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DOHA — Qatar's prime minister and foreign minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, has accused those responsible for the situation in Gaza of being "war criminals," saying in an interview with British journalist Piers Morgan that Israel's response to the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack cannot be defended. The remarks, made on "Piers Morgan Uncensored," underscore how sharply the Gulf state's long-running mediation role has been overtaken by its public condemnation of the war.
The interview, published on 29 September 2026, came at a sensitive moment for a country that has positioned itself as the principal channel for back-channel talks in the Middle East. Sheikh Mohammed attended a quadrilateral meeting of the United States, Iran, Pakistan and Qatar at the Burgenstock hotel complex in Lucerne, Switzerland, on 21 June 2026 — evidence of how far his diplomatic portfolio has expanded beyond the Gaza conflict into a wider regional confrontation.
Sheikh Mohammed did not absolve Hamas. The 7 October attack on Israel, he said, was "a massacre, and should be condemned," and those responsible should be held accountable. But he drew a sharp line between condemning the attack and accepting Israel's retaliation, saying the response was unjustified.
"Hospitals have been targeted, schools have been targeted," he said. "Whatever the justifications and the arguments, nothing is justifying this." The charge was aimed directly at the humanitarian record of the campaign rather than at any single operation, signalling that Doha sees the harm to civilians as the central moral issue rather than a matter of disputed military necessity.
He also used the interview to assess the October 2025 ceasefire in Gaza, which he said was not being honoured. More than 1,400 Gazans have been killed since it ostensibly came into effect, he said, and almost 70 percent of the Strip remains occupied and inaccessible under Israeli military control. "They are not fulfilling their commitments of this agreement," he told Morgan. "This is just showing that they have different intentions."
For Sheikh Mohammed, that record is doubly damaging: it undermines the agreement his government spent months brokering, and it undercuts the credibility of diplomacy as a route out of the war. He said Qatar's efforts to broker a ceasefire had been "undermined from day one of the war," a claim that carries weight given that Doha hosted and convened the negotiations themselves.
The sharpest language was reserved for Israel's 2025 strike on Qatar itself. Sheikh Mohammed condemned what he described as an unprecedented attack in Doha that targeted senior Hamas officials who had been convened for negotiations, and which triggered a deadly explosion. The strike, he said, violated Qatar's sovereignty — a pointed reference to the fact that the target was the state actively working to defuse the very conflict Israel was fighting.
"We were attacked by Israel while we were mediating and trying to push for Trump's proposal at that time in Doha. It was unacceptable and condemned," he said. He argued that the attack sets a precedent of attacking the mediator that, in his words, "has never happened throughout the wars in history."
"Netanyahu has crossed the line like he has crossed other lines before that," Sheikh Mohammed added — a formulation suggesting he sees the strike on Doha as part of a wider pattern of Israeli conduct rather than as an isolated operation.
Asked whether mediation remains viable, he said the task has not been easy but insisted that diplomacy behind closed doors is still the most effective way to make progress. "We are trying to do our best to give the best advice to the US government on how to reach a solution, as well as the Iranians," he said, positioning Doha as an adviser to both Washington and Tehran rather than as a party to any of the fighting.
Much of the interview was devoted to the US-Israel war with Iran, where he identified three matters that must be settled for the conflict to end. The first is agreement on Tehran's right to "peaceful nuclear power," accompanied by the removal of sanctions. The second is agreement on freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz in accordance with international law — an issue with immediate economic consequences for Gulf exporters.
The third is the reform of regional security arrangements, including those involving the Gulf Cooperation Council states and Iran. Sheikh Mohammed said this would not happen without direct dialogue between Iran and the GCC, and without setting explicit principles for what a good neighbourhood relationship should look like.
Those principles, as he described them, include non-interference in each other's internal affairs and non-aggression, along with cooperation in areas of common interest — energy and the economy, trade and business — so that the region can "unleash its potential." The framing is significant: it treats security and economic integration as a single project rather than as separate tracks, and it implies that any durable end to the Iran war must be built with GCC states at the table, not negotiated over their heads.
Taken together, the interview offers a rare two-track assessment from a state that has been hit by one conflict while trying to mediate another. Sheikh Mohammed tied the Gaza and Iran tracks together implicitly: Israel's conduct in Gaza, including the strike on Doha, is presented as evidence of a state that "has different intentions" from the one it professes, while the Iran settlement is offered as a test of whether diplomacy can still deliver.
The practical implication is a narrowing window for the kind of quiet, transactional diplomacy he describes. His account of an October 2025 deal that has since produced more than 1,400 deaths and a stalled withdrawal offers a stern warning: agreements brokered under pressure require enforceable follow-through, and mediators who operate in the open face risks that closed channels are meant to avoid. Whether his terms for ending the Iran war are accepted, and whether the Gaza ceasefire is honoured in practice, will determine whether the back-channel work he defends can survive another year of war.
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