Qatar Welcomed Hamas Leaders Years Before the US-Backed Doha Office
Qatar’s own foreign minister said the emir initiated the 1999 reception of four Hamas leaders, with Washington notified a day before they arrived. The political office established in 2012 came much later.
Qatar’s relationship with Hamas did not begin with the political office it says opened at Washington’s request in 2012. Thirteen years earlier, Doha had received four of the movement’s leaders under an arrangement its own foreign minister attributed to the emir.
The older account, highlighted in Eitan Fischberger’s thread on X, adds a chapter often missing from that explanation. The 2012 office was a separate arrangement. It was not the beginning of Qatar’s hospitality toward Hamas.
A Qatari plane out of Jordan
On November 21, 1999, Khaled Mashal, Ibrahim Ghosheh, Izzat al-Risheq and Sami Khater arrived in Doha aboard a private Qatari government aircraft, UPI reported. Jordan had moved against Hamas, shut its offices and detained its members.
These were senior figures: Mashal headed the political bureau, Ghosheh was its spokesman, and al-Risheq and Khater sat on the bureau. UPI described their departure as forced deportation. Jordan said they had been allowed to leave after consultations between King Abdullah II and Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani.
The invitation came from the emir
Less than two weeks later, Qatar’s foreign minister offered a more revealing account. In a report dated December 3, 1999, Al Bayan described Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani saying that King Abdullah had agreed to a request from the emir.
The minister denied an American role or Israeli pressure. Qatar had coordinated only with Jordan, he said. Washington was informed one day before the Hamas leaders arrived, without being asked for its opinion. In Qatar’s public account at the time, the United States was being notified of a decision, not invited to make it.
The promise of no political activity
Qatar had also drawn a public boundary. The men were welcome as guests, its foreign minister told Al Jazeera at the time of their arrival, but they would not be allowed to conduct political activity from the country. UPI included that assurance in its report.
By June 2001, David Schenker was describing something different. Writing for the Washington Institute, he said Hamas’s relocated external leadership continued running the organization from Qatar. He did not detail the specific work behind that assessment. Meanwhile, the State Department’s report covering 2000 described a new main Hamas office in Damascus. Hosting leaders and housing their organization’s main office were not necessarily the same thing.
A request to close an office
Another episode appears in a 2005 US Embassy Doha cable copy published by WikiLeaks. It describes President George W. Bush’s homeland security adviser, Frances Townsend, asking for a Hamas office in Doha to be closed during meetings on June 2. The cable is dated June 6.
The reply came from Khalid al-Misnad, chief of staff to the then heir apparent, Sheikh Tamim. According to the cable, he denied that a formal office existed while acknowledging that four Hamas leaders had lived in Doha at one time. The exchange records a disagreement over what was operating there, rather than an agreed description of an office.
What changed in 2012
Years later, Mashal was back in Qatar after leaving Syria. In an Al Jazeera interview transcript dated April 2, 2012, Ahmed Mansour asked Hamad bin Jassim, now prime minister as well as foreign minister, whether Doha had sought American permission for his return.
Hamad bin Jassim said Qatar had not obtained approval and defended its right to decide whom to receive. His answer concerned Mashal’s residence, however, not the terms of a separate political office. That distinction matters when comparing it with Qatar’s later explanation.
Doha has linked that later office to an American request. In the Qatari Foreign Ministry’s account of remarks at the Doha Forum on December 7, 2025, Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani described the 2012 arrangement as a channel for ceasefire contacts and aid delivery. That was Qatar’s stated purpose for the office.
Former US officials gave Fox News differing accounts in 2023: a Washington request in one, American approval of Qatar’s initiative in another.
The channel Washington later defended
For Israel, the office’s role became particularly significant in efforts to bring hostages home. Washington publicly defended keeping a route to the group holding them. At the State Department’s October 28, 2024 briefing, spokesman Matthew Miller called Qatar’s channel with Hamas useful for those negotiations, while saying relations with Hamas could not continue as before.
That explains why Washington supported the channel at that stage. It does not establish who first proposed it in 2012, or turn Qatar’s earlier reception of Hamas leaders into an American initiative.
The history leaves Qatar facing questions about more than its later role as an intermediary. In 1999, its own foreign minister described the reception as the emir’s initiative with Jordan and said Washington received one day’s notice. Any account of how Hamas came to be hosted in Doha needs to include that decision too.
