Donald Trump, the President of the United States, alleged on Monday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not tell him ahead of time about Israel’s attack in Qatar last week. Axios reported that Netanyahu told the U.S. president about the strike moments before it happened, which is the opposite of what Trump said.
The Trump administration has always said that it was only told about the missiles after they were already in the air, which meant that the U.S. couldn’t stop the strike. But the Axios article, which cited Israeli sources, said that the White House knew about it before, even though the time frame to stop the strike would have been short. When asked explicitly if Netanyahu had told him of the strike, Trump said, “No, no, they didn’t.”
The Israeli airstrike in Qatar on Tuesday was meant to kill Hamas’s top leaders. People all throughout the Middle East and the world have decried the action as something that could make things worse in an already tense area. The U.S. is friends with both Israel and Qatar. Doha is also very important as a mediator in efforts to end the fighting in Gaza.
After the Axios article, Netanyahu’s office repeated its claim that the bombing was a “wholly independent” Israeli operation. The raid is part of Israel’s larger military assault since the October 2023 onslaught by Palestinian Hamas militants, which killed 1,200 people and took more than 250 captives. Many human rights experts have said that Israel’s military activities in Gaza, which have forced everyone to leave and caused a hunger crisis, could be considered genocide. Israel dismisses these claims, saying that its acts are in self-defense.