Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of sabotaging efforts to reach a peace agreement in the Gaza Strip, making the comments in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Saturday.
“It’s very simply for one person’s gain, for the gain of the (Israeli) prime minister and his far-right government,” said Al-Thani. “That’s the whole thing.”
Al-Thani claimed that Israel has not fulfilled their commitment under the agreement reached in Sharm el-Sheikh in October 2025, in which Egypt mediated between Israeli and Hamas representatives to achieve a ceasefire and the release of Israeli hostages.
“When every aspect of that move is ousted… they just deny it, and they just move on in the opposite direction,” Al-Thani said. “They occupy now more than 70% of the strip; instead of withdrawing, they are continuing the killing while this agreement called (for) a ceasefire, and the targeting of the population over there.”
He added that the average number of humanitarian trucks entering the strip daily is 150, despite claiming the agreement requires a minimum average of 600 per day.
“We have a long list of violations that, unfortunately, Netanyahu’s government are committing, and basically we have seen that he is the biggest obstacle right now in progressing this peace plan, while everyone among the mediators is trying to work very hard to make sure this agreement is upheld,” he said.
Al-Thani: ‘No single penny’ from Qatar has reached Hamas’s military wing
The Qatari prime minister pushed back against Israeli allegations of Qatar having funneled money to Hamas’s military wing, saying that “no single penny” from the country reached the terror group’s military wing “intentionally or unintentionally.”
“We’ve been very clear on this: There is no single penny that has flowed into Gaza without the full coordination and consent of the United Nations and the Israeli government,” he said, noting that such consent spanned “across governments, not only Netanyahu; it was Netanyahu and other governments as well.”
According to Al-Thani, Qatari funds to Gaza were used exclusively to buy gas from Israel to supply Gazan power plants, funding an Israeli-approved list of poverty-stricken Gazan families, and to Gaza “government employees, civil employees, and government in Gaza, an approved list of those employees by the Israeli security… Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) or Mossad or whatever… those are the ones who are approving that. Besides this, there is nothing going outside this category from our funding.”
He added that such funds were generally requested by Israel and “not initiated” by Qatar.
He said he is unaware of who wrote the reports regarding Qatari funding of Hamas’s military wing, calling them a “baseless accusation that Qatar will never accept.”
Al-Thani further claimed that “every time” Qatar pushed for a long-term solution in Gaza, Israel would respond, “we have an election cycle, let’s wait until after that,” saying that this was the conversation from the time the funding started until September 2023, “just a month before October 7 started, when Israeli officials were in Doha pushing for another round of funding.”
“We have been struck by Netanyahu’s government,” he noted. “Netanyahu has sabotaged many attempts for us and the ceasefire before and the release of the hostages, and we have seen that he has been undermining our efforts every step we were moving forward.”
Qatari PM calls Qatargate ‘absurd,’ says it would have been terrible investment
He also addressed Israel’s “Qatargate” scandal, calling it “absurd” and saying that it would have been “the worst investment Qatar have ever done.”
Al-Thani concluded the interview by turning to former prime minister Naftali Bennett’s push to designate Qatar an enemy state, describing Bennett’s former government as one that “was requesting and praising actually what Qatar was doing at that time.”
He accused Israeli politicians of “trying to pick a fight amongst themselves for political reasons… using Qatar as a scapegoat for this; this is totally unacceptable.”
“Qatar has been, unfortunately maybe, at the center of the campaign of anyone who wants to see chaos in the region, who wants to see escalation in the region for one simple reason: Because they have seen that Qatar has been the only country that in every conflict… is the country who is trying to put down this conflict,” he argued.
