OIC convenes emergency summit as Islamic nations navigate divided response to Israel-Gaza conflict

In Dubai on a Sunday in May 2021, 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 because Israel and Hamas were locked in heavy fighting, with Gaza taking the brunt of the strikes. But the real story unfolding in that room was not about unity—it was about how much the Islamic world had splintered in recent years, and how that fracturing would shape what these nations could actually do.

The Palestinian Authority's foreign minister, Riad Malki, opened with the language of defiance. He called Israel's actions cowardly attacks and spoke of resistance continuing to the last day. He named the root cause as he saw it: a long-term occupation, crimes committed without consequence. But there was a hollow note to his words. The Palestinian Authority controls parts of the West Bank, but it has no authority over Gaza, where Hamas seized power in 2007 and still rules. Malki was speaking for a fractured Palestinian leadership, and everyone in the room knew it.

Turkey's foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, took a harder line. He blamed Israel alone for the escalation and said his country's warnings had gone unheeded. But then he turned on his own allies. Some OIC members, he said, had lost their moral compass by reaching recognition deals with Israel. If the Islamic bloc could not speak with one voice, how could it expect the world to listen?

The deals he was referencing had come the previous year, in the final months of the Trump administration. Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates had normalized relations with Israel—a seismic shift in regional diplomacy. Both nations still said they supported Palestinian statehood. But their media coverage of the current violence was notably restrained compared to other regional networks. Qatar, by contrast, hosted Hamas's top leader, Ismail Haniyeh, who drew hundreds to hear him vow that resistance was the shortest road to Jerusalem. Turkey and Iran also backed Hamas. Kuwait's parliament speaker and Qatar's foreign minister both spoke with Haniyeh. So did the head of Iran's Quds Forces.

The divisions ran deeper than official statements. In Bahrain, civil society groups signed a letter demanding the government expel the Israeli ambassador. In the UAE, where political parties and protests are forbidden, Palestinians working in Abu Dhabi and Dubai expressed anger quietly, afraid of losing their residency permits. Some Emiratis themselves voiced concern. One Emirati writer and analyst, Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, tweeted sarcastically about Israel's strike on a Gaza building housing the offices of the Associated Press and Al-Jazeera, calling Israel the region's only democracy.

A scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington offered a reading of the Gulf Arab calculus. Most Gulf leaders, he wrote, viewed Hamas's rocket fire as reckless and dangerous—a provocation that endangered both Israelis and Palestinians. That view gave those leaders political cover to respond with restraint, unlike during previous crises involving the Al-Aqsa mosque or Israeli settlement expansion. They could call the violence tragic without feeling obligated to act. They could blame both sides and step back.

What emerged from Dubai was not a unified Islamic response but a statement of the limits of unity. The OIC had convened, as it must. But the Abraham Accords had redrawn the map of Middle Eastern allegiances, and the organization's members were now reading the same conflict through different lenses, answering to different constituencies, and calculating different costs. The emergency meeting was the first major move among Islamic nations grappling with the fighting. It would not be the last word.