Doha Not as Safe a Hangout for Hamas as It Used to Be

On the menu today: Like an old AT&T commercial, Israel reached out and touched someone in Hamas in Doha, Qatar. That’s the good news; the bad news is that last night Vladimir Putin and the Russian military sent a small swarm of military drones into Polish airspace. Hey, what’s the worst that could happen when a dictator with delusions of grandeur chooses to invade Poland, right? Elsewhere, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics revises its numbers and finds that for much of Biden’s final year in office, job creation was half what it previously estimated. Whoops.

Israel’s Unmistakable Message

Hamas’s political leadership has resided in Doha, Qatar, since 2012. According to Meshal bin Hamad Al Thani, the Qatari ambassador to the U.S., “the Hamas political office in Qatar was opened in 2012 after a request from Washington to establish indirect lines of communication with Hamas. . . . The presence of the Hamas office shouldn’t be confused with endorsement but rather establishes an important channel for indirect communication.”

Obama administration officials remember it a little differently:

Fox News Digital confirmed with a former Obama administration State Department official that the U.S. did request the establishment of the Hamas office, but Goldberg and Steven Simon, a senior director on the National Security Council (NSC) for the Middle East and North Africa during the Obama administration, said the U.S. merely supported the office’s establishment in Doha.

“Hamas was going to go somewhere, and the Qataris wanted to host it,” Simon told Fox News Digital. “Of course, it was discussed with the United States, and we said, ‘go ahead.’”

On paper there was a logic to this move; the U.S. wanted a reliable channel for negotiations. Hamas’s political leadership had previously operated in Syria, and by 2012 the Syrian civil war was starting to heat up. Hamas leaders, despite all their talk of the glories of martyrdom, did not want to die, either at the hands of some faction in the Syrian civil war or in some Israeli airstrike.

And face it, by the standards of Middle Eastern cities, Doha ranks among the best. Most of the Gaza Strip is impoverished, crowded, and pretty miserable; Doha, as the cruise lines describe, “is a dynamic and progressive city boasting luxury shopping, fine dining and museums as exuberant as those you’d find in Dubai.”

And if you think American CEOs have excessive compensation packages, you should see how well terrorist leaders get paid:

Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh, who in 2006 was elected prime minister over all Palestinian territories, has remained outside of Gaza since 2019. Haniyeh — whom Israel estimates is worth $4 billion — splits his time between luxury hotels in Qatar and Turkey. He and his associates have been photographed flying in private jets, enjoying fine dining, and attending international sporting events.

Haniyeh’s adult son, Maaz Haniyeh, reportedly both controls a real estate empire in Gaza and lives a playboy lifestyle in Turkey. Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior member of Hamas’s politburo, lives in Egypt and is estimated by Israel to be worth $3 billion. Israel also estimates former Hamas political chief Khaled Mashal — who also lives in Qatar — to be worth $4 billion.

If you’re a financial supporter of Hamas, you’re a terrible person and depending upon where you live, you’re probably in violation of your country’s laws. But you’re also a sucker, as Hamas leaders have taken your money and lived a lifestyle that Robin Leach could showcase. That money you gave to help fight the Zionist occupier from the river to the sea was probably used on a luxury hotel suite that even Liberace would call “a bit much.”

So life was pretty sweet for Hamas leaders living in Doha; while their underlings got pulverized by Israeli airstrikes and other military operations, guys like Hamas chief Khalid Mishal got to work on their table tennis games. And Hamas’s top men surely felt safe there; Qatar is a peninsula in the Persian Gulf, sticking up out of Saudi Arabia, more than 1,110 miles from Israel. What was the Israel air force going to do, fly all the way over and bomb them in Doha?

Yesterday, the Israeli government demonstrated that, yeah, they can do exactly that.

As demonstrated during Israel’s strikes on Iran, the Syrian Air Force is in no shape to function as even a speed bump to Israeli jets heading east, and as our Henry Olsen notices, at least one or two Arab countries must have looked the other way as Israeli fighter jets and refueling planes flew overhead:

Israeli reports state that the strike was carried out by Israeli Air Force fighter planes that required many refuelings en route. That means the jets and large tankers were in the air for hours before they reached their target. Some country’s radars and air defenses likely spotted those planes well before they reached Doha. . . .

There’s a further clue pointing to tacit Jordanian and Saudi cooperation: the direction the planes were traveling when American radar identified them. According to the Times of Israel, radar at America’s large base in Qatar identified Israeli planes “heading toward the east,” leading Americans to demand “an explanation.” Planes approaching Qatar from Saudi airspace would be heading east; those approaching from Iranian or Kuwaiti airspace would likely be heading south or west as they came near.

The upshot of this is as important as it is simple: the U.S.-Israeli alliance now holds unparalleled sway throughout the region. The Iranian-backed Syrian regime is gone, and its Houthi and Hezbollah proxies have been severely damaged. Iraq is powerless to protect its airspace against Israeli incursion, and Jordan has long been at peace with Israel and allied with the U.S. Now Israel can even reach Gulf states militarily in pursuit of its enemies.

No more need for Mossad agents to slip into a hostile country and plant smuggled explosives anywhere. The Israelis said 15 fighter jets were involved in the attack and dropped ten bombs. The Qatari government said the site was the “residential headquarters where members of the Hamas Political Bureau reside.”

The Israelis stated they hit the villa of Hamas chief Khalil al-Hayya. In a statement Tuesday, Hamas said Hayya had survived the attack, which killed his son and the director of his office, as well as three bodyguards and an officer from Qatar’s Internal Security Forces.

