Trump warns Israel has to be ‘very careful, Qatar has been a great ally to the US’

A week after Israel’s strike on Hamas’ leadership in Doha, U.S. President Donald Trump warned Israel to be “very careful” in its approach to the close U.S. ally.

Speaking to reporters at a New Jersey airport on Sunday evening, Trump said, “My message is that they have to be very, very careful. They have to do something about Hamas, but Qatar has been a great ally to the United States.”

Following the strike, whose results remain unclear, Trump and his special envoy Steve Witkoff hosted the Qatari Prime Minister, Mohammed Al Thani, for a dinner in New York City on Friday.

Reporter: What is your message to Netanyahu about strikes on Qatar?

Trump: They have be very careful. They have to do something about Hamas. But Qatar has been a great ally to the US. A lot of people don’t know that. pic.twitter.com/HyfZlLN1Ab

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 14, 2025

“Great dinner with POTUS. Just ended,” Qatar’s deputy chief of mission, Hamad Al-Muftah, wrote on 𝕏 afterward. The White House offered no details about the content of the discussions.

Trump continued, “I told the emir, who I think is a wonderful person actually, I said, ‘You need better public relations’… I mean people talk of it so badly, and they shouldn’t be.”

“Qatar has been a very great ally, so Israel and everybody else, we have to be careful. When we attack people, we have to be careful,” he concluded his remarks.

Immediately after the strike, Trump had said he wasn’t “thrilled about the whole situation,” and in a statement, called targeting Hamas a “worthy goal” while lamenting that the targeted site “very unfortunately, was located in a section of Doha.”

“I view Qatar as a strong Ally and friend of the U.S. and feel very badly about the location of the attack,” Trump stated.

Since then, media reports claimed he was only informed by the U.S. military once the Israeli operation was already underway. He tried to warn the Qatari leadership, but by the time the warning was transmitted, the missiles had already struck.

Qatar is a designated “major non-NATO ally” of the U.S. and host to Al Udeid airbase, the largest U.S. base in the region.

Despite the public criticism, Trump sent State Secretary Marco Rubio to Israel on Sunday as a show of continuing support for the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

After a reportedly tense first phone call following the strike, media reports said a second phone call was amicable, and Netanyahu has since affirmed that their relationship continues to be strong.

Speaking in Washington before his departure, Rubio told reporters that the United States was “not happy” about the Israeli strike in Qatar, but affirmed that it would not “change the nature of our relationship with the Israelis, but we are going to have to talk about it.” 

While visiting the Western Wall with Rubio on Sunday, Netanyahu said, “I think his visit here is a testimony to the durability, the strength of the Israeli-American alliance, that is as strong and durable as the stones of the Western Wall that we just touched.”