OIC convenes emergency summit as Islamic nations split on Israel-Gaza conflict

In Dubai on a Sunday in May 2021, representatives from fifty-seven Muslim-majority nations gathered for an emergency meeting called to address the escalating violence between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. It was meant to be a moment of unified response from the Islamic world to a conflict that had dominated headlines for weeks. Instead, what unfolded revealed something more complicated: a bloc fractured by competing interests, recent diplomatic realignments, and fundamentally different assessments of who bore responsibility for the bloodshed.

The fault lines were visible from the opening statements. Riad Malki, the Palestinian Foreign Minister, delivered a forceful condemnation, calling Israel's actions cowardly and demanding accountability for what he characterized as crimes committed without consequence. Turkey's foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, struck a similarly uncompromising tone, declaring Israel solely responsible for the escalation and noting that Turkish warnings issued the previous week had gone unheeded. These were the voices of traditional resistance, the rhetoric that had defined Arab responses to Israeli military action for decades.

But the room held other voices, and they spoke differently. The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, both of which had signed recognition agreements with Israel less than a year earlier under the Trump administration, maintained their public support for Palestinian statehood while their government-linked media outlets offered notably restrained coverage of the fighting compared to other regional networks. In Qatar, hundreds gathered to hear Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh declare that resistance was the only path forward and that Palestinians would accept nothing less than a state with Jerusalem as its capital. Yet even as Qatar and Turkey provided platforms for Hamas, the response from some of the region's most powerful states was muted in ways that would have been unthinkable in previous confrontations.

The Abraham Accords—those recognition deals signed by the UAE and Bahrain—had fundamentally altered the calculus. These nations could no longer claim to be uniformly opposed to Israeli legitimacy, and that shift created political cover for a more measured response. Hussein Ibish, a scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, explained the dynamic plainly: Gulf Arab leaders viewed Hamas's rocket fire as reckless and dangerous, a provocation that endangered both Israelis and Palestinians. That assessment, whether fair or not, gave those leaders permission to treat the conflict as a tragedy born of two leaderships beyond their control rather than as a moral imperative demanding unified action.

Yet the divisions ran deeper than government statements. In Bahrain, civil society groups circulated a letter demanding that the kingdom expel the Israeli ambassador in response to the violence. In the UAE, where political parties and protests are prohibited by law, Palestinian workers in Abu Dhabi and Dubai expressed their anger quietly, constrained by the fear of losing their residency permits. Some Emirati citizens also voiced concern. One prominent Emirati writer and political analyst, Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, criticized Israel's strike on a Gaza building housing the offices of the Associated Press and Al-Jazeera, describing Israel as the region's only democracy in a pointed tweet that undercut the official narrative of measured restraint.

Cavusoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, turned his criticism inward, rebuking OIC members who had reached deals with Israel. "There are a few who have lost their moral compass," he said, and he questioned how the organization could expect the world to take its positions seriously when its own members offered only half-hearted statements. The tension was unmistakable: the traditional guardians of Arab unity were watching their coalition splinter, and they had few tools to reassemble it.

What the emergency summit revealed was not a unified Islamic response to Israeli military action but rather the emergence of a new Middle Eastern order in which some Muslim-majority nations had chosen a different path. The Abraham Accords had created a new category of state—one that maintained rhetorical support for Palestinian rights while establishing formal ties with Israel. That contradiction, once unthinkable, had become the new normal for at least some members of the organization. The fighting in Gaza had forced the OIC to confront a reality it could no longer ignore: the bloc was no longer bloc at all, and the old language of unified resistance no longer carried the weight it once had.