On September 9, Israel expanded its campaign against Hamas by striking them in Doha, Qatar, which housed members of the group’s political bureau. Qatari officials said five Hamas members and a Qatari security officer were killed. The operation reportedly coincided with ceasefire and hostage-deal deliberations that were going on in Qatar’s capital. These talks were important as Doha served as a key mediator alongside Egypt and the United States. The attack marked a rare extraterritorial use of force inside a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) state, raising profound questions about sovereignty, the durability of normalisation with Israel, and the region’s crisis-management architecture.
Qatar condemned the strike as “state terrorism” and a violation of international law and convened Arab and Islamic foreign ministers ahead of a leaders’ summit in Doha to craft a collective response. Instead of isolating Hamas, the strike shifted the diplomatic centre of gravity, rallying regional support around Qatar and straining Israel’s ties with Gulf states, including normalization tracks. For Qatar, the attack was a breach of sovereignty that threatened its hard-won mediator role and the architecture of indirect diplomacy on Gaza.
Doha’s immediate aims are to deter further violations and protect the credibility of its mediation, which remains pivotal to any ceasefire-hostage deal.
For the UAE, strategic hedging intensifies: Among Gulf states, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) faced the starkest balancing act. As a signatory to the Abraham Accords (2020), the UAE has maintained open diplomatic, commercial, and limited security ties with Israel. Yet it also sits within a GCC security community that treats sovereignty breaches in the Gulf as red lines. UAE reacted to this attack by summoning Israel’s deputy ambassador and condemning both the attack and Netanyahu’s rhetoric. This was the sharpest public rebuke of Israel by the UAE since normalisation, and it revealed the constraints of “business-first” engagement amid a widening war. Strategically, the UAE is likely to pursue three tracks simultaneously. First, it will press for de-escalation mechanisms that guard GCC territory from becoming a theatre for third-party strikes. Second, it will keep economic normalisation in a holding pattern—neither rupturing ties nor advancing them—pending clearer lines from Jerusalem. Third, the UAE will double down on a multi-vector foreign policy that reduces exposure to single partners, deepens insurance through ties with Washington and Asian powers, and keeps channels with Tehran calibrated. The Doha strike thus reinforces a pre-existing Emirati instinct i.e., normalise when useful, but hedge when costs increase.
Saudi Arabia’s leadership stakes rise: Riyadh condemned the strike in strong terms and publicly backed Qatar. Just a year earlier, there was intensive speculation about the US-brokered Saudi-Israeli normalisation package; however, the conflict in Gaza put this on the back burner. This has further deteriorated after these attacks in Doha. For Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman, two imperatives are stuck—a strategic aperture to Israel (framed within a broader American defense pact and civil nuclear cooperation) and custodianship of regional order and Islamic solidarity. After an attack on a fellow GCC state hosting ceasefire talks, moving forward with normalisation would carry steep reputational and political costs. The Doha episode gives Riyadh additional leverage to insist that any normalisation pathway must be embedded in an architecture that deters extraterritorial strikes and protects mediating states.
Arab Middle Powers—principled sovereignty and consensus-building: Arab states of Kuwait and Oman, long positioned at the GCC’s diplomatic centre of gravity, issued statements of solidarity with Qatar and denounced the strike. Consistent with their foreign-policy traditions—Kuwait’s parliamentary sensitivity to public opinion and Oman’s facilitative neutrality—both are likely to prioritise two outcomes: (1) a political firewall around GCC sovereignty and (2) renewed investment in multilateral de-escalation channels (Arab League, OIC, and quiet US-GCC coordination). Their messaging underscores that even Gulf states without formal ties to Israel see extraterritorial operations on GCC soil as categorically unacceptable. Bahrain, another signatory to Abraham Accords (2020) signatory, quickly expressed solidarity with Qatar and condemned the violation of sovereignty. Manama’s reaction mirrors the Emirati dilemma but with fewer strategic buffers. Bahrain’s normalisation is more symbolically tethered to an American-led regional project, yet its sensitivities on sovereignty and domestic public opinion are acute.
Non-Arab Reaction to Doha Strikes
In case of the non-Arab members of the region, Iran will portray the strike as proof that normalisation with Israel invites insecurity, hoping to widen cracks between Jerusalem and Gulf capitals. Yet the Gulf response does not align with Tehran—counters that narrative. Türkiye, meanwhile, worries it could be targeted next if Israel adopts a doctrine of cross-border decapitation against Hamas affiliates abroad. There is a possible chance that Ankara will likely tighten security around Palestinian figures and coordinate rhetorically with Doha. However, like the Gulf, it will want to avoid escalation that invites retaliation on its own soil.
Threat to normalisation? In the aggregate, yes—at least in the near to medium term. A draft resolution for the Arab-Islamic summit warned openly that Israeli actions risk derailing normalization, language that would have been unthinkable during the initial Abraham Accords optimism. For states that normalised, the calculus was always transactional: economic gains, technology transfer, and a strategic hedging via US sponsorship. That bargain pre-supposed Israel would not draw Arab partners into the war’s direct blast radius or embarrass them diplomatically. A strike in Doha ruptures that assumption. Even if ties are not severed, the political oxygen for visible, high-level Israeli-Gulf engagement is thinning. Beyond normalisation, the core Gulf concern is precedent. If Israel can act militarily inside a GCC state to target non-state actors it deems threats, what immunizes other regional powers from similar moves? The GCC’s security doctrine has long centred on deterrence against Iran and extremist networks; the Doha strike adds a third axis: deterring partners from unilateral military actions on GCC soil. Expect a push inside the GCC for a common position that any counter-terror action within member states requires host-government consent and coordination—a principle likely to be pressed in dialogues with Washington and European partners as well. The practical effect on Gaza diplomacy is double-edged. On one hand, Hamas’s political bureau will be more cautious about convening in Doha in predictable patterns, complicating the logistics of shuttle talks. On the other, the outcry has rallied Arab and Islamic institutions behind Qatar’s mediator role, paradoxically strengthening Doha’s mandate even as it narrows the physical space for talks.
Bottom line
Israel’s Doha strike produced a paradox. Tactically, it signalled resolve to pursue Hamas beyond Gaza; strategically, it antagonised the Gulf partners whose cooperation Israel will need for any sustainable regional architecture after the war. In the Gulf, the operation revived the principal concerns about sovereignty, pulled normalisation into the conflict’s slipstream, and re-legitimized Qatar’s mediator role by casting it as a wounded, not complicit, stakeholder. The time ahead will test whether a common Arab line—anchored in sovereignty and de-escalation—can coexist with pragmatic ties to Israel. For now, the political cost of visible engagement with Jerusalem has risen across the Gulf, and any pathway back to normalisation runs through a ceasefire architecture that protects mediators, respects borders, and re-establishes the basic guardrails of regional statecraft.
The author is Assistant Professor-III, Amity Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (AIDSS), Amity University, NOIDA.
