Whether the senior Hamas officials Israel tried to kill in a surprise missile strike in Doha yesterday are still alive is an open question. But the U.S.-brokered peace deal they were meeting to consider is almost certainly dead.

The diplomatic calculation is not difficult.

“When one party bombs the negotiating team of the other party, it’s hard to see a path forward,” Dana Shell Smith, the former U.S. ambassador to Qatar, told us. Qatar, the tiny Gulf nation that has housed Hamas political leaders for years at the request of the United States, and that had been the indispensable mediator in ongoing talks to end the nearly two-year-old war, was uncharacteristically livid in its condemnation of the Israeli strike. Even if peace talks continue, Qatar seems unlikely to play go-between after

See Full Page