When the longtime political chief of Hamas was assassinated in late July 2024, it didn’t simply go away your entire Center East on edge. It additionally created a political headache in Qatar.

That’s as a result of the dying of Ismail Haniyeh, the results of an obvious Israeli operation, struck a blow to Doha’s already sputtering diplomatic efforts within the Center east.

The Gulf state has lengthy been the staging floor for negotiations involving Israelis and Palestinians, together with Haniyeh, who lived in Qatar. However current criticism from the U.S. and Israel for, of their view, failing to place sufficient stress on Hamas had led Qatar’s leaders to query its position.

After which got here Haniyeh’s dying.

“How can mediation succeed when one celebration assassinates the negotiator on the opposite aspect?” contemplated Qatar’s prime minister and prime diplomat, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani. Israel is extensively believed to be behind the assassination, though no declare of accountability has been made.

As an knowledgeable on Gulf politics, I consider bin Abdulrahman’s query is a legitimate one. As the primary anniversary of the Oct. 7 assault in Israel approaches, Qatari officers face a problem. Mediation has produced diminishing returns – each for the combatants and for Qatar itself. However transferring away from mediation would characterize a seismic shift for Qatar, which has put it on the coronary heart of its overseas coverage for many years.

Diplomacy as coverage

Qatar is a small state in a unstable neighborhood. Over the previous 45 years, the area has skilled a number of interstate wars and durations of revolutionary upheaval. All through that point, successive generations of Qatari leaders have regarded towards diplomacy and mediation as a strategy to advance the nation’s pursuits.

Certainly, Qatar’s structure, in impact since 2004, requires a overseas coverage “based mostly on the precept of encouraging peaceable decision of worldwide disputes.”

Such a proper dedication to dispute decision marks Qatar as distinct from most of its Gulf friends. However the method is rooted in a practical calculation of how and the place a small nation can finest train leverage in regional and overseas coverage.

On this manner, Qatari officers have labored as mediators for twenty years.

Initially, they discovered success, serving to resolve in 2008 a very intractable political disaster in Lebanon, which gave the impression to be heading to civil battle. The breakthrough in Lebanon and a two-year stint on the United Nations Safety Council in 2006 and 2007 helped put Qatar on the diplomatic map.

However Qatar’s negotiating efforts haven’t all the time labored out. Qatari officers didn’t facilitate breakthroughs between warring Sudanese factions in Darfur in 2011 and between the Houthis and the central authorities in Yemen’s decadelong civil battle since 2014.

A lot of the early mediation efforts had been led by the veteran overseas minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani, who was additionally appointed prime minister in 2007.

Bin Jassim engaged in a personalised fashion of policymaking based mostly on his huge vary of worldwide contacts and his capability to lean on Qatari entities, such because the Qatar Funding Authority, in his diplomatic efforts.

Evolving coverage

Bin Jassim stepped down as each prime and overseas minister in June 2013 as a part of a rigorously deliberate handover of energy to the present emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.

By this time, the Qatari management was going through a backlash from neighbors comparable to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates over what they considered as Qatari assist or sympathy for Islamist actions throughout the multinational sequence of uprisings often known as the Arab Spring.

In 2017, the Saudis and Emiratis, together with Bahrain and Egypt, minimize diplomatic ties with Qatar and accused Doha – with out proof – of supporting regional terrorist teams.

However such criticism didn’t deter Qatar from its coverage of mediation as diplomacy. Reasonably, within the decade for the reason that 2013 political transition in Doha, Qatari mediation has advanced and expanded. In 2023, a brand new place of Minister of State for Worldwide Cooperation was created throughout the International Ministry, giving higher institutional depth {and professional} functionality to policymaking.

Qatar’s mediation efforts have additionally advanced away from the unilateral actions involving Islamist teams that raised regional issues throughout the Arab Spring.

As an alternative, Qatari officers have acted on the request of different international locations to function potential mediators.

On this manner, the Gulf state labored intensively with the U.S. and representatives from the Taliban in a course of that culminated within the 2020 Doha Settlement that set a timeline for U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

It equally labored with Israeli officers to facilitate monetary and humanitarian assist for the Gaza Strip within the 5 years previous to the Hamas-led assaults of Oct. 7.

Hamas retreats to the tunnels

However since that assault and the Israeli operation in Gaza that adopted, Qatari mediation has had solely restricted success.

It was instrumental in negotiating the short-term cease-fire in November, however combating rapidly resumed and the devastation of Gaza intensified quickly after.

In the meantime, each U.S. and Israeli politicians have attacked Qatar for persevering with dialogue with Hamas.

That criticism led the Qatari prime minister to warn in April that Doha might reassess its position in Gaza in consequence.

4 months on, the killing of Haniyeh has narrowed nonetheless additional the pathway for additional diplomacy. Haniyeh, like his predecessor as head of the Hamas Political Bureau, Khaled Mashal, had a base in Doha.

The person appointed to succeed Haniyeh in that position, hardliner Yahya Sinwar, is believed to be in a tunnel in Gaza and can’t fairly hope to be in Doha given the present circumstances.

Following Haniyeh’s dying, the White Home did attain out to Qatar to thank the nation for its mediating efforts, nevertheless it’s more and more tough to see how Qatar can dealer any breakthrough.

Talks will proceed. Israeli and Egyptian officers met in Cairo on Aug. 3, after Haniyeh’s assassination, with out Qatari illustration. However negotiations broke down after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly imposed new calls for.

De-escalating Iran tensions

With the dominant view in Doha that Israeli management merely isn’t keen to interact in good-faith talks, nonetheless much less attain a cease-fire deal, officers in Qatar are prone to concentrate on mitigating any Iranian response in opposition to Israel. This started with an emergency assembly of the Group of Islamic Convention members, together with Iran, in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia on Aug. 7.

With no viable political technique for a Gaza cease-fire presently in place, de-escalating tensions involving Iran – somewhat than making an attempt to dealer peace between Palestinians and Israelis – will dominate Qatar’s method within the days and weeks forward.