More than 7,000 people, including 3,500 children, have died since the start of the Israeli response to the Hamas terrorist attack, which killed more than 1,400 Israelis. The Middle East has once again entered a cycle of hatred and violence not seen for decades. The Islamist organisation carried out an operation the likes of which it had never carried out before, breaking through the barriers with Israel and taking advantage of the tunnels to spread panic in southern Israel and take nearly 240 hostages, many of them still under the yoke of Hamas.
Even if Netanyahu, caught off guard and failing to actively monitor the country’s security, and taken to task by a growing section of public opinion, wants to raze Gaza to the ground and continue to kill thousands of Palestinian civilians, we must continue to defend a ceasefire as soon as possible and the release of the hostages. At the moment, Qatar is in charge and must continue the work it began on the first day of the kidnappings.
It is clear that both the United Nations and the European Union are isolated and powerless today to restore peace and negotiate the release of the prisoners. We are in a new era in which multilateralism is being swept aside and the West is increasingly rejected as a means of settling conflicts around the world. For several years now, in the Middle East and beyond, regional powers have been playing a major role in bringing peace to their immediate and more distant environments. At this stage in Gaza, while many Arab countries have either signed peace agreements with Israel, signed normalisation agreements or given up the fight for the Palestinian state, few Muslim countries can play the mediation card by maintaining relations with the two protagonists in the conflict. There has been no mention of the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia, which have been in an awkward position since 7 October.
There are not many countries that can play the role of peace mediators and that have built up their experience and reputation in this area. In addition to Egypt, Jordan and Turkey, it is Qatar, which has already negotiated several times with Israel and Hamas, that can best help bring about a ceasefire and the release of as many hostages as possible before Israel razes Gaza to the ground in the hope of destroying Hamas. Several hostages have recently been released by the Islamist organisation and have returned to Israel. This must be the beginning, but the acceleration of the Israeli government’s military operation could quickly doom the remaining hostages.
For 17 years, the population of Gaza has been living in terrible conditions, cut off from the world, since Egypt and the Hebrew State decided to impose a blockade against the Palestinian enclave after Hamas took power. The Hebrew State made the choice to accept that Qatar finance the Gazan civil servants and population in order to avoid chaos. At the request of Washington and Tel Aviv, Qatar agreed to open a Hamas office in the Qatari capital in 2012. As a result, the leaders of Hamas, Khaled Meechal, its former leader, and Ismaël Haniyeh, its political leader in Gaza, are in Doha, making it easy for the Qatari government to demand that they negotiate.
In just a few years, Qatar has become a buffer state between Western countries and the Middle East’s infrequenters. Doha has acquired real expertise in freeing hostages from Syria, Libya, Sudan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Eritrea and elsewhere. Recently, in mid-October, Doha, which has extended its sphere of action, helped free Ukrainian children in Russia! But – and this is why we must continue to defend and call for an emergency ceasefire, which the Hebrew state rejects out of hand – the Qatari mediation strategy has led to a number of ceasefires at the heart of several violent conflicts around the world. This has been the case in Yemen, Sudan, Chad, Israel, Djibouti and Eritrea. With more than 240 hostages still held in Gaza, will Israel launch the final struggle to destroy Hamas and sacrifice them? The countdown is on and we must continue to hope that diplomacy will bring every Israeli living home as soon as possible.
