Ex-Shin Bet Chief Hints at Hamas Leaders' Fate After Qatar Strike
Former senior Israeli officials have offered starkly different assessments of the recent Israeli strike in Qatar, with one expressing optimism about its success and another condemning it and Israel’s broader policy in Gaza.
Twitter
Former Shin Bet chief and Cabinet member Minister Avi Dichter addressed the attempted assassination of senior Hamas figures in Qatar, a strike whose success remains unclear, expressing optimism based on their absence from public view.
"To understand, I look at the other signs," Dichter said in an interview today (Sunday) on Radio Galei Yisrael. "I have no intelligence saying who was killed or who survived after the Qatar strike, so my way of understanding is through the other signs."
He elaborated: "This was a strike on the highest headquarters of Hamas seniors abroad. If we look at the funeral on Friday, the two most senior figures from Turkey arrived, and you ask yourself: How is it that none of the senior Hamas figures in Qatar came to the funeral...?"
When asked by host Yotam Zmeri about Prime Minister Netanyahu's apparent hint yesterday at the strike's failure, Dichter replied: "That's an interpretation of the prime minister's words. We're fed scraps of information, it could be they were hit, it could be they were injured."
Dichter added: "The fact that there's a very heavy fog days after the strike suggests there could be unpleasant things for them."
Earlier today, a report indicated that Khalil al-Hayya, a senior Hamas official in Turkey, and other top figures are being held in a secure compound without phones, with Egypt reportedly in a state of hysteria.
In a separate development, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in an interview with Qatar's Al Jazeera, expressed regret over the death of Khalil al-Hayya's son in the Israeli strike in Qatar.
"A child shouldn't be a victim, and his wife was also injured. We're fighting terrorism and they'll be punished when the time comes, but the family is a different story," Olmert said.
The former prime minister also criticized the strike itself: "Killing the negotiation team means you don't want talks and you don't want the hostages released."
Olmert emphasized: "All Hamas people need to be punished, but the strike in Doha wasn't in the right place or at the right time."
Olmert recently sparked controversy in an interview with Britain's The Guardian, attacking the plan for a "humanitarian city" in Rafah and calling it a "concentration camp." He said forcibly bringing Palestinians into the humanitarian city would constitute "ethnic cleansing."
"It's a concentration camp, I'm sorry," Olmert stated. "If they're expelled to that 'humanitarian city,' then you can say it's part of the ethnic cleansing. It hasn't happened yet."
According to him, this is "an inevitable interpretation of any attempt to create a camp for hundreds of thousands of people. When you build a camp to 'clear' more than half of Gaza, the clear understanding is that it's not to save Palestinians. It's to expel them, push them, and throw them out. You can't understand it any other way."