Qatar's PM condemns Israel's Gaza actions as war crimes, accuses Netanyahu of undermining ceasefire

Qatar's Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani sat down for an interview on Tuesday and did not mince words about what he has witnessed from his position as both his country's top diplomat and chief mediator in one of the world's most intractable conflicts. Whoever bears responsibility for the devastation across Gaza, he said plainly, is a war criminal. The hospitals that have been bombed, the schools reduced to rubble—he listed them as facts beyond argument, beyond the reach of any justification Israel might offer.

Sheikh Mohammed acknowledged the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel as a massacre that deserved condemnation and accountability. But he drew a sharp line: the scale and nature of the Israeli response, in his assessment, crossed into something else entirely. "Nothing is justifying this," he said, speaking to the targeting of civilian infrastructure and the broader campaign across the territory.

The ceasefire that took effect in October 2025 has become, in his telling, a document Israel has treated as optional. More than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since that agreement was supposed to bring the fighting to an end. Nearly 70 percent of the Strip remains under Israeli military control, he noted, in direct violation of the terms both sides had supposedly accepted. "They are not fulfilling their commitments," he said of the Israeli government. "This is just showing that they have different intentions."

Qatar's own experience with Israeli military action has been searing. In 2025, Israeli forces struck Doha itself, targeting senior Hamas officials who had gathered there for negotiations. The explosion was deadly and, in Sheikh Mohammed's view, a rupture of something fundamental—an attack on the mediator itself, a breach of the diplomatic immunity that has historically protected those trying to broker peace. "It was unacceptable and condemned," he said. "It's setting a precedent of attacking the mediator that has never happened throughout the wars in history." He characterized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as someone who had "crossed the line" repeatedly.

Sheikh Mohammed described Israel's undermining of ceasefire efforts as systematic, dating back to what he called "day one of the war." Qatar has invested enormous political capital in these negotiations, working alongside other parties to find pathways toward stability. That investment, he suggested, has been met with bad faith.

Beyond Gaza, Qatar is also engaged in mediation between the United States and Iran following the launch of the US-Israel war on Iran in February. Sheikh Mohammed outlined three conditions he believes must be resolved: an agreement on Iran's right to peaceful nuclear power and the lifting of sanctions; freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz according to international law; and a fundamental reform of regional security arrangements that would bind the Gulf Cooperation Council countries and Iran in a framework of non-interference and non-aggression.

He spoke of the possibility of building what he called "an area of common interest," where the region's nations could work together on energy, trade, and economic development. Such cooperation, he suggested, would allow the region to "unleash its potential." But that future, he made clear, depends on whether the parties are willing to engage in genuine dialogue and accept the constraints of neighborly conduct. The alternative—the path of military escalation and the violation of diplomatic norms—leads only deeper into the cycle that has already claimed so much.