A senior member of the negotiation team working to return the hostages recently told me the following: "I always had the feeling there was an inexplicable bias in favor of Qatar. Strange things happened. It started when we were instructed early on to brief Yossi Cohen, the former Mossad chief, ahead of his trip to the Gulf. Later, the prime minister arranged trips with the Mossad chief over our heads. Former senior Mossad officials occasionally joined team meetings, and every time the Egyptian mediators tried to assert themselves, it felt like someone was cutting them down so that Qatar could continue to lead the mediation."
This senior official suspects that "Qatargate" is just the tip of the iceberg, and that there are many other pieces of the puzzle we don’t know about. When David Meidan mediated during the Gilad Shalit affair, Benjamin Netanyahu asked him to meet with the Qatari prime minister — the uncle of the current prime minister. The mediator at the time was French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Meidan met with the Qatari PM in London, but returned to the Egyptian mediation. He didn’t trust the Qataris. He told the Americans that Qatar was playing a double game: "You watch Al Jazeera in English," he told them, "you have no idea what's happening on Al Jazeera in Arabic."
Why have the Qataris become the central mediators in this war, and not the Egyptians? Another senior member of the negotiation team once said to me: "How do I know Qatar isn’t good for us? Because Hamas insists on working through them. Logically, if Hamas wants Qatar, we should want the Egyptians. The Egyptians also have clear leverage over Hamas — and more importantly, they don’t like them."
There are also other reasons that might explain Qatar’s dominant role. First, the Qatari prime minister is sophisticated, articulate, and manipulative — especially compared to the former head of Egyptian intelligence, who was replaced about six months ago. Second, the Americans really want the Qataris involved. Right after October 7, then–U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the Emir of Qatar that once the hostage issue was resolved, “that’s it — your romance with Hamas is over.” The Emir promised it would be, and began mediating a deal. Very quickly, he delivered for the Americans by facilitating the release of Judith and Natalie Raanan without any compensation — a direct gesture to Joe Biden.
Hamas’s preference for Qatari mediation means it makes its concessions through Qatar. Qatar has also hired so many former senior U.S. officials that it’s hard to tell whether their support is based on merit or because they’ve worked for Qatar — or plan to in the future. In the midst of the negotiations, when the time came to renew the U.S. lease for its large military base in Qatar, Israel pressured the U.S. to make the renewal conditional on Qatar applying real pressure on Hamas. That didn’t happen. The lease was renewed almost automatically.
Qatar’s role as mediator also led the Americans to initially appoint CIA Director William Burns as the head of their negotiation team. As a result, Israel put Mossad Director David Barnea at the helm on its side — until he was replaced by Ron Dermer. Barnea is highly capable, but less suited to leading hostage negotiations. He’s not an Arabist, not experienced in negotiations, and Netanyahu was able to manipulate him fairly easily — to the dismay of other senior members of the team.
The question now is whether to continue relying on Qatari mediation. Netanyahu, in any case, doesn’t truly want a deal. He feels he has already brought home far more hostages than could have been expected. Only public pressure might eventually force him to soften his positions. In the meantime, perhaps it’s worth putting one more demand on the table: we will only accept Egyptian leadership of the negotiations. Nothing else. Even if Steve Witkoff doesn’t like it.