Smoke rises from Israeli attacks on Doha, Qatar, September 9, 2025 (Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters)
EA on WION: Israel’s Destruction of Gaza City
On Tuesday, just after news of Israel’s attempted assassination of Hamas senior negotiators in Qatar, I answered questions by Jonathan Este of The Conversation:
Q1: What’s the thinking behind Israel’s strike on Qatar? Why now?
The Netanyahu Government is going for the kill with Hamas.
Having staked his political and legal future on the “absolute destruction” of Hamas, Netanyahu cannot agree to a settlement in which the organization retains any place in Gaza, let alone power.
So he and some of his Ministers have not engaged in negotiations for a ceasefire since the start of March. At that point, they pulled out of any discussion of a Phase II, resumed the military assault, and cut off humanitarian aid.
The problem for them is that others continued to push for a resolution. On more than one occasion, Hamas agreed — or at least came close to agreeing — terms put to them by mediators. Last month, the Gazan group did so again.
The Netanyahu Government had a choice. Accept the settlement, get the hostages back, but pull back on the plan for a long-term occupation of Gaza. Or try and push aside the settlement while blaming Hamas and expand military operations to take over Gaza City.
Netanyahu’s commanders, including the head of the Israel Defense Forces Eyal Zamir, warned against the assault on Gaza City. Other advisors noted the risk of further international condemnation and isolation of Israel. But the Prime Minister and hard-right ministers have persisted.
So how to accomplish “absolute” victory? While levelling parts of Gaza City, take out Hamas’s leadership — both to break up the organization and to ensure that there is no more talk of ceasefire, only capitulation.
Q2: This is the first time Israel has launched an attack on the soil of a Gulf State. What does this mean for normalization?
There is no normalization. There probably was none before this attack. The Netanyahu Government has decided to overrun Gaza with the mass killing of at least 65,000 people, most of them civilians; to displace up to 90% of the population of 2.2 million; and to threaten all of them with starvation. Not even the most cynical Arab Government could risk the domestic backlash of continuing with “normalisation” in those circumstances.
So the Netanyahu Government is not losing any possibilities with the brazen bombing in a sovereign Arab state. It is trying to set the terms for the future, perhaps a distant one: we’ll come back to normalisation from the position of imposing our will on Gaza, even if you might not have liked it.
Q3: Israel has said the US president gave the green light for the strike. It also knew Hamas leaders were discussing Trump’s peace proposal for Gaza. Where does this leave Washington?
It leaves the Trump Administration where it has always been: supporting the Netanyahu Government’s mass killing.
Yes, Donald Trump has pursued the chimera of a deal giving him the Nobel Peace Prize. But when Israel effectively ended this at the start of March, he provided not only an excuse — Hamas is to blame — but also a rationale. The Gazans could be moved out of Gaza for his Riviera of the Middle East.
His envoy, real estate developer Steve Witkoff, has continued to strut around with a supposed proposal. But each time that the Netanyahu Government has walked away, Trump and his senior officials have covered them. So, as the Israelis approach their long-term occupation, we are at the same point as March: Trump officials talking about the removal of the civilians who are still alive.
I doubt that this attack will shake this position. My only question is whether Trump and Witkoff will still have the temerity to pretend that they have a proposal to negotiate.
Q4: What does this tell us about negotiations over Gaza?
There are no negotiations over Gaza. There is a demand by the Netanyahu Government’s for Hamas’s capitulation.
If it does not capitulate, it will be destroyed — no matter how many civilians pay the cost.
And this is not just about the approach to Gaza. The Netanyahu Government has now decided that its regional objectives will be pursued through “decapitation”.
It has not only tried to decimate the leadership of Hamas, with attacks in Gaza, Iran, and now Qatar. It has killed most of the leadership of Lebanon’s Hezbollah. It lay waste to Iran’s political and military commanders in its 12-day war in June. On August 24, it assassinated the Prime Minister and other Cabinet members of the Houthi government in Yemen.
The deadly message of the Netanyahu Government is clear: no one whom we consider an “enemy” is immune, wherever they are.
Negotiations are peripheral, perhaps even irrelevant, to that commitment.
