US Secretary Marco Rubio’s first engagement after arriving in Israel this weekend to discuss the Gaza war and the fallout of Israel’s strike in Qatar sent a dangerous signal.

By visiting Jerusalem’s Western Wall, a Jewish place of prayer and pilgrimage together with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the United States’ Christian Zionist ambassador to the Jewish state, Mike Huckabee, Mr. Rubio was implicitly framing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a religious and civilisational rather than a national dispute.

Is Qatar the straw that breaks the camel’s back by James M. Dorsey

Israel is playing a high-stakes game of bluff poker.

The problem is that the stakes are high not only for Israel but also for its foremost supporters, the United States and Europe, as well as Gulf states with which it enjoyed close relations despite differences over Gaza, Palestine, and Iran.

How the US, Europe, and the Gulf respond to Israel's targeting of Hamas's leadership in exile in Qatar, one of three mediators alongside the United States and Egypt in the Gaza war, is likely to determine whether Israel's gamble pays off.

The fact that Israel failed to kill any of the senior Hamas leaders gathered to discuss an Israeli-endorsed US proposal to end the war and initial responses to the attack don't bode well for Israel.

Israel’s risky strike against Qatar was neither an unmitigated success in Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s terms nor a complete failure, even if it’s too early for a definitive cost-benefit analysis of what could prove to be a watershed.

With the United States and Israel discussing a follow-up to a US$38 billion ten-year Memorandum of Understanding between the two countries, which is set to expire in 2028, Israeli officials are warming to the notion of a paradigm shift in US-Israeli military relations.

Nearly two years into Israel’s devastating war in Gaza, ceasefire negotiations remain stalled, the humanitarian toll continues to mount, and international divisions are deepening. Despite mounting global pressure, Israel has resisted calls for a permanent ceasefire, insisting on unfeasible conditions.

During this week’s Middle East Report, James M. Dorsey analysed the faltering ceasefire efforts.

Dorsey outlined the core of the impasse: a mounting divergence between Israeli and much of the international community, and Hamas’s demands on the other. In August, Hamas accepted an Israeli-endorsed US proposal for a 60-day ceasefire. Yet, Israel and US envoy Steve Witkoff shifted the narrative, insisting any truce be permanent and linked to full hostage release—effectively changing the negotiated goalposts.

Dorsey warned that this tactical shift by Israel and the United States amounts to deliberate undermining of ceasefire momentum.

“So, in effect, what Israel is doing is sabotaging a ceasefire,” Dorsey said.

The Trump administration has enacted sweeping punitive measures against Palestinians: preventing Palestinian officials—including President Mahmoud Abbas—from attending the United Nations General Assembly in New York; barring Palestinian passport holders from US entry; and sanctioning Palestinian human rights groups supporting South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Dorsey observed that diplomatic and economic pressure on Israel remains insufficient—yet potentially poised to escalate.

“Private sector and limited government sanctions are troubling Israelis, but not enough to push Prime Minister Netanyahu to reconsider his policies,” Dorsey said.

At the same time, civil society in Europe and elsewhere are campaigning for sanctions against Israel.

“If and when sanctions start to kick in by the Europeans, serious sanctions that start to hit where it hurts, that’s something that Israel is going to have to take account of,” Dorsey said.

Dorsey also spotlighted the latest flotilla of 50 ships from 44 countries—including activists from Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar—that has set sail to break the siege of Gaza. He flagged the unprecedented involvement of Gulf nationals as “remarkable,” given the suppression of pro-Palestinian expression of support in much of the Middle East.

Finally, Dorsey touched on Lebanon’s entanglement: the Lebanese government, under US pressure, has committed to disarming Hezbollah, though the group has refused to comply.

On paper, this move is framed as a step toward consolidating state sovereignty by ensuring the monopoly of arms rests with the state. But in practice, it places Beirut in an impossible bind. Hezbollah, still reeling but not broken from its latest confrontation with Israel, has declared it will not give up its weapons as long as Israeli forces occupy Lebanese land. This creates a standoff between Hezbollah, which commands loyalty across significant sections of Lebanese society, and the fragile Lebanese state.

For ordinary Lebanese, this uncertainty compounds daily struggles. The country is still reeling from years of financial crisis, the 2020 Beirut port explosion, and one of the world’s worst currency devaluations. Analysts warn that pressure to confront Hezbollah militarily could trigger fresh conflict in a society exhausted by instability. At the same time, Washington insists that Lebanon must show it can rein in armed groups operating independently of the state.

As Dorsey put it, this leaves Lebanon “between a rock and a hard place,” trying to navigate American demands without igniting a civil confrontation that could spiral into another round of violence.

Israelis are enjoying their mangoes this summer at sharply reduced prices at the expense of food-deprived Gazan Palestinians.

The sharp drop in mango prices is as much a result of Israel's throttling of the flow of food into Gaza and its economic blockade of the Strip as it is a byproduct of increasing consumer boycotts of Israeli products and US President Donald Trump's tariffs on Brazilian and Mexican imports of the fruit.

As a result, Israel is witnessing a mango glut, with the Gaza market shut down because of the almost two-year-long war, and Latin American producers are grabbing European market share from Israel with pricing that undercuts Israeli produce.

Mangos are the exception to the rule.

Most private sector and primarily limited government sanctions and boycotts of Israel are causing Israelis discomfort, but not yet the kind of pain that could persuade Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to rethink his warmongering and morally, legally, and politically questionable policies.

However, the pain is likely to increase, all the more so as Israel and the Trump administration proceed with plans to make Gaza even more uninhabitable than it already is, so that Palestinians decide they have no option but to emigrate.

The UAE’s long-standing no holds barred campaign to persuade Western and other nations to proscribe the Muslim Brotherhood as the source of all Islamist evil, is producing results.

The question is whether crackdowns on freedoms of expression and assembly, leaving Muslims and others with few, if any, release valves, coupled with anger at Western and Arab restrictions on expression of support for the Palestinians and a Western refusal to sanction Israel for its Gaza war conduct, creates a feeding ground for a next generation of Islamist militants.

James discusses on Radio Islam the dim prospects for ending the Gaza war and resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Pursuing diametrically opposed objectives, Gaza's ceasefire mediators are working at cross purposes.

The divide among the mediators, the United States, Qatar, and Egypt, significantly diminishes the chances of the ceasefire talks succeeding and, if they do, reaching a deal that would lead to an end of the war.

Hamas’s renewed acceptance by Hamas of a months-old Israeli-endorsed US proposal for a 60-day-ceasefire was as much a product of the mediators working at cross purposes as it was a Qatar-Egyptian attempt to get the talks back on track.

It was also an effort to re-engage US President Donald Trump, who, faced with mounting criticism of Israel’s Gaza starvation policy from segments of his support base, has gone silent on the ceasefire talks.

Finally, Qatar and Egypt hope the revived talks will keep open the door to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.