Qatar said Saturday it will host a summit of Arab and Muslim leaders to denounce Israel’s attack on Hamas officials in Doha and to show solidarity with the Gulf state.

Monday’s meeting would consider “a draft resolution on the Israeli attack on the State of Qatar” to be drafted Sunday at a ministerial meeting, said Qatar’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Majed al-Ansari.

The summit reflected “broad Arab and Islamic solidarity with the State of Qatar in the face of Israel’s cowardly aggression… and the categorical rejection of Israel’s state terrorism,” he said, quoted by the official QNA news agency.

Among the leaders attending will be Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will also be in Doha, but his presence at the meeting is yet to be confirmed.

Israel targeted Hamas leaders Tuesday in strikes on the Qatari capital, killing five members of the terror group and a Qatari security officer. Israel’s security establishment is set to increasingly believe that the attack failed to take out Hamas’s top brass.

The attack drew widespread international condemnation, including from Gulf monarchies allied with the United States, Israel’s main backer.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended the strike, comparing Israel’s operations in the wake of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre to US actions in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terror attack.

The premier took a defiant tone in an English-language video defending Israel’s actions, and warned Qatar that either it must “expel” the Hamas politburo members or “bring them to justice, because if you don’t, we will.”

Qatar, which hosts the largest US base in the region, plays a mediation role in the Gaza war alongside the United States and Egypt.

Analysts say the summit is meant to send Israel a clear signal.

The Israeli strikes were “seen across the Gulf as an unprecedented violation of sovereignty and an attack on diplomacy itself,” Andreas Krieg of King’s College London said, adding the summit signaled that “such aggression can’t be normalized.”

“The goal is to draw clear red lines and end the sense in Israel that it can act with impunity,” he said. “Expect a sharper stance on Palestine and a harder edge on Israeli actions.”

Egypt said looking into NATO-like force for Arab nations

As Qatar looks to gather Arab allies for a united response to Israel’s recent strikes, Egypt is looking to gain support for a NATO-style Arab force that would protect Arab countries facing attack, Lebanon’s Al-Akhbar newspaper reported Saturday, citing an unnamed official in Cairo.

The report noted the proposal was first made some nine years ago, but did not advance.

While the report did not say so outright, it suggested that Israel’s recent strike on Hamas leaders in Qatar has given new impetus to the initiative.

It said Egypt is proposing to include some 20,000 of its own military personnel in the force and is working on developing the mechanism by which such a force would be activated, “allowing it to be used when necessary and forming it in a manner consistent with the populations of Arab countries and their armed forces, while taking into account regional and political balances in the formation, whether in terms of the inclusion of military personnel from countries such as Morocco and Algeria, or sharing command positions,” according to the official.

“Cairo wants to retain the first command position while granting the second to Saudi Arabia or one of the Gulf states,” he added.

The report did not detail which countries Egypt is looking to recruit for such a force, and the Egyptian official quoted in the report said “there are still several practical obstacles to the proposal,” such as the details of mutual defense agreements and mechanisms of intervention.

The source added that consultations between Egypt and its Arab allies are “ongoing, especially with Saudi Arabia,” and that the diplomats involved in the discussions “believe it is important to avoid turning it into a declaration of war against Israel,” adding that some countries involved could look to use the military alliance as “a pretext for direct military involvement with Israel.”

While the idea of a joint Arab military alliance was first brought up years ago, with US input, as a potential bulwark against Iranian influence in the region, progress petered out in 2022 and no agreements were reached.

Original ideas included Israeli partnership, or even membership, in the alliance, though Saturday’s report suggested the new initiative would aim to deter Israel — not only Iran — from attacks against its members, especially after the Israeli strikes in Qatar.