OPINION:
Qatar’s role in the newly signed U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding goes far beyond playing host and engaging in shuttle diplomacy.
Pakistan and Qatar are listed as co-mediators for the deal.
Yet one of Tehran’s central demands before coming to the table involved access to frozen funds already held in Qatari accounts. Axios reported that the idea of a “prosperity fund” for Iran came from Qatar and was discussed with Washington and Tehran for several weeks.
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of Iran’s Islamic Consultative Assembly, made no secret of the pressure points: “We told the mediator that the issue of Lebanon and the blocked/frozen funds were among the main axes of the negotiations.”
Qatar offered Iran a $12 billion financial lifeline — a bribe by any other name — arranged behind the backs of every other Gulf state. Iran demanded the immediate release of those funds as a precondition for any agreement. Qatar enabled and welcomed that demand.
One question follows: Why does anyone still treat Qatar as a neutral party? I have been raising this question since Oct. 7, 2023.
In the weeks after that blackest of days, when Hamas slaughtered approximately 1,200 innocent Israelis and abducted 251 more, I made a startling discovery. One of Beverly Hills’ most luxurious hotels, the Maybourne, just over a mile from my home, is co-owned by two of Qatar’s central power brokers, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the former emir and father of the current ruler, and Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, the former prime minister.
These men own four of London’s most prestigious hotels: Claridge’s, the Connaught, the Berkeley and the Emory. Under their leadership, Hamas established its political headquarters in Doha.
It is intolerable that financiers of terrorism could enjoy the status that comes with being Beverly Hills hoteliers while their proxies in the Gaza Strip butchered Jewish families in Israel. I protested outside the Maybourne, demanded the world wake up to what was hiding in plain sight and put Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani’s documented antisemitic remarks on the public record.
When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, his oligarch allies had their assets frozen and were treated as accomplices to war crimes. Why should Qatar’s ruling elite receive different treatment for supporting the architects of mass murder?
Qatar presented itself as a mediator after Oct. 7, yet it actively funds Hamas, hosts Hamas’ political leadership in Doha and maintains contact with its commanders in Gaza. President Biden thanked Qatar for its “diplomatic efforts.”
No one should praise a government for helping secure the release of hostages whose kidnapping it made possible.
What Qatar enabled deserves a plain statement. Hamas staged its macabre ceremony in February 2025, parading the bodies of murdered Israeli hostages — 32-year-old mother Shiri Bibas, her children Ariel, 4, and Kfir, 9 months, and peace activist Oded Lifshitz, 83 — before Qatari-sponsored Al Jazeera cameras.
The remains were flanked by masked terrorists and cheering crowds. This is the face of what Qatar’s money buys.
Qatar’s goal in the Iran side deal is anything but humanitarian. Qatar wants joint control of the Strait of Hormuz, an arrangement it can secure only by keeping Iran financially viable and geopolitically aggressive. Qatar funds the threat and then positions itself as indispensable to managing it, playing the role of the arsonist who volunteers as a firefighter.
Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani and Sheikha Moza bint Nasser stand behind this. They built a system in which Qatar talks peace while waging a proxy war, proclaims neutrality while picking sides and claims alliance with the West while stabbing it in the back.
The response must be proportionate to the offense. Qatar’s Western assets must be frozen. Its status as a U.S. non-NATO ally must be revoked. The U.S. military base in Doha should relocate to a Persian Gulf state that actively opposes radical Islamism.
Western governments must stop treating Qatar as a legitimate mediator and recognize it as a state sponsor of terrorism.
The $12 billion arrangement is the latest expression of a playbook Qatar has run for decades. Fund the threat, host the architects, pose as the solution.
The question that matters is whether the world will finally stop falling for the act.
• Rabbi Pini Dunner is an award-winning author, the senior rabbi of Beverly Hills Synagogue and a member of the executive committee of the Rabbinical Council of America and the board of the Israel Christian Nexus.
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