By Dominic Waghorn, international affairs editor
The Israeli airstrike on the Qatari capital Doha is a step change in the way they tackle their enemies, but only the latest in a series of them.
In the past, Israel used stealthier means to dispatch its foes. Plausible deniability was preferable.
October 7th changed everything the Israelis say.
So when they came for Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in 2024 in the Iranian capital of Tehran, they didn’t bother with anything as subtle as poison or strangulation – they blew him up with an airstrike instead.
Now it’s launched another one, this time not on a city in a country that’s hostile to Israel, but one it has relations with, to the horror of the region and massive diplomatic fallout.
You might assume the targets were high value, a clear and present threat to Israel, to justify all that.
Not exactly.
Divide and rule?
There are plenty of reasons for Israelis to hate the old men of Hamas, whom they appear to have targeted. In the past, some of them were instrumental in organising terrorist attacks that killed many innocent women and children.
They will have cheered on the October 7 atrocities, but so far as we know, they were not its primary masterminds.
In 2011, the US government persuaded the Qataris to let Hamas open a political office in Doha and the Israelis approved of the idea.
Everyone wanted an address to negotiate with and funnel millions of dollars through to Gaza.
In the words of one Israeli official: “We believe that better conditions in Gaza would lessen the incentive of Hamas and the population to go again to a war. So in a way, it is helping the deterrence.”
Critics of Netanyahu said he was deliberately strengthening one wing of Palestinian politics as part of a cynical policy of divide and rule.
For whatever reason, Israel acquiesced fully in the Hamas political office being set up in Doha. It was staffed with some of the veterans of its cause who seem to have been on the target list in this strike.
When I interviewed Khaled Meshaal in Doha in October 2023, he was determined and dogmatic in his defence of the attacks a year earlier, but seemed at one stage removed.
He was no longer the ideological godfather of the movement he clearly had been when I first met him in Damascus in 2017.
The hard men of Gaza – Yahya Sinwar, Abu Obeida, Muhammad Deif – were in control now, much more than those languishing in exile.
Hard to see how strikes help hostages in Gaza
Benjamin Netanyahu will have had his reasons for today’s strikes.
He has almost certainly been waiting for another chance to kill Meshaal after his first failed so spectacularly.
In 1997, he sent Mossad agents to pour a lethal poison in his ear in the Jordanian capital, Amman.
They botched the job, and King Hussein told then-US president Bill Clinton to order the Israeli leader to hand over an antidote that saved him.
Initial reports suggest the wily Meshaal escaped the latest attempt on his life, too.
But the men killed and targeted today were, for all their faults, the people Israel was indirectly talking to try to negotiate the return of their hostages.
It is hard to see how this helps their plight now.
Hamas says five members killed in Israeli strikes on Doha but Sky News understands leadership survived
