ON 9 September 2025, Israeli warplanes launched ten missiles at Doha’s Laqtifiya district, targeting senior Hamas political leaders Khalil al-Hayya, Zaheer Jibrin, Muhammad Ismail Darwish and Khaled Meshaal.
Fortunately, they survived unharmed. This marked the first time Israel failed to assassinate Hamas leaders. Those leaders were directly involved in negotiations for a Gaza ceasefire and for the exchange of Israeli and Palestinian hostages.
Despite the failure, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shamelessly justified the attack instead of apologizing to Qatar. Now after weeks Netanyahu has tendered apology to Qatar on the mischievous attack. He declared Hamas’s political leaders terrorists and vowed to continue targeting them. But Hamas came to power in Gaza through a democratic election—just as Netanyahu came to power in Israel through elections. Hamas is a political movement with popular support. To label them as terrorists is deeply misleading.
For eight decades, Israel has been attacking Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Yemen—and even launched operations nearly 2,000 kilometers away in Iran, where Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated while in Tehran. Beyond Haniyeh’s killing, Israel has carried out numerous assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, generals and Revolutionary Guard leaders across Iran, Syria and Baghdad. When Israel strikes its neighbours, it always claims justification and never calls itself a terrorist. Yet if any country dares to respond to Israeli aggression, it brands that response as “terrorism.” If striking Israel is terrorism, then Israel’s repeated aggression against Muslim nations is the greatest terrorism of all.
It’s worth remembering that peace talks between the United States and the Taliban were also held in Qatar. Those negotiations paved the way for the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan in August 2021. These were the same Taliban the US had toppled after 9/11, branding them terrorists. But twenty years later, Washington dealt with them as political actors. The US and Israel have shown time and again that they can brand a group as terrorists when it serves their interests and later restore that same group to power when it suits them politically.
Until recently, Qatar hosted ceasefire and hostage-exchange talks between Hamas and Israel—talks overseen at Washington’s request. Thanks to Qatar’s mediation, Israeli hostages were freed. But after the September 9 strike, Israel showed no regard for Qatar’s sovereignty. It attacked Hamas leaders on Qatari soil because it did not want the peace talks, or Qatar’s diplomacy, to succeed. The attack was part of a wider conspiracy to sabotage peace efforts involving both Iran and Qatar.
For the US and Israel, peace in the Middle East undermines their long-term strategic project: Greater Israel. To keep that project alive, they deliberately sabotage peace. The September 9 attack on Doha was another example of that strategy. This isn’t the first time the US and its allies have staged such theater. On the night of May 2, 2011, the United States carried out what it claimed was a military operation in Abbottabad, Pakistan, to kill Osama bin Laden. Soon after, President Barack Obama announced that the “world’s most wanted man” had been killed and that his body had been dumped at sea. But the entire episode was shrouded in mystery. No evidence was ever produced to prove Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad or his death. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accused Pakistan of sheltering him, yet Pakistan never confirmed his presence. The United States simply staged an operation at a large residential compound in Abbottabad, left and declared the mission a success. To this day, no proof has been provided. I am convinced Bin Laden was never there.
The official story—that he was killed in Abbottabad and buried at sea—is a fiction. And Netanyahu has now tried to use that same fabricated narrative to justify Israel’s attack on Qatar. In 2011, the US sought to frame Pakistan as a harbour for terrorists by claiming Bin Laden lived in Abbottabad. In 2025, Netanyahu used the same line of argument, comparing Israel’s missile strike on Hamas leaders in Doha to America’s Abbottabad raid. But just as Bin Laden’s supposed presence in Abbottabad was a lie, Israel’s claim about targeting “terrorists” in Doha is another fabricated cover story. In 2020, Ziauddin a notable journalist in his column had also rejected US claim of presence of Osama in Pakistan. First, those Israel targeted in Doha were not terrorists—they were political leaders engaged in peace negotiations, including past talks that secured the release of Israeli hostages. Second, the Abbottabad raid was itself an international fraud. Bin Laden was either killed elsewhere or remains in US custody. He was not in Abbottabad and the US story was never credible. Both events—the so-called Abbottabad raid and Israel’s attack on Qatar—fit the same pattern: elaborate conspiracies by the US and Israel to manipulate global opinion, sabotage peace and advance their own agenda.
—The writer is editor, political analyst and author of several books based in Islamabad.
