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

In Dubai on a Sunday in May, fifty-seven nations gathered under the banner of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to confront a crisis that had exposed a fracture running through their ranks. The emergency meeting was called to address the escalating violence between Israel and Hamas in Gaza—fighting that had grown heavy enough to demand a response, yet not heavy enough to unite the room.

The split was not new, but it had sharpened. Several Muslim-majority states had signed recognition agreements with Israel in recent months, a diplomatic realignment that sat uneasily alongside the organization's longstanding position that Palestinians deserved their own independent nation. That contradiction hung over the proceedings like a question no one could quite answer: how do you condemn military action while maintaining formal ties with the aggressor?

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki opened the meeting with language that belonged to an earlier era of Arab politics. He called Israel's strikes cowardly and spoke of resistance continuing until the occupation ended. His words carried moral weight, but they also carried a limitation: Malki represented the Palestinian Authority, which governed parts of the West Bank but held no sway over Gaza or Hamas, the militant group that had controlled the territory since 2007. Turkey's foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, took a harder line still, declaring Israel solely responsible for the escalation and noting that Israeli warnings had gone unheeded.

But across the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf, the picture fractured. In Qatar, which hosted both the Al-Jazeera network and Hamas leadership, hundreds gathered to hear Ismail Haniyeh, the militant group's top leader, vow that resistance would not yield and that Palestinians would accept nothing less than a state with Jerusalem as its capital. Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, Kuwait's parliament, and Qatar's foreign ministry all made contact with Haniyeh in those days. The message was clear: some nations were doubling down on support.

Then there were Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates—two Gulf states that had signed deals with Israel under the Trump administration just months earlier. Both nations reiterated their support for Palestinian statehood, a rhetorical commitment that sat oddly with their new diplomatic arrangements. Their state-linked media outlets, unlike networks elsewhere in the region, did not blanket their coverage with continuous updates on the violence. In Bahrain, civil society groups circulated letters demanding the expulsion of Israel's ambassador. In the UAE, where political parties and public protest were forbidden, Palestinian workers in Abu Dhabi and Dubai expressed their anger quietly, fearful of losing their residency permits. Some Emiratis voiced concern as well, including a prominent writer and analyst who called Israel the region's only democracy while criticizing its strike on a building housing the offices of the Associated Press and Al-Jazeera.

Cavusoglu turned his criticism inward, accusing OIC members who had reached recognition deals with Israel of losing their moral compass. His words carried an implicit warning: if the Islamic bloc could not speak with one voice, how could it expect the world to listen?

Hussein Ibish, a scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, offered an explanation for the muted response from Gulf leaders. Many of them viewed Hamas's rocket fire as reckless and dangerous—a provocation that endangered both Israelis and Palestinians without advancing Palestinian interests. That perception, Ibish wrote, relieved pressure on Gulf leaders to mount the kind of forceful response they had offered in past confrontations over the Al-Aqsa mosque or Israeli settlement expansion. The current exchange, he suggested, would be easier for Gulf leaders and many of their citizens to dismiss as a tragic clash between two leaderships over which they had neither control nor influence.

The emergency meeting had convened to address a crisis, but what it revealed was something deeper: a Muslim-majority bloc struggling to reconcile competing interests, historical commitments, and strategic calculations. The question of how to respond to Gaza had become inseparable from the question of who these nations wanted to be.