There are policy decisions that are misguided, and then there are decisions so breathtakingly absurd that one wonders whether satire has replaced strategy. The Trump administration’s reported decision to appoint Turkey and Qatar to the so-called “Board of Peace” tasked with overseeing Gaza belongs firmly in the latter category.
To place Ankara and Doha – two of the most vocal enablers of Hamas – in charge of shepherding Gaza toward peace is akin to appointing the tobacco lobby to run the World Health Organization. It is an insult to common sense and a direct affront to Israel’s most basic security needs.
This is not diplomacy. It is a farce.
Let us dispense with the polite fiction that Turkey and Qatar are “honest brokers.” Qatar has for years served as Hamas’s chief financial lifeline, hosting senior terror leaders in luxury hotels while funneling billions of dollars into the terror group’s coffers.
These funds did not build kindergartens or desalination plants. They built terror tunnels, long-range rockets, and Hamas command centers. Even now, Doha refuses to sever ties with Hamas, preferring instead to cloak its indulgence of terrorism in the language of “mediation.”
Nor has Qatar bothered to hide its worldview. In repeated official statements and speeches by its leaders, the Jewish state is accused of “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and even waging a war of annihilation against the Palestinians.
In March 2025, a Qatari diplomat told the United Nations in Geneva that the “fraternal Palestinian people… face a real existential threat as a result of the war of extermination and ethnic cleansing waged by Israel, the occupying power.”
Three months ago, in October 2025, Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani said in an address in Doha to his government’s Shura Council that Israel was committing “genocide” and characterized its actions as “state terrorism.”
A year prior, in October 2024, he hurled similar slander, saying that what was happening in Gaza “has become crystal clear… it is genocide,” while asserting that Israel was turning the Gaza Strip “into an area unfit for human habitation.” This is not the rhetoric of a neutral peace broker; it is the language of a hostile actor.
Erdogan calls Hamas a 'liberation group'
Turkey, meanwhile, has sought to race Qatar to the bottom. Under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Ankara has been turned into a megaphone for Islamist invective. Less than three weeks after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre of 1,200 Israelis, Erdogan said that Hamas was a “liberation group” acting to defend its land and not a terrorist organization, while labeling Israel a “war criminal.”
In July 2024, Erdogan openly threatened to invade Israel in defense of the Palestinians, saying, “There is no reason why we cannot do this.” Two months later, standing at the podium of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the Turkish tyrant compared the Israeli premier to Adolf Hitler. “Just as Hitler was stopped by the alliance of humanity 70 years ago, Netanyahu and his murder network must also be stopped,” Erdogan said.
Following his boss’s lead, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, in August 2025, accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of “trying to cover up genocide in Gaza,” comparing Israel’s counterterror campaign against Hamas to “the madness of Hitler.” Fidan also asserted that the “Zionist lobby in each country” was helping Israel to hide its actions.
Incredibly, Fidan is the person invited by Washington to represent Turkey on its Board of Peace.
And these are the actors Washington now wants to “oversee” Gaza?
One searches in vain for any statement by Turkey or Qatar calling for Hamas to disarm. There are none. One looks for demands that Hamas relinquish control of Gaza, surrender its weapons, or renounce its genocidal charter. Silence.
The reason is obvious: Neither Ankara nor Doha has any interest in dismantling Hamas. On the contrary. Hamas is useful to them as a lever against Israel, a banner for Islamist street credibility, and a convenient proxy in a regional cold war.
The notion that these two states would suddenly pivot and force Hamas to disarm defies both logic and experience. Turkey shelters Hamas operatives. Qatar bankrolls them. Expecting either country to act against Hamas is like expecting the ayatollahs of Tehran to lead a seminar on religious tolerance.
Yet the Trump administration’s proposal pretends otherwise, as if the mere act of convening a “board” can alchemize ideological hostility into statesmanship. This is fanciful thinking of the most dangerous kind.
Gaza does not need another international committee issuing press releases. It needs the removal – complete, total, and irreversible – of Hamas’s military and political infrastructure. Any framework that does not begin with that premise is not a peace plan; it is a recipe for the next war.
There is a deeper insult here as well. By elevating Turkey and Qatar to this role, and doing so without informing Israel beforehand, Washington signals that the Jewish state’s security concerns are negotiable, that the patrons of its enemies can be entrusted with its future. This is not realism; it is an abdication of responsibility. Allies do not outsource post-war stabilization to regimes that openly cheer for the other side.
Peace in Gaza will not emerge from the chancelleries of Ankara or the palaces of Doha. It will come only when Hamas is disarmed, delegitimized, and dismantled, and when those who financed and defended it are held to account, not handed the keys.
History has a way of judging such folly harshly, and it is unforgiving to those who confuse appeasement with statesmanship. Empowering Turkey and Qatar to oversee Gaza will not weaken Hamas; it will merely entrench it under international cover.
When the next round of violence erupts – as it inevitably will – no Board of Peace and no communiques or diplomatic euphemisms will obscure those who enabled it or the responsibility they bear for the consequences. ■
The writer served as the deputy communications director under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.