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

The fifty-seven nations of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation gathered in Dubai on a Sunday in May to confront a crisis that had fractured their ranks before the meeting even began. The emergency session was called to address the escalating violence between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, but the assembly itself became a mirror of a deeper problem: the Islamic world no longer spoke with one voice on Palestine.

For decades, Arab and Muslim nations had responded to Israeli-Palestinian flare-ups with unified condemnation and coordinated pressure. This time was different. Several OIC members had signed recognition agreements with Israel in the final months of the Trump administration, and those diplomatic ties had created a fault line that no emergency summit could simply erase. The result was a gathering where the traditional rhetoric of resistance collided with the quieter calculations of states that had chosen a different path.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki opened the meeting with language that belonged to an earlier era. He called Israel's actions cowardly attacks and spoke of resistance continuing until the last day. But Malki represented the Palestinian Authority, which controls only scattered enclaves in the West Bank and has no authority over Gaza, where Hamas seized power in 2007. His words carried moral weight but limited political leverage. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu took a harder line still, declaring Israel solely responsible for the escalation and noting that Turkish warnings issued the previous week had gone unheeded.

But across the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf, the response was fractured. In Qatar, which hosts both Hamas leadership and the Al-Jazeera network, hundreds gathered late Saturday to hear Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh declare that resistance was the shortest road to Jerusalem and that Palestinians would accept nothing less than a state with Jerusalem as its capital. Kuwait's parliament speaker and Qatar's foreign minister both spoke with Haniyeh. So did General Esmail Ghaani, head of Iran's Quds Forces. The message from these capitals was clear: Hamas had allies, and they were willing to say so publicly.

Then there were Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, the two Gulf states that had normalized relations with Israel. Both nations reiterated their official support for Palestinian statehood, but their government-linked media outlets were notably restrained in their coverage of the fighting, a stark contrast to the round-the-clock reporting elsewhere in the region. In Bahrain, civil society groups circulated a letter demanding the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador. In the UAE, where political parties and public protests are prohibited by law, Palestinians working in Abu Dhabi and Dubai expressed their anger quietly, fearful of losing their residency permits. Some Emirati citizens also voiced concern, with one prominent writer sardonically referring to Israel as the region's only democracy while criticizing an Israeli strike that destroyed a building housing the offices of the Associated Press and Al-Jazeera.

Cavusoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, did not hide his frustration with the Gulf states. He accused OIC members who had reached deals with Israel of losing their moral compass and warned that half-hearted statements from within the Islamic bloc would undermine its credibility with the outside world. Hussein Ibish, a scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, offered a different reading of the Gulf's muted response. Most Gulf Arab leaders, he argued, viewed Hamas's rocket fire as reckless and dangerous, a calculation that relieved them of the pressure to respond as forcefully as they might to other provocations—such as threats to the Al-Aqsa mosque, Islam's third-holiest site, or Israeli settlers displacing Arab families from their homes. The fighting in Gaza, from this perspective, was a tragedy born of two leaderships over which the Gulf states had neither control nor responsibility. That framing allowed them to express concern without taking sides in a way that would complicate their relationships with Israel or anger their own populations. The OIC emergency summit had convened to forge unity, but it instead exposed the reality that the Islamic world's response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had become as divided as the conflict itself.