Under the fog of the Iran war, Hamas has been evicted from its luxury and protected home in Qatar without anyone noticing.
Khalil al-Hayya, Hamas’ chief negotiator, left his five-star exile in Doha for what was intended to be a quick diplomatic trip to Cairo.
After he rejected the U.S.-backed disarmament proposal that offered a staged Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, he received a text message notifying him that he had been evicted from his luxury lodgings and was officially barred from re-entering Qatar.
It appears that Hamas’ latest bout of intractability has finally broken its patron’s back - for now. After 20 years, Qatar is pulling its investment in the terror group. According to publicist Amit Segal, Doha will no longer play the role of host and negotiator, and most of Hamas’ leadership has already departed the country.
Why now?
The decisive turning point wasn’t Cairo, nor was it October 7 which, truth be told, represented a major appreciation of Doha’s investment. In fact, Qatar, which had sent suitcases filled with cash to Hamas (ostensibly to Gazans) via Israel before October 7, was to become the negotiation venue for negotiations on freeing the hostages, playing both sides.
But -
The breaking point was Operation Roaring Lion. After 16 agonizing days of silence, torn between their two patrons, Hamas ultimately issued a statement defending Iran’s “right of self-defence," but asked Tehran to refrain from targeting “neighbouring countries." For Qatar, a nation whose sovereign territory was actively being struck by Iranian missiles, this relatively weak, delayed condemnation from the group they had been funnelling cash and support to for decades did not go down well.
In exchange for their luxury accommodations, Hamas had provided Qatar with a highly marketable service: terrorist mediation. But it made Qatar, intentionally driving a wedge between the US and Israel, look bad.
Alongside their shared ideological alignment, this mediation is precisely why Qatar reached out to Hamas after the group’s 2006 electoral victory when the rest of the world cut contact. Doha cornered this unserved market. But the value of that service is in steep decline-not only because a new status quo is settling over Gaza, but because the primary consumer of Qatar’s service, the United States, has developed a distaste for such intimate terrorist ties.
So now Hamas is looking for a new home, both metaphorically and literally.
Since the regional war began, a civil war has been raging inside Hamas. The more pragmatic camp led by Khaled Mashal wants to diversify their patronage through Sunni Arab states, while the hardline faction led by al-Hayya wants to maintain their membership in Iran’s Axis of Resistance.
At one point, they successfully kept a foot in both camps, with a house in Tehran and a house in Doha. Now, they are locked out of one, and the other is a smoking ruin. Still, a smoking ruin is better than no house at all. Qatar cutting Hamas off will likely encourage the Iran-aligned faction, despite the negligible amount of support a battered Tehran can currently offer, not to mention the bad publicity.
There remains one wild card - Erdogan. A place for them may be opening up in Ankara, with Turkey offering sanctuary in exchange for more regional influence, all this under the umbrella of Trump’s Gaza Board of Peace.
For now, the arrangement remains tentative. The amount of tangible support flowing to Hamas is unclear.
Despite the infamous fog, this war has an intensely clarifying effect. It answers the fundamental questions: what you stand for, who your enemies are, and who your friends are.
Even when the guns stop firing and life returns to normal, those understandings remain. Watch this situation closely.
With thanks and acknowledgement to Amit Segal.
Barry Shaw blogs on The View from Israel and is a fellow at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.