Qatar's ex-PM warns Israel using Iran war to expand territory, urges Arab defence pact

The United States-Israel war on Iran is not the result of a sudden escalation but the culmination of a long-term Israeli agenda to violently reshape the Middle East, former Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani tells Al Jazeera.

In a wide-ranging, candid interview on Al Jazeera’s Al Muqabala programme, the veteran diplomat offered a stark assessment of the region’s rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape. He warned that the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is the most perilous consequence of the recent war, cautioned against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ambitions for a “Greater Israel” and called for the urgent establishment of a unified Gulf defence pact.

“We are witnessing a major restructuring of the region,” Sheikh Hamad said, noting that the current geopolitical tremors will dictate the shape of the Middle East for decades to come.

Netanyahu’s ‘illusion’ and the US misstep

Sheikh Hamad had warned of an impending conflict last year and urged Gulf states to push for a diplomatic resolution to resolve the crisis with Iran and prevent military strikes.

He identified a push for a conflict with Iran and blamed it on a “hardline faction” within Israel led by Netanyahu, who he said had been trying to drag the US into a war over Tehran’s nuclear programme since President Bill Clinton’s administration in the 1990s.

While previous US governments – including during President Donald Trump’s first term – hesitated to launch a full-scale war on Iran, Netanyahu finally succeeded by selling Washington an “illusion”, Sheikh Hamad argued. “He convinced the US administration that the war would be short and swift and that the Iranian regime would fall within weeks,” he said, drawing parallels to failed US efforts to change Venezuela’s government.

The former Qatari premier criticised Washington’s reliance on military might, saying, “America’s true power has always been in its ability to avoid using force, not in deploying it.” He noted that the current war ultimately has forced all parties back to the negotiating table, suggesting that an additional two weeks of talks in Geneva early this year – an Oman-led diplomatic push to avoid war – could have averted the catastrophe altogether.

Netanyahu has emerged as the primary beneficiary of the war, Sheikh Hamad observed, saying the Israeli leader is using the chaos to market his vision of forced regional alliances and a “Greater Israel”, a plan among Israel’s right wing to expand the country’s borders deeper into neighbouring Arab states.

The Strait of Hormuz: A new global flashpoint

Assessing Tehran’s strategy, Sheikh Hamad said Iran successfully absorbed the initial military strikes of the war and subsequently dragged its feet on a settlement after realising it could leverage a new strategic advantage: the Strait of Hormuz.

Calling the weaponisation of the waterway the “most dangerous outcome” of the war, he warned that Iran is now treating the vital international chokepoint as its own sovereign territory. This, he argued, poses a more immediate and severe threat to global economies than the Iranian nuclear programme.

The Gulf states, rather than Washington, have borne the brunt of this crisis, Sheikh Hamad said, and the former prime minister harshly condemned Iran’s attacks on Gulf energy, industrial and civilian infrastructure under what he said was the guise of targeting US interests, noting that these Gulf nations had explicitly opposed the war.

As a result, Tehran has exhausted much of its political capital in the Gulf, generating widespread public anger over the economic and security disruptions its actions have caused. However, Sheikh Hamad stressed that geography dictates coexistence and called for a frank, collective Gulf dialogue with Tehran rather than fragmented unilateral communications to establish a realistic framework for the future.

A call for a ‘Gulf NATO’

In one of his most blunt assessments, Sheikh Hamad declared that the greatest threat to the Gulf is neither Iran, Israel nor foreign military bases but internal Gulf disunity.

To counter this, he proposed the creation of a “Gulf NATO”, a joint political and defence project starting with a core group of strategically aligned Gulf nations with Saudi Arabia serving as its natural backbone. He argued that the European Union began with a small number of states before expanding, suggesting a similar model governed by strict institutionalised laws respected by all members.

Addressing the US military presence, Sheikh Hamad acknowledged that US bases have provided crucial deterrence for decades. However, he warned that Washington’s strategic pivot towards Asia and the containment of China means the Gulf can no longer rely indefinitely on the US security umbrella, and he urged Gulf states to develop long-term, interest-based strategic partnerships with regional powers such as Turkiye, Pakistan and Egypt.

Gaza, normalisation and a late-1990s secret

Turning to the issue of Palestine, Sheikh Hamad condemned the killing of civilians on all sides but accused Israel of committing a “moral and political disaster” in Gaza, where more than 72,500 Palestinians have been killed since Israel’s genocidal war began in October ⁠2023. He warned of an Israeli plot to depopulate the strip, citing intelligence that money is being offered to encourage Palestinians to leave the enclave, which he said, in effect, is turning Gaza into a real estate project.

While acknowledging the unprecedented global sympathy the Palestinian cause has garnered since October 7, 2023, particularly in the West, he cautioned Palestinian factions, including Hamas, to carefully weigh the devastating human cost.

He firmly rejected any discussion of disarming Hamas without a guaranteed political horizon for an independent Palestinian state and praised Saudi Arabia’s steadfast refusal to normalise relations with Israel without a roadmap for this – a stance, he said, that deeply disrupted Netanyahu’s regional calculations.

Reflecting on recent regional shifts, Sheikh Hamad expressed relief at the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, revealing that he had personally advised the former president early in the revolution to listen to his people. He praised the pragmatism of the new Syrian leadership in avoiding Israeli provocations and urged it to focus on economic and institutional rebuilding after nearly 14 years of war and mismanagement by al-Assad’s government.

The interview also unveiled a piece of hidden diplomatic history. Sheikh Hamad disclosed that in the late 1990s, the Qatari leadership dispatched him to Tehran to deliver a message from the Clinton administration. The US demanded that Iran hand over its nascent nuclear programme to Russia or submit to international arrangements.

While Qatar acted strictly as a messenger, Tehran at the time viewed Doha as aligned with the American stance, he noted.