Former Qatar PM:
Netanyahu Using
Iran War to Reshape
the Middle East
DOHA / WASHINGTON — In one of the most candid diplomatic assessments to emerge from the region in years, former Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani has delivered a sweeping, no-holds-barred verdict on the ongoing US–Israel war on Iran — and the man he holds most responsible for it: Benjamin Netanyahu.
Speaking on Al Jazeera's prestigious Al Muqabala programme, the veteran diplomat laid out a stark picture: the current conflict is not a sudden explosion of tensions but the calculated result of a decades-long Israeli agenda to violently redraw the map of the Middle East — and Netanyahu is now exploiting the chaos to advance his vision of a "Greater Israel."
We are witnessing a major restructuring of the region. The current geopolitical tremors will dictate the shape of the Middle East for decades to come.
Sheikh Hamad traced the roots of this conflict back to the 1990s, identifying a hardline faction within Israel led by Netanyahu that has spent more than three decades trying to drag the United States into a military confrontation with Tehran over its nuclear programme. While previous US administrations — including Trump's first term — pulled back from the brink, Netanyahu ultimately succeeded this time by selling Washington a dangerous illusion.
Sheikh Hamad revealed that Netanyahu "convinced the US administration that the war would be short and swift and that the Iranian regime would fall within weeks" — a scenario the former Qatari PM compared to failed American efforts to force a regime change in Venezuela. The result, he argued, has been a costly miscalculation that has now locked all parties into a crisis with no easy exit.
Critically, Sheikh Hamad pointed out that an Oman-led diplomatic push earlier this year — involving two additional weeks of talks in Geneva — could have averted the conflict entirely. He accused Washington of undervaluing diplomacy and over-relying on force, saying: "America's true power has always been in its ability to avoid using force, not in deploying it." The tragic irony, he noted, is that all sides have now been forced back to the negotiating table anyway — at far greater human and economic cost.
Of all the war's consequences, Sheikh Hamad reserved his gravest warning for the Strait of Hormuz. Iran, he explained, initially absorbed the military strikes and then quickly recognised that it held a trump card in the form of the world's most strategically vital waterway. Tehran has since been treating the strait as sovereign Iranian territory — closing it, enforcing tolls, and weaponising it as an economic lever.
The weaponisation of the Strait of Hormuz is the most dangerous outcome of this war — more immediately threatening to global economies than even Iran's nuclear programme.
The former prime minister noted bitterly that it is the Gulf states — not Washington — that have absorbed the sharpest economic pain from the Hormuz crisis. Tankers are bottlenecked, energy markets are in turmoil, and civilian infrastructure across the Gulf has been hit. He condemned Iran's strikes on Gulf energy and industrial sites — nations, he stressed, that had explicitly opposed the war. As a result, Iran has burned through enormous political goodwill in the Gulf, generating public fury that may take years to repair.
The former Qatari PM called for the urgent creation of a "Gulf NATO" — a unified political and defence alliance beginning with a core group of strategically aligned Gulf states, with Saudi Arabia as its natural backbone. Drawing parallels to the early European Union, he argued that such a bloc must be governed by strict, institutionalised laws binding on all members. He also urged Gulf states to stop relying indefinitely on the US security umbrella, warning that Washington's pivot toward Asia and containing China means the Gulf must build durable partnerships with regional powers including Türkiye, Pakistan and Egypt.
Sheikh Hamad made a striking disclosure: in the late 1990s, he was personally dispatched by Qatar's leadership to Tehran to deliver a message from the Clinton administration — demanding that Iran hand over its nascent nuclear programme to Russia or submit to international arrangements. Tehran, at the time, viewed Qatar as aligned with Washington's position. The revelation offers a rare window into back-channel Gulf diplomacy that has shaped today's crisis.
On Gaza, Sheikh Hamad was unsparing. He accused Israel of committing a "moral and political disaster" in the enclave, warning of an Israeli plot to depopulate Gaza — with reports of money being offered to encourage Palestinians to leave, effectively turning the strip into what he called "a real estate project." He praised Saudi Arabia's firm refusal to normalise relations with Israel without a guaranteed roadmap toward Palestinian statehood, calling it a stance that has deeply disrupted Netanyahu's regional calculations.
As the dust of war continues to settle — and as diplomats in Geneva, Muscat, and Islamabad work frantically to find off-ramps — Sheikh Hamad's message to the world rang clear: the Middle East is being reborn, violently and rapidly. The question is not whether it will change, but who shapes it — and at what cost to the millions caught in between.
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