The Qatari government has agreed to kick Hamas out of its country following a request from the United States in response to the U.S.-designated terrorist group’s repeated refusal to agree to a ceasefire deal that would end its war with Israel.
The United States asked the Qataris about two weeks ago to push Hamas leaders out of Doha after Hamas’s latest rejections to ceasefire proposals, a senior Biden administration official told the Washington Examiner on Friday.
“Hamas is a terrorist group that has killed Americans and continues to hold Americans hostage,” the official explained. “After rejecting repeated proposals to release hostages, its leaders should no longer be welcome in the capitals of any American partner. We made that clear to Qatar following Hamas’s rejection weeks ago of another hostage release proposal.”
The Qataris, which along with the U.S. and Egypt have mediated negotiations between Israel and Hamas, agreed and notified Hamas’s leaders about ten days ago, according to a source familiar with the conversations. It’s unclear exactly when they will be forced to leave Qatar and where they will go.
Khaled Meshaal is believed to be Hamas’s top official outside of the Gaza Strip, and he’s based in Qatar. He was one of six Hamas leaders whom the Department of Justice charged in early September with the planning and execution of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack in Israel. Hamas killed about 1,200 people in the attack, including more than 40 Americans, and kidnapped about 250 others.
Meshaal served as the head of Hamas’s Politburo from 1996-2017.
Hamas is still holding about 100 hostages, including seven Americans, and they haven’t released anyone since the weeklong ceasefire agreement that occurred in late November 2023.
In negotiations over the last several months, Hamas and Israel have both held firm to their conditions, which are contradictory to one another, preventing a deal from coming together. Recently, Hamas had “shown no signs of budging off unrealistic positions that would effectively ensure it remained in power in Gaza, a position that Israel (and the United States) will never accept,” the source added.
The decision for the Biden administration to make the request to Qatar was a long time coming and had been under consideration for “many months,” the source said, adding that the decision was “accelerated” after the death of Hersh Goldberg Polin, an American, who was one of six Israeli hostages killed by Hamas hours before Israeli forces found their bodies in a tunnel in Rafah in late August.
The U.S. had not ultimately decided to ask Qatar, and Israel’s assassination of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in mid-October provided the mediators with renewed optimism that they could get a deal finalized. The mediators hoped that Sinwar’s successor would be more amenable to making a deal because Sinwar had been obstructing a deal, but that hasn’t panned out. Hamas rejected an Egyptian ceasefire proposal since Sinwar’s death, demonstrating that the optimism had not materialized, and that was the “final straw” for the U.S., the source added.
“Following Hamas’s repeated refusal to release even a small number of hostages, including most recently during meetings in Cairo, their continued presence in Doha is no longer viable or acceptable,” the senior administration official added.
Israel is believed to be responsible for the assassination of Hamas’s previous exiled leader, Ismail Haniyeh. While Haniyeh was based in Qatar, he was killed in a bombing while in Tehran, Iran for the presidential inauguration in late July.
The Biden administration will continue to pursue a ceasefire deal as its days wane down, the source said, and believes the Qataris’ request could prove to be needed “leverage” to get them to make a deal.
In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, Israeli leaders declared war and that their objectives were to remove Hamas from power in Gaza and to destroy their military capabilities to ensure they couldn’t carry out a repeat attack, which Hamas officials publicly said they wanted to do. Hamas, for its part, has spent more than a decade turning the strip into a militarized area with tunnels and weapons caches underneath civilian areas.
Israel’s military operations in Gaza have decimated much of the enclave. More than 40,000 people are believed to be killed in the war, and Israeli officials acknowledge that only about half are terrorists, while the others are civilians. An overwhelming majority of the population has been displaced and is facing a humanitarian crisis with limited food, clean water, and medicine.
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The Biden administration, in an effort to get Israel to improve the humanitarian conditions in Gaza, gave the Israelis 30 days to make significant progress in getting aid to civilians or risk future U.S. military aid and that deadline is approaching early next week.
“I mean, no, not enough is being done,” Pentagon deputy spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said on Thursday. “I think it’s clear that the situation in Gaza, the humanitarian situation remains dire.”
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