Israel shifted the playing field against Hamas on Tuesday. The terrorist organization’s leadership has been residing in Qatar for over a decade. It has enjoyed a life of luxury and privilege while there.
Visiting Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, and other countries, those top Hamas officials have been able to fly around the Middle East. They felt safe and secure, even when they cheered the October 7 massacre on, watching Israelis being slaughtered.
They watched as the Bibas family was carted off to Gaza; they celebrated as they viewed videos of the massacre of young people at the Nova music festival.
But on September 9, 2025, the party was over for at least some of them.
It took Israel more than 700 days to target Hamas’s leadership in Doha.
In Beirut, Israel had eliminated Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri in January 2024. Then, the terrorist organization’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed as he was relaxing in Tehran.
Other key Hamas figures have also been eliminated: Yahya Sinwar and his brother have both been killed, along with Mohammed Deif, Marwan Issa, and other Gaza-based leaders.
The elephant in the room was the Hamas headship in Doha. Khaled Mashaal, Khalil al-Hayya, Zaher Jabarin, Mousa Abu Marzouk, Mohammed Ismail Darwish, and others were all stationed outside of Gaza. Ghazi Hamad, another key Hamas official, also primarily resides abroad.
Decades of privilege
These senior Hamas officials have enjoyed decades of privilege. The terrorist group was founded in the late 1980s during the First Intifada. It originated from the Muslim Brotherhood, and its base of support was primarily in Gaza.
It had followers among Palestinians in the refugee camps established in 1948 in Gaza. The Muslim Brotherhood experienced exponential growth in the region during the 1980s, mainly through the efforts of its preachers and their networks. It primarily reached Gaza due to the influence of Gazan connections to Egypt.
Egypt had controlled Gaza from 1948 to 1967, and the Muslim Brotherhood had roots in Egypt. However, by the 1980s, the group and its ideology had spread worldwide.
In the 1990s, Hamas members earned their spurs murdering Palestinian “collaborators” and seeking to derail the Middle East peace process. They picked up where the Soviet Union had left off. As the Cold War ended and the wind in the sails of the PLO shifted, Hamas injected Islamist extremism into the Palestinian movement.
Hamas began brutally; its gangs in Gaza were torturing and murdering. This murder campaign directed at collaborators wasn’t that different than other terrorist groups such as the IRA. However, Hamas soon shifted to murdering Israeli civilians and kidnapping Israelis. It benefited from this.
Mousa Abu Marzouk is an example of Hamas jet set privilege. Born in 1951 in Rafah, he moved to the UAE and worked as an engineer. He then attended university in the US in 1982. Life in the US didn’t make him more tolerant, though. Instead, he became a senior official in Hamas, enabling fundraising and also going to Tehran and Jordan.
Marzouk apparently went as far as to hold talks with US officials, even as Hamas was murdering people in Israel. Jordan asked him to leave in 1995, and Marzouk flew to the US, where he was finally detained that same year. He was deported to Jordan in 1997 and subsequently spent time traveling throughout the Middle East, including visits to Cairo and Doha.
Like many Hamas officials, Marzouk spent time cultivating Jewish connections. And, like many other top brass Hamas leaders, he assumed that they could murder Jews, blow up buses, and sit and relax with other Jews while pretending to be open to talks.
Toward that end, Marzouk interviewed with the US Jewish publication The Forward in 2012. He conducted his interview while relaxing in Cairo as Hamas continued its war on Israel from Gaza. The terrorist organization found it to be normal to murder children while relaxing abroad, holding court for interviews.
Khaled Mashaal enjoyed the same privilege. Born in the Jordanian-ruled West Bank in 1956, he lived in Kuwait for years and then in Jordan. Israel attempted to kill him in 1997, but the attempt went awry, and Mashaal survived. He was finally expelled from Jordan in 1999 and eventually ended up in Syria.
When the Syrian civil war broke out, he left the country. Like many Hamas members, he moved to Doha. Meanwhile, Qatar was a friend of the US, eventually becoming a major non-NATO ally. It also hosted an American military base.
Nevertheless, Hamas felt comfortable there. Mashaal, akin to many other Hamas officials, enjoyed the privilege of flying back and forth to Turkey. In 2015, for instance, he met with Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Significantly, Hamas’s leadership gathered together to celebrate on October 7 in Doha. None of them were shocked by the attack, even though some commentators have claimed that the Doha leaders were unaware of what Sinwar was planning in Gaza.
But there is no evidence to suggest that the Hamas officials in Qatar were, by any means, surprised. On the contrary, they cheered and called on more countries and groups to join the attack on Israel.
Hamas members, such as the aforementioned Ghazi Hamad, who were portrayed over the years as being open to negotiations with Israel due to their role in the Gilad Schalit deal, had called instead for more October 7-like attacks.
After the October 7 massacre, Hamas assumed that its friends in Doha and Ankara could get the US to pressure Israel into a ceasefire. It then thought that a hostage deal would be struck, and that it would gain influence in the West Bank in an insulting manner.
The terrorist organization calculated that it could leverage this toward a technocratic Palestinian Authority government when Mahmoud Abbas steps aside or dies. Then, it assumed it would take over the West Bank while maintaining control of Gaza.
It is believed that it could also get some tacit support from Egypt and other states. Egypt had opposed the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.
However, after Cairo reconciled with Turkey, it appears that it decided to turn the other way in terms of Hamas plots in exchange for Turkey and Qatar stopping their critique of the government in Egypt.
Ankara had backed Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leader in Egypt, in 2012. However, after Morsi died in 2019, Ankara could move on.
All in all, over the years, Hamas has enjoyed the privilege of massacring Israelis and getting away with it. Its leaders in Doha assumed that they could come to power the way the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan.
Doha had also hosted the Taliban. Still, even as other Hamas leaders were getting killed, Hamas in Qatar did not heed the warnings of US President Donald Trump. It assumed that its luck would never run out.
On September 9, a day to be remembered for bringing justice to the October 7 victims, some of those Hamas leaders appear to have run out of decades of privilege.