To place Ankara and Doha – two of the most vocal enablers of Hamas – in charge of shepherding Gaza toward peace is akin to appointing the tobacco lobby to run the World Health Organization.
There are policy decisions that are misguided, and then there are decisions so breathtakingly absurd that one wonders whether satire has replaced strategy. The Trump administration’s reported decision to appoint Turkey and Qatar to the so-called “Board of Peace” tasked with overseeing Gaza belongs firmly in the latter category. To place Ankara and Doha – two of the most vocal enablers of Hamas – in charge of shepherding Gaza toward peace is akin to appointing the tobacco lobby to run the World Health Organization. It is an insult to common sense and a direct affront to Israel’s most basic security needs.
Let us dispense with the polite fiction that Turkey and Qatar are “honest brokers.” Qatar has for years served as Hamas’s chief financial lifeline, hosting senior terror leaders in luxury hotels while funneling billions of dollars into the terror group’s coffers. These funds did not build kindergartens or desalination plants. They built terror tunnels, long-range rockets, and Hamas command centers. Even now, Doha refuses to sever ties with Hamas, preferring instead to cloak its indulgence of terrorism in the language of “mediation.”
Nor has Qatar bothered to hide its worldview. In repeated official statements and speeches by its leaders, the Jewish state is accused of “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and even waging a war of annihilation against the Palestinians. In March 2025, a Qatari diplomat told the United Nations in Geneva that the “fraternal Palestinian people… face a real existential threat as a result of the war of extermination and ethnic cleansing waged by Israel, the occupying power.”
...Peace in Gaza will not emerge from the chancelleries of Ankara or the palaces of Doha. It will come only when Hamas is disarmed, delegitimized, and dismantled, and when those who financed and defended it are held to account, not handed the keys.
...History has a way of judging such folly harshly, and it is unforgiving to those who confuse appeasement with statesmanship. Empowering Turkey and Qatar to oversee Gaza will not weaken Hamas; it will merely entrench it under international cover.
...When the next round of violence erupts – as it inevitably will – no Board of Peace and no communiques or diplomatic euphemisms will obscure those who enabled it or the responsibility they bear for the consequences. (Ed note: Great article from JPost, a must read.) (Read More)
...Peace in Gaza will not emerge from the chancelleries of Ankara or the palaces of Doha. It will come only when Hamas is disarmed, delegitimized, and dismantled, and when those who financed and defended it are held to account, not handed the keys.
...History has a way of judging such folly harshly, and it is unforgiving to those who confuse appeasement with statesmanship. Empowering Turkey and Qatar to oversee Gaza will not weaken Hamas; it will merely entrench it under international cover.
...When the next round of violence erupts – as it inevitably will – no Board of Peace and no communiques or diplomatic euphemisms will obscure those who enabled it or the responsibility they bear for the consequences. (Ed note: Great article from JPost, a must read.) (Read More)
