Donald Trump’s Negotiating Trap in Doha
An Israeli airstrike in Doha has cast a long shadow over the latest round of ceasefire diplomacy. Hamas negotiators, assembled under Qatari protection, became the targets of a strike that killed the son of Khalil al-Hayya, the group’s chief negotiator, along with a member of Qatar’s security services. Senior Hamas figures survived.
How the meeting came about, and how the strike unfolded, is now the subject of intense dispute. According to critics of the Trump administration, Washington presented a U.S.-backed, Israeli-drafted ceasefire proposal — a brief, 100-word text accompanied, they say, by an ultimatum: accept or face consequences. Hamas leaders traveled to Doha to review the offer. At that point, Israeli aircraft struck.
What role Qatar’s U.S.-linked air defenses played is unclear. Some accounts suggest the systems “stood down,” allowing Israeli jets to enter Qatari airspace unhindered. Others say the Hamas leaders survived only because they had stepped into a prayer room at the moment of impact, leaving their mobile phones behind in the meeting room. Surveillance planes, according to these accounts, were circling nearby, monitoring the signals from those phones and relaying the data to Israeli strike aircraft. The missiles were aimed at the spot where the signals converged — but the intended targets had already moved. None of these details have been independently verified.
The strike has been read by critics as proof that negotiations were never intended to succeed. Instead, they describe what unfolded as a coordinated trap — a conspiracy linking Washington and Tel Aviv, with Donald Trump outsourcing regional policy to Benjamin Netanyahu.
Such suspicions are not new. Trump has been accused, without corroboration, of allowing negotiations to serve as bait for Israeli military action in the past — whether against Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah or Iran during nuclear talks. For Hamas, the pattern is presented as grimly familiar: leaders invited to talks only to be hunted down — Saleh al-Arouri assassinated in Beirut, Ismail Haniyeh reported killed in Tehran (a claim still disputed), and now the Doha strike. With 10,000 U.S. troops stationed at Al Udeid airbase, some argue that Qatar has been left humiliated, unless, as others suggest darkly, Doha was itself complicit.
For many observers, the implications are stark. They argue that negotiations are over, that Israel has shifted into what some describe as “final-solution mode” in Gaza — a campaign unconstrained by international law, shielded by U.S. power, and directed at any interlocutors willing to talk. Trump, while publicly professing to be “very unhappy” about the incident, is nonetheless said by his critics to have provided a green light. The question now hangs over every future initiative: after Doha, who would choose to negotiate with the United States again?
Speculation has also extended beyond the United States and Israel. Open-source flight watchers noted an RAF Voyager aircraft circling off the coast of Qatar at the time of the attack, prompting rumors that Britain may have had advance notice. Defense specialists quickly dismissed the theory, citing incompatible refueling systems, but the sighting circulated widely online.
Embedded image; copyright stamp @Loredana Cioclei. Flight-tracking map of RAF Voyager (callsign LION03) circling off Doha
Flight-tracking map of RAF Voyager (callsign LION03) circling off Doha, Qatar, near Al Udeid Air Base. Published by The Canary (Skwawkbox), 9 Sept 2025. Source: The Canary.
