Arab foreign ministers were expected to gather on Sunday in Qatar to formulate a united response to Israel’s brazen missile attack there last week that sought to assassinate senior leaders of Hamas.
The ministers, meeting in the Qatari capital of Doha, will lay the groundwork for an emergency summit there on Monday with the leaders of Arab and Islamic countries.
The Israeli strike on Tuesday targeted senior Hamas officials who had gathered in Doha to discuss a U.S.-backed cease-fire proposal to stop the fighting in Gaza. It hit a residential neighborhood in broad daylight, killing several people affiliated with Hamas as well as a member of Qatar’s internal security forces. Hamas said it had failed to kill any of the targeted officials. Israel has not released its own assessment of whether the strike had achieved its intended consequences.
The attack on a U.S. ally that hosts a major American military installation in the Middle East drew sharp international condemnation. Even close allies of Israel have denounced it as a violation of the Qatar’s sovereignty.
Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, landed in Israel on Sunday amid signs that President Trump was growing frustrated with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for prolonging the war in Gaza.
Mr. Rubio said he would discuss the Qatar attack with Mr. Netanyahu, who he is expected to meet on Monday. President Trump “didn’t like the way it went down,” Mr. Rubio told reporters before his departure on Saturday.
“We’ll talk about what impact it’s going to have on efforts to get all the hostages back, get rid of Hamas, end this war,” he added.
Qatari officials have said they agreed to host political leaders of Hamas at the behest of the United States, to keep open channels of communication. That has positioned the country as a critical mediator in talks to end the war in Gaza.
It remains unclear how the Israeli strike will affect cease-fire negotiations, which were already stalled. Qatar or Egypt could suspend their roles as mediators, but have stopped short of doing that so far.
The attack sent shock waves through Gulf capitals that in recent years have been courted by Israel as potential allies and that have long regarded the United States as their main security guarantor.
Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani of Qatar, in an interview with CNN last week, described the summit as a chance for regional leaders to decide how to respond to the attack.
“We are hoping for something meaningful that deters Israel from continuing this bullying,” he said.
Analysts say that a military response by Gulf countries is out of the question because further escalation could harm the domestic agendas of the Gulf’s rulers, and they remain dependent on American military support.
Gulf sovereign wealth funds control around $4 trillion in assets around the world, giving them financial and economic leverage that they could deploy against Israel or the United States, a close ally that supplies Israel with weapons.
The regional leaders could decide to downgrade or abrogate the Abraham Accords, a 2020 deal backed by the United States under which the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco established diplomatic relations with Israel.
President Trump viewed the accords as one of the crowning foreign policy achievements of his first term. But they have already been significantly strained by the war in Gaza.
Mr. Netanyahu has defended the attack in Doha. In comments on social media Saturday night, he claimed that the Hamas leaders outside of Gaza had “blocked all cease-fire attempts in order to endlessly drag out of the war.”
“Getting rid of them would rid the main obstacle to releasing all our hostages and ending the war,” he said.
Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents — including many Israelis — argue that he is the one who has dragged the war out to mollify his hard-line coalition allies. The war in Gaza began after Hamas led the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Mr. Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes. Human-rights groups argue that Israel’s campaign now constitutes a genocide.
Israeli officials refute that charge and argue that they are fighting a defensive war against Hamas. They say Hamas could end the fighting by laying down its arms and returning the hostages still held in the enclave, which it has refused to do.
Israel is now gearing up for a large-scale operation to seize Gaza City, a major population center in the northern part of the enclave. The military has ordered hundreds of thousands of people living there to flee south to already crowded areas.
Many Palestinians have been reluctant to flee for their lives yet again. Some believe there is no safe place to go, although Israel has designated a “humanitarian zone” farther south.
Olga Cherevko, a spokeswoman for the U.N. humanitarian affairs office, said on Sunday morning that tens of thousands of people had fled south over the past two days alone. But some who made it south wound up returning, she added, because there was no space for them to pitch their tents.
Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut.