Wednesday, September 10, 2025

Trump offers a Biden-like rebuke of Israel after Qatar strike

On Tuesday, Israel took a controversial step in its war against Hamas and carried out a strike in a sovereign country — Qatar — without the support of that country's government.

The shockwaves were instant, and will reverberate for a while.

Condemnations rolled in from the United Nations and Western leaders like the U.K.'s Sir Keir Starmer. 

"I condemn Israel’s strikes on Doha, which violate Qatar’s sovereignty and risk further escalation across the region," Starmer said in a statement posted on X.

From the White House, the response was much, much more delicate-- despite the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu just delivered a major setback to Trump's campaign to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

The president “feels very badly about the location of this attack,” said press secretary Karoline Leavitt, almost apologetically, on Tuesday.

Trump himself spoke to reporters as he attended a dinner with senior aides: “I'll be giving a full statement tomorrow, but I will tell you this: I was very unhappy about it."

With an almost Biden-like refusal to directly criticize Benjamin Netanyahu or the Israeli government, Trump is now the one facing questions about why America's no. 1 ally in the Middle East can't bring its devastating war to an end.

Read more here.

By John Bowden

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Daily briefing

Israel just bombed Doha. The Middle East is on the brink of an abyss

These strikes set Israel firmly against Qatar and make Doha – once a main meeting point and venue for truce negotiations – now a new theatre of war in the Gaza conflict, writes The Independent's chief international correspondent Bel Trew.

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QUOTE OF THE DAY

I am so goddamn sick of being asked.

One Republican member of Congress was none too happy to get a question from Inside Washington's Eric Garcia about the Epstein 'birthday book' on Tuesday.

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