One of the funnier kabuki theater aspects of this story is that everyone who quietly assented to Israel literally hitting Hamas leaders where they live now must act like they had no idea and object to it.

Last night, President Trump said, “Well, I'm not thrilled. I'm not thrilled about it. . . . I'm not thrilled about the whole situation. It's not, a good situation. But I will say this. We want the hostages back, but we are not thrilled about the way that went down today.”

On Sunday, President Trump posted on Truth Social, “I have warned Hamas about the consequences of not accepting. This is my last warning, there will not be another one.”

On Monday, this newsletter noted Trump’s past dire-sounding warnings to Hamas and asked whether there would be follow-through.

On Tuesday, the roof caved in on Hamas political headquarters.

It turns out that once again, no, Trump does not always chicken out.

Great, Another Dictator Is Violating the Sovereignty of Poland

If you’ve been reading this newsletter or other corners of National Review, you know that the Russian government and its military are constantly probing new ways to mess with NATO countries. Russia is jamming GPS signals over the Baltic Sea; aviation experts argue it’s just a matter of time before this leads to a crash. At the end of last month, a plane carrying European Union head Ursula von der Leyen was hit by “GPS jamming” as it readied to land in Bulgaria. Last year, Russia removed border-marker buoys from the Narva River separating Russia and Estonia, a NATO member country. Russian sabotage operations are at work all over Europe.

Last night, Russia took another big step. The Polish military confirmed “an unprecedented violation of Polish airspace by drone-type objects. This is an act of aggression that posed a real threat to the safety of our citizens”:

[Polish Prime Minister Donald] Tusk said 19 violations were recorded, though figures were not final, and that three drones were confirmed shot down, with a fourth probably downed as well.

According to Tusk, this was the first time drones entering Polish airspace came from Belarus rather than Ukraine. “What is new is the direction from which the drones violating Polish airspace came — for the first time in the history of this war, they did not come from over Ukraine [but] a significant portion of these drones flew over Poland directly from Belarus,” he said.

Nearly 20 Russian drones don’t just “accidentally” cross over into Polish airspace. Every Russian drone operator knows exactly where Ukrainian and Belarussian airspace ends and where NATO airspace begins. This incursion occurred because the Russian military wanted it to happen, probably because they intended to monitor and study how NATO countries respond to hostile military drones entering their airspace.

The Polish government temporarily closed at least two airports, Chopin Airport in Warsaw and the Rzeszow-Jasionka Airport in the southeast. As you may recall from my coverage of my first trip to Ukraine, Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport is the hub of the NATO effort to send military aid to Ukraine:

The airport was a strange combination of small local airport, with flights to Warsaw and Gdansk, and major NATO air base, with lines of tan, heavily armored trucks called MRAPs (mine-resistant, ambush protected). The radar for a British Sky Sabre air-defense system and Patriot-missile batteries were visible from the road. (Because anyone in Poland can just drive up and see it from the road, I’m not telling you anything new or sensitive about the facility’s security.)

When Volodymyr Zelensky needs to travel abroad, he usually flies out of Rzeszów-Jasionka because . . . well, nobody’s flying over Ukrainian airspace except military missions.

The Russian government still has its embassy open here in the United States, and it still has a military attaché office, at 2552 Belmont Road off Massachusetts Avenue. (It is a stone’s throw away from the current residence of Barack and Michelle Obama.) Some argue that the U.S. should expel all Russian diplomatic personnel, but I think it is good to keep lines of communication open. This would, however, be a good time for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to reach out to the Russian defense attaché and read him the riot act and ask him if Russia wants a war with NATO, because sending a swarm of military drones into Poland’s airspace is a heck of a good way to start World War III.

Or maybe today is a good day for the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg to suddenly lose all connectivity to the Internet again.

ADDENDUM: The Bureau of Labor Statistics gets its jobs data from surveying American companies. As more survey responses come in, the bureau adjusts its numbers. Unfortunately, American businesses are growing less interested in responding to the BLS requests for hiring and firing information. As recently as 2013, 90 percent of businesses contacted by BLS responded; it’s now down to about 67 percent. To make up for having less data, BLS must use other methods to estimate and get the best assessment possible.

So, there’s nothing necessarily sinister or biased about a revised number. (Although I get suspicious when, say, a state economic bureau consistently announces impressive job creation numbers, month after month, and those numbers consistently get revised downward dramatically in subsequent months. Particularly when it happens right around when an embattled governor is running for reelection.)

And as reader Wyckham Seelig reminded me yesterday, “About 163 million people are employed in the U.S. So, when the BLS calculates the number of jobs lost or gained over a year, an error of six-tenths of a percent (.006) in either number creates a 1 million job difference. I'm amazed at how well they do.”

Yesterday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics data offered its updated numbers for the year between April 2024 and March 2025, and revealed that instead of creating 1.8 million new jobs as previously estimated, the U.S. economy created less than half that -- only 847,000 jobs. That’s not a disastrous number, but it is a pretty tepid rate of job growth and an indication that the economy was sluggish for much of that stretch.

As I wrote yesterday, this blows a giant hole in the 2024 campaign narrative that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had presided over “a red-hot economy” and that Americans were not giving them enough credit for what the left-wing Center for American Progress insisted was the best economy in decades.

And for those wondering, no, Trump’s appointee to head the bureau, E. J. Antoni, is not yet running the show over there; he hasn’t even had his confirmation hearing yet.