News- Middle East: Israeli spy agency Mossad has reportedly shelved plans for a ground invasion targeting Hamas in Qatar, a plan it had drawn up in recent weeks to use agents on the ground to assassinate the resistance group's leaders.

The Israeli regime on Tuesday attacked a residential area in the Qatari capital, Doha, targeting Hamas’s leadership.

The attack was unsuccessful. Top Hamas leaders, who were meeting to discuss a Gaza ceasefire proposal, survived the attack. However, five members of the Gaza-based resistance group and a Qatari security officer were killed.

The Washington Post, in a report on Friday, citing two unnamed Israelis familiar with the matter, revealed that the Mossad director, David Barnea, opposed killing the Hamas officials in Qatar partly because such an action could rupture the relationship he and his agency had cultivated with the Qataris.

Qatar had been hosting Hamas and serving as a key mediator in ceasefire talks between Hamas and the Israeli regime.

In January, Barnea reaffirmed the spy agency’s commitment to targeting “those responsible for the October 2023” operation led by Hamas; however, he took issue with the timing of it.

While Israeli officials broadly agree that all Hamas leaders — including those abroad — should eventually be killed, many, including Barnea and Israeli Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, questioned whether this was the right moment.

At the time, Hamas leaders were gathered in Qatar discussing a ceasefire proposal at the request of the Israelis and the US, which aimed to free 48 remaining Israeli captives in exchange for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Nitzan Alon, the senior Israeli military officer responsible for captive negotiations, was excluded from a Monday meeting discussing the attack on Doha. Israeli leaders assumed he would oppose a strike that might endanger the captives’ lives.

An Israeli official familiar with internal dissent questioned Netanyahu’s decision.

“We can get them in one, two, or four years from now, and the Mossad knows how to do it,” the official said. “Why do it now?”

“Barnea was known as someone who thought the Qatari mediation had value, and you don’t burn the Qatari mediators or the mediation channel,” said David Makovsky, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute.

However, Netanyahu “may have made up his mind that he’s going into Gaza City, believing the very latest negotiating proposal by the US and Israel on the [captive] release was getting zero traction from Hamas.”

Makovsky added, “If this is the case, Netanyahu may have viewed the negotiating track as an unhelpful constraint on taking action on the ground.”

This internal disagreement influenced how the attack was conducted and its chances of success, reflecting a broader conflict of interest within Israel’s security establishment.

Nevertheless, the airstrike failed to achieve its main goal of killing senior leaders. Instead, Hamas reported that five of its officials, along with a Qatari officer, were killed. A source familiar with the Tuesday attack said, “Israel did not get who they wanted.”

Analysts note that a faction of Israeli decision-makers supporting Netanyahu — including Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer and minister of military affairs Israel Katz — had lost patience with negotiations.

They say that the strike was justified by a rare opportunity to hit top Hamas leaders in one place and in response to recent Hamas retaliatory operations in occupied al-Quds that killed six Israeli settlers and an ambush in Gaza that killed four Israeli soldiers.

Source: Press TV