'They refused to even entertain the idea': Qatar PM says Israel rejected early offer to free all civilian hostages

Qatar's prime minister has said that in the days after the October 7, 2023 attacks, Doha brought Israel an offer to release all civilian hostages held in Gaza in exchange for a temporary ceasefire — and that Israeli officials refused to even consider it. Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, who is also Qatar's foreign minister, made the claim in an interview with Piers Morgan published on October 1. He said Qatar approached Israeli officials immediately after the Hamas-led attacks with what he described as an agreement to free every civilian hostage, asking only for a temporary ceasefire window to make the release possible. "They rejected to even entertain the idea," he said, according to reports of the interview. The Qatari prime minister, whose country has been a central mediator between Israel and Hamas throughout the war, also condemned the October 7 attacks, calling them a massacre and saying those responsible should be held accountable — while sharply criticising Israel's subsequent military campaign in Gaza. The claim is not entirely new. An investigation by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz previously found that Israel had rejected an early Hamas offer to release civilian hostages in the days after the attack. But hearing it stated so bluntly by the mediator who says he carried the offer gives the allegation fresh weight — and it lands at a delicate moment for Benjamin Netanyahu, with Israel's parliamentary elections scheduled for October 27. Netanyahu has consistently rejected claims that he passed up deals that could have freed the hostages. He maintains that Hamas set impossible conditions and repeatedly walked away from negotiations, and he has dismissed scrutiny of his wartime decisions as politically motivated election-season attacks. The claims add to a growing pile of questions about the earliest days of the war. Separate reports have said Israel received warnings that Hamas was preparing a major attack before October 7 — reports Netanyahu has also dismissed as politically driven. On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led militants killed around 1,200 people in Israel and took 251 hostage. The war that followed has devastated Gaza, and the fate of the remaining hostages has remained the most politically explosive issue in Israeli public life, with families of the captives repeatedly accusing the government of not doing enough to bring them home. If the Qatari account is accurate, the earliest off-ramp of the war — every civilian hostage freed in exchange for a pause in fighting — was on the table within days, and was not taken. That is the question now facing Netanyahu's government: not whether the offer existed, but why it was refused.