The End Game

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, September 09, 2025

 

Just ten days after the Israeli Air Force all but decapitated the Yemeni Houthis’ leadership in one deft blow, and just under a year after the Israelis meted out a similar fate to Hezbollah’s senior commanders, Hamas’s Politburo abroad may have been eliminated in an Israeli airstrike.

 

In an unprecedented airstrike, Israel finally took long-threatened action against Hamas’s leadership inside Doha, Qatar – the senior members of which were apparently still taking shelter in Qatar’s capital city despite the government’s pledge to kick Hamas out at Washington’s request in November of last year.

 

“For years, these members of the Hamas leadership have led the terrorist organization’s operations, are directly responsible for the brutal October 7 massacre, and have been orchestrating and managing the war against the State of Israel,” the Israeli Defense Forces said in a statement.

 

As of this writing, there are still conflicting reports about the status of the figures Israel targeted. We do, however, know who those targets were:

 

·        Nizar Awadallah, a U.S.-branded Specially Designated Global Terrorist and an associate of Hamas’s founders and spiritual leaders who has played a central role in negotiating prisoner exchanges with Israel going back decades.

 

·        Mohammed Darwish, the head of Hamas’ Shura Council and reportedly one of the figures considered to replace Ismail Haniyeh (who was neutralized in a covert Israeli operation inside Tehran) as the head of the terrorist group’s political bureau.

 

·        Zaher Jabarin, “considered Hamas’s ‘economic brain,’” according to Ynet, Jabarin was described as Hamas’s “CEO” – the man at the top of the terrorist group’s global financial network who underwrote Hamas’s terror attacks, including the 10/7 massacre.

 

·        Khaled Mashaal, Hamas’s leader abroad and the head of Hamas’s political bureau before Haniyah’s ascension, is under indictment in the United States for his involvement in a “decades-long campaign” of terrorism that has claimed hundreds of lives, including American citizens.

 

The Qatari government has bitterly protested Israel’s “reckless” conduct and the “blatant violation” of its sovereignty — language that mirrors Doha’s protests over the “flagrant violation” of its borders and international law following Iran’s effort to retaliate for Operation Midnight Hammer against the U.S.-run Al Udeid base inside Qatar. We subsequently learned that Tehran had given Qatar a heads-up in advance of that strike. The Wall Street Journal reported that similar forewarning was provided to the Qataris ahead of Tuesday’s action.

 

U.S. officials said that they were only given a tipoff as the strikes “were being launched,” so they had neither operational knowledge of the strike nor — they emphasize — the capacity to intervene and alter Israel’s operational plans. As Phil noted, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence that this was a “wholly independent Israeli operation” is consistent with either that story or evidence of Washington’s desire to maintain its distance from the strike.

 

And yet, the mission came one day after the president put some stark terms before Hamas’s leadership abroad. “This is my last warning,” Trump wrote of Hamas’s refusal to endorse what the terror group called a “humiliating surrender document.” Surrender might have been humiliating, but probably not more so than discovering that Israel’s reach extends even to the safe harbors like Qatar. That, and the vaporization of the terrorist group’s soft and comfortable leaders miles from the front lines of the conflict they started and lost, is, one might say, pretty embarrassing.

 

The international diplomatic and media establishments have reacted to the strike on Hamas with reflexive apprehension. Western European leaders have condemned it. Mainstream media outlets are beside themselves with fear that the long-stalled cease-fire negotiation process will remain stuck. Israel just executed “an attack on the capital of a major non-NATO US ally in the midst of U.S.-supported negotiations against officials who were originally hosted there at the U.S.’s request,” marveled Senator Bernie Sanders’s onetime foreign policy adviser Matt Duss (who has clearly missed some recent developments). Former State Department spokesman Ned Price issued sotto voce admonitions to those like Duss whose criticisms of Israel back them into tacitly supporting terror-sponsors like Qatar. And yet, he called the strike a “dangerous escalation” that is “counterproductive” if the goal is “an end to this horrible war.”

 

But there would be no “end” to the war against Hamas with a cease-fire — only a brief interlude before the next war. Hamas cannot justify its own existence in the absence of its raison d’être, waging existential conflict against the Jewish people with only the near-term goal of putting an end to the “Zionist project.” That’s its purpose. That’s how it recruits fighters, raises funds, and subjugates the civilians under its boot. Wars end not through negotiated cease-fires but definitive victories. A lot of Westerners cannot conceive of conclusive victory in war anymore. Fortunately, Israel still can.