Islamic nations convene emergency summit as Gaza conflict divides Muslim-majority states

In Dubai on Sunday, representatives from fifty-seven Muslim-majority nations gathered for an emergency session to confront the escalating violence between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. The meeting itself marked a significant moment—the first coordinated response among Islamic states to the fighting—yet what unfolded inside revealed a fractured coalition struggling to speak with one voice.

The fracture runs along a fault line drawn by recent diplomacy. Several Gulf Arab states, including Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, had normalized relations with Israel during the final months of the Trump administration. That shift, combined with lingering concerns some nations harbor about Hamas as a militant organization, has muted the kind of unified condemnation that might have erupted in earlier decades. The Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation have long maintained that Palestinians deserve an independent state, yet that principle now competes with other interests and calculations.

Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riad Malki opened the meeting with unsparing language, calling Israel's actions "cowardly attacks" and insisting that occupation itself remains the root cause of the violence. "We need to tell Allah that we will resist to the last day," he declared, cataloging what he characterized as crimes committed against Palestinians without accountability. Yet Malki's authority extends only to autonomous enclaves in the West Bank; he holds no sway over Gaza or Hamas, which seized control there in 2007.

Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu adopted a similarly forceful stance, placing sole responsibility on Israel for the escalation across East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. He noted that Israeli officials had disregarded warnings Turkey had issued the previous week. Cavusoglu went further, directly rebuking OIC members who had made peace with Israel, accusing them of losing their "moral compass." His words cut at the heart of the organization's internal tension: how could the bloc demand that others take its positions seriously when some of its own members had chosen a different path?

Across the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf, the response fractured along predictable lines. In Qatar, which hosts both the Al-Jazeera network and Hamas leadership, hundreds gathered late Saturday to hear from Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh. He vowed that "the resistance will not give in" and framed armed struggle as the shortest route to Jerusalem, insisting Palestinians would accept nothing less than a state with Jerusalem as its capital. Qatar's foreign minister and Kuwait's parliament speaker both spoke with Haniyeh that same day, as did General Esmail Ghaani, who commands Iran's Quds Forces. The message was clear: these nations remained committed to Hamas.

But Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates presented a different picture. Both have reiterated their support for Palestinian statehood, yet their government-linked media outlets have covered the violence with noticeably less intensity than regional competitors. In Bahrain, civil society groups circulated a letter demanding the kingdom expel Israel's ambassador. In the UAE, where political parties and protests are prohibited, Palestinians working in Abu Dhabi and Dubai expressed their anger quietly, fearful of losing residency permits. Even some Emiratis voiced concern; one prominent writer and analyst tweeted sardonically about Israel's strike on a Gaza building housing offices of the Associated Press and Al-Jazeera, calling Israel "the region's only democracy."

Scholar Hussein Ibish, based at the Washington-based Arab Gulf States Institute, offered an explanation for the muted Gulf response. Most Gulf Arab leaders, he wrote, view Hamas rocket fire as "cynical, dangerous, unnecessarily provocative and endangering Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza alike." That assessment removes pressure on those leaders to mount the kind of forceful response they might feel obligated to offer in other circumstances—such as confrontations involving the Al-Aqsa mosque, Islam's third-holiest site in Jerusalem, or Israeli settlers displacing Arab families. The current fighting, in this reading, becomes easier to characterize as a tragic clash between two leaderships over which Gulf states claim neither control nor responsibility. The distinction matters: it allows leaders to express concern without committing to action.