year saw an opposition motion to label Qatar an enemy state comprehensively defeated in the Knesset.
Another thing that has not changed is that Qatar will keep having to navigate a delicate balancing act with Hamas. Doha’s refusal to condemn the Oct. 7 attack preserved its access to Hamas but further damaged its standing in Israel. Yet Qatar has also reportedly come close to expelling Hamas’s leaders from Doha on several occasions. This relationship will, in short, remain both an asset and a burden. It gives Qatar a seat at the table for discussions of the “day after” in Gaza but will continue to raise awkward questions over how much leverage Doha actually possesses and how far it is prepared to use that leverage to advance Hamas’s disarmament.
The problem is that these complexities are being obscured by the increasing toxicity in any debate about Qatar-Israel relations. Within Israel, anti-government activists are using Qatar as a stick to beat Netanyahu. Pro-government voices exaggerate Qatar’s agency over and links to Hamas to downplay Netanyahu’s own role in creating the pre-Oct. 7 status quo. This means that whoever forms a government after October is going to have to deal with an increasingly anti-Qatari Israeli public. They are likely also, however, going to have little choice but to continue dialogue with Qatar, given Doha’s role as a mediator and actor in Lebanon, Syria, and, most of all, Gaza.
All of this means that cool heads should prevail. The United States should use its influence to de-escalate tensions because the Doha strike demonstrates the dangers of allowing disputes between allies to turn violent. Qatar now sits on the Board of Peace, making a functional relationship between Doha and Israel essential to implementing the Trump administration’s Gaza peace plan. Whoever forms a government in Israel after the October elections will likely seek to reset relations with the United States. This means they will have to engage in serious discussions with third parties over Gaza’s reconstruction and postwar governance. And Qatar will likely have a seat at that table.
Israeli and Qatari leaders should therefore consider whether bellicose rhetoric today will make advancing their interests harder tomorrow. The two states have worked together because their interests sometimes overlapped. Despite everything that has happened since the Oct. 7 attack, that has not substantively changed.
