Hamas HQ a legitimate target

Weeks from the second anniversary of the October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel, with Hamas refusing to release the remaining hostages, alive and dead, frustration has led Israel to target the terrorists’ “leaders in suits” bosses living in luxury in Qatar. On Wednesday, Foreign Minister Penny Wong said this was “the wrong thing to do” because it violated the sovereignty of a Gulf state that had been central to hopes for a negotiated ceasefire and an end to Gaza’s nightmare. But as Hamas digs in its heels, refusing to do the one thing that immediately could end the war and the suffering of Gaza’s people, its leaders should not expect to be immune from Israel’s tactics to persuade them to change their minds.

One of the most grotesque videos to emerge after October 7, as The Wall Street Journal noted, was filmed not in Gaza but in Qatar. It showed Hamas leaders in their Doha offices joyously celebrating the barbaric slaughter of 1200 Jews, giving thanks to Allah for the worst pogrom the world had witnessed since the Holocaust during World War II.

Some of the same thugs and villains who celebrated then were in the same place on Tuesday when Israel struck. Among them, reportedly, was the loathsome Ghazi Hamad who, after October 7, pledged to repeat the massacre “again and again”. He claimed: “Israel should be wiped from the face of the Earth. It is an animal state that recognises no human worth. It is a cancer which should be eradicated.” Such is the evil of those Israel targeted in Doha. Qatar’s staggeringly rich ruling al-Thani family may be miffed over the attack, understandably, which it described as a “criminal assault”. It probably believed the presence of the big US Al Udeid military base in Qatar, Doha’s role as a conduit for Gaza ceasefire talks and perhaps its gift earlier this year of a new presidential aircraft to Donald Trump would afford it immunity from attack by Israel.

But with Hamas showing scant interest in Mr Trump’s latest ceasefire proposal, and the latest version of his “last warning or else” that accompanied it, there should be no surprise that Israel decided it was time to put Hamas’s leaders in Qatar in the firing line, even if that meant upsetting the Gulf state’s rulers and Mr Trump.

The redoubtable prime minister Golda Meir, during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, summed up Israel’s mood in this way: “If we (Jews) have a choice between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive and have the bad image.” The lesson the rest of the world, including Israel’s allies, need to learn is that Israel is in the same frame of mind now, as in targeting Doha it seeks to use every possible way to persuade Hamas to do the only thing that will stop the war, end the killing and halt the desperate plight of Gaza’s people: hand over the hostages. That is the reality as the second anniversary of October 7 approaches, and no amount of hand-wringing about ceasefire talks being “imperilled” and fears of “escalation” is likely to change it.