Former Qatar PM says Netanyahu using Iran war to reshape Middle East

Former Qatari prime minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani has accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of using the war with Iran to advance a long-standing plan to reshape the Middle East, warning that the escalating crisis around the Strait of Hormuz could become its most dangerous global consequence.

In a wide-ranging interview with Al Muqabala on Al Jazeera, he said the United States–Israel war on Iran was not a sudden escalation but “the culmination of a long-term Israeli agenda to violently reshape the Middle East”.

He argued the conflict had been years in the making and warned, “We are witnessing a major restructuring of the region,” adding that its consequences would last for decades.

Sheikh Hamad directly singled out Netanyahu as a key driver of the escalation, saying he had convinced Washington the war would be short and decisive.

“He convinced the US administration that the war would be short and swift and that the Iranian regime would fall within weeks,” he said, adding that previous US reluctance had been overcome by what he described as a misleading assessment of the outcome. 

He also criticised Washington’s reliance on force, saying, “America’s true power has always been in its ability to avoid using force, not in deploying it.”

He argued that diplomacy had been abandoned too early and suggested that extended talks in Geneva earlier this year could have prevented the war. According to him, Netanyahu has since emerged as the main beneficiary of the conflict, using the resulting instability to promote political and strategic shifts in the region, including ideas associated with a “Greater Israel” and forced regional alignments.

A major concern in his remarks was the Strait of Hormuz, which he described as the most dangerous fallout of the war. He said Iran had increasingly used the strategic waterway as leverage, warning that instability there now poses a greater immediate threat to global economies than the nuclear issue.

He also accused Iran of striking Gulf infrastructure under the pretext of targeting US interests, despite Gulf opposition to the war, saying this had significantly damaged Tehran’s standing in the region.

Sheikh Hamad called for stronger regional coordination, warning that internal Gulf divisions were a greater threat than external powers. He proposed the creation of a unified defence framework, a “Gulf NATO”, with Saudi Arabia at its core, and suggested the model could evolve gradually like the early stages of the European Union.

At the same time, he cautioned that Gulf states could no longer rely entirely on the United States, given Washington’s strategic pivot towards Asia and its focus on competition with China, urging deeper long-term partnerships with countries such as Türkiye, Pakistan and Egypt.

On Gaza, he described Israel’s campaign as a “moral and political disaster” and warned of efforts to depopulate the enclave through financial incentives for displacement, calling it “a real estate project” in effect. He rejected any discussion of disarming Hamas without a clear political path to Palestinian statehood, and praised Saudi Arabia for refusing normalisation with Israel without such a roadmap.

He also reflected on regional shifts, expressing relief at the fall of Bashar al-Assad and urging Syria’s new leadership to focus on reconstruction after years of war. Separately, he revealed that in the late 1990s Qatar had acted as an intermediary delivering a US message to Iran during the Clinton administration regarding its nuclear programme, underscoring long-standing backchannel diplomacy between the sides.

Overall, he portrayed the region as entering a period of deep geopolitical transformation, driven by war, shifting alliances and growing uncertainty over key strategic chokepoints and security architectures.

By Aghakazim Guliyev