The images defied belief— thick, dark smoke climbing into the desert sky over Doha’s glittering towers. The sound of blasts echoed through West Bay Lagoon, an opulent district that is home to foreign embassies, schools, and residential compounds.

The target was a compound where key leaders of Hamas were deliberating Trump’s proposal for a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of Israeli hostages. The attacker was Israel. Five Hamas members and a Qatari security officer were killed. The Palestinian group said its leadership, including chief negotiator Khalil Al-Hayya and prominent leader Khaled Meshal, survived the assassination bid.

Qatar is the sixth country Israel has attacked since October 7, 2023 alongside Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran-- and Gaza.

For a moment, the world’s attention shifted from Gaza to the heart of the Arabian Gulf, to Qatar, a nation that has positioned itself as the region’s mediator of conflicts, where the world’s bitter adversaries find space for diplomacy.

Qatar has hosted Hamas’s political office since 2012, and mediated the 2004 Iraq hostage negotiations at the behest of the US, the 2020 US-Taliban deal, and the Israel-Hamas talks, now in jeopardy.

Israel’s audacious attack on Hamas’s exiled leadership in Qatar is more than a targeted attack; it is a profound geopolitical event. It represents a direct challenge to Qatari sovereignty, marks a dangerous escalation, shattering long-standing red lines and fundamentally rewriting the rules of engagement in the Middle East and Gulf region.

Attacking Qatar is akin to igniting fire in an already white-hot region. The country is a key non-NATO ally to the US, it hosts America’s biggest military base in the Middle East and is the mediator for ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas. Enraged Qatari PM, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani termed the attack “barbaric” and “state terrorism.”

More than 64,500 people have reportedly been killed in Gaza during what the United Nations has called a genocide-- but Netanyahu refuses to pay heed to international calls for a ceasefire. 

With the fall of the Bashar-Al Assad regime in Syria, the weakening of Hezbollah following the elimination of its leadership, and the consequent diminishing military influence of Iran in the Middle East, Israel can envision expanding its muscle power from the Middle East into the Arabian Gulf.

“Netanyahu does not yet have a strong imperative to wind down the war in Gaza nor to adopt a less aggressive posture in the region,” analyst Caroline Rose at New Lines Institute, a Washington based think-tank told me. She said Israel’s aggressive approach has fueled a stream of domestic support that detracts from Netanyahu’s opposition, and creates an appearance of regional strength and superiority.

“As long as Netanyahu can benefit from this show of strength, he will seek to continually add or reopen fronts across the region to showcase regional dominance,” she said.

Amid a storm of condemnation from world leaders, Netanyahu on Thursday signed a ‘controversial’ agreement to move ahead with an expanded settlement plan that would bisect the occupied West Bank making it virtually impossible to reconstruct a Palestinian state in the future.

“We are going to fulfil our promise that there will be no Palestinian state. This place belongs to us,” Netanyahu said. Many argue Netanyahu’s plans in the region are not possible without the interminable support of the US for Israel.

“Israel cannot sustain its wars for long without the US paying for them, sending weapons and protecting it diplomatically. This is not Israeli hegemony: this is Israel becoming a proxy for US hegemony while putting much of the cost— financially, diplomatically, politically, and militarily— back on the US shoulder,” Trita Parsi, a prominent expert on Middle East at the Washington-based Quincy Institute, told me.

The US has high stakes in the Middle East and Gulf region. Israel’s attack on Doha undermines its credibility and has adverse consequences for Trump’s personal and political interests. The US failing to rein in Israel from attacking its military ally and its initial ‘weak’ response raises a lot of questions. It is unimaginable for many that Israel wouldn’t have informed Washington in advance.

The White House initially implied the US informed Qatar of the attack before it happened, but Doha denied the claim. Later, Trump acknowledged that by the time his envoy Steve Witkoff informed Qatari officials about the attack, it was “too late.”