On 9 September, the Zionist entity in occupation of Palestine conducted an aerial strike at a building in Doha, Qatar’s capital. The strike’s primary targets were the Hamas chief negotiator, Khalil Al-Hayya, and the resistance group’s former Political Bureau Chief, Khaled Meshaal. While both survived the attack, some other Hamas cadres, including Al-Hayya’s son, were killed.

The Zionist entity claimed the strike and in fact bragged about it. Its genocidal leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, against whom the International Criminal Court has issued warrants of arrest for being a war criminal and who should more aptly be referred to as Satanyahu, compared the Zionist strike to the United States raid in Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. He claimed that the Zionist entity’s action was grounded in the same logic as America’s and instead of being condemned should be hailed. He finished his rant by saying that states harbouring “terrorists” should act and if they refuse to do so, “we [Zionist entity] will.”

Netanyahu, who has honed lying, deception and doublespeak into a fine art, conveniently ignored that the US raid had (a) no basis in international law and (b) Hamas was not hiding in Doha but openly operated a political office there. There’s also the somewhat inconvenient fact that the Hamas office in Doha existed on the request of the US. Qatar had also hosted the Afghan Taliban on US request. The Taliban political office in Doha became the venue for talks between the US and the Taliban. If anything, the US didn’t bomb the Taliban office because, unlike the illegal Zionist entity, states do not kill negotiators while they are negotiating. Netanyahu knows this. But he won’t refer to this fact because it interferes with his evil narrative. In fact, the Zionist entity has regularly killed Hamas leaders who offered a truce. We shall return to that.

Western reaction, predictably, has been lackadaisical. Instead of condemning the Zionist entity’s demonstrably illegal act in utter violation of international law and proposing sanctions against it, the US merely said that the strike “does not advance Israel or America’s goals.” The US President, Donald Trump, also told reporters that he was “very unhappy about the way that it went down”. And pray, how does an aerial strike generally go down if not the way it did?