Politics & Diplomacy
Ali Al Thawadi brokers both Gaza's ceasefire and the Iran deal
Photo: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The negotiations that could end the American-Iranian war are due to resume this afternoon. If they produce an agreement, one of the men who built it will be Ali Al Thawadi, Qatar's minister of state for strategic affairs — the official President Donald Trump named, alongside heads of state, as having "largely negotiated" his deal with Iran.
A year ago almost nobody outside Doha knew his name. The Telegraph has since called him the mysterious fixer who saved the Gaza deal from disaster.
For Palestinians the file matters twice over. The man holding Qatar's seat on the board that oversees Gaza's reconstruction is the same man Washington and Tehran trust with their deal, and the two files move together or stall together.
An attack called off, talks back on#
The past two days show how fast this file swings. On Saturday, Trump said he had called off what he described as the biggest attack since the Second World War, after a plea from Tehran and requests from Washington's Gulf allies, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported.
He said negotiations would resume Monday afternoon and called a deal on the Strait of Hormuz "imminent." His stated terms: the immediate and total reopening of the strait, and an end to Iran's nuclear threat.
Tehran tells it more narrowly. Iran's foreign ministry said no direct talks with Washington are planned, describing instead an emerging arrangement on safe passage through the strait along a route acceptable to both sides.
Even the venue is unsettled. Qatar's foreign ministry said last week that no high-level meeting was scheduled in Doha; Qatar mediates the channel alongside Pakistan.
The man Doha sends when a deal is dying#
Al Thawadi rose through the prime minister's office to a portfolio — strategic affairs — that in practice means the files too sensitive to hand anyone else. Semafor, profiling his "quiet influence" in May, described a man who works almost entirely in the background and has a personal relationship with Trump that most foreign ministers would envy.
His hardest test came in September 2025, when Israel bombed Hamas's negotiating team in the middle of Doha — an attack on the mediator itself. Qatar weighed walking away from mediation altogether.
Instead, Al Thawadi flew to Washington to save the process. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu telephoned Qatar's prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, to apologize for the strike, Al Thawadi sat in the Oval Office beside US envoy Steve Witkoff as the call was placed, the Israeli outlet Ynet reported.
In January, Qatar named him to the Gaza Executive Board, the international panel assembled around Gaza's reconstruction. The backroom fixer became, for the first time, the public face of Qatar's Gaza policy.
The Gaza file: from cash suitcases to the board#
His Gaza work long predates the war. Ynet has reported that he was central to the arrangement that moved Qatari cash — the famous suitcases — into Gaza in the pre-war years to pay salaries and keep the economy breathing. The transfers ran with Israel's approval, whatever Israeli politicians said about them afterwards.
Through the war he worked the hostage exchanges, the aid packages and the ceasefire rounds that Qatar mediated with Egypt and the United States.
The board seat is the test of that record. The Gaza Executive Board is supposed to be the channel for reconstruction money and governance decisions, and AFP, reporting around Netanyahu's July 28 White House visit, described reconstruction as effectively at a standstill over exactly the questions the board exists to answer: who governs Gaza, and who pays.
Qatar says its seat serves "prosperity for the people of Gaza." What Gaza has so far is a ceasefire that largely holds, aid far below need, and a reconstruction whose politics have not caught up with its urgency.
The Iran file: a secret flight and a war it could not stop#
The Iran channel shows how far Doha lets him run. The Financial Times reconstructed how Al Thawadi and fellow negotiator Hamad Al Kubaisi took a secret flight to Tehran this spring and quietly brokered the substance of an American-Iranian understanding. By mid-May the Qataris believed they had a deal.
The war came instead. After Iranian forces downed an American Apache helicopter, Trump ordered strikes — and the FT reported that the Qatari delegation sat stranded for seven hours at a Tehran airport while the bombing it had flown in to prevent unfolded around it.
The channel survived the war it failed to stop. Qatari, Saudi and Emirati leaders personally pressed Trump to give diplomacy another window, Axios reported in July.
By late July, Netanyahu was back at the White House, Trump was announcing talks with Tehran, and the Jerusalem Post reported Qatari negotiators heading to Iran ahead of a possible signing. The Washington Examiner recorded the unusual sight of an American president crediting a Qatari minister of state, by name, with negotiating his Iran agreement.
Why one office holds both threads#
The files are joined by more than one man's calendar. Iran's relationship with Hamas sits inside any durable Gaza arrangement, which is why Iranian negotiator Ali Larijani meets senior Hamas officials in Doha, on Al Thawadi's ground.
The Doha channel is also one pole of a Gulf competition this newspaper has tracked all summer. Our investigation into the Kushner-Dahlan backchannel documented how Abu Dhabi promotes Mohammad Dahlan as its man in Gaza's future; Qatar — Hamas's host, and now Gaza's seat-holder on the reconstruction board — runs the rival wire. The same American envoys shuttle between both.
Which channel prevails will shape who governs Gaza, whose money rebuilds it, and how much say Palestinians have in either.
Times of Palestine will keep reporting the Doha channel with the same scrutiny it applies to Abu Dhabi's. Palestinians have watched outsiders negotiate their future before. The measure of every mediator is whether Palestinians end up at the table or merely on it.
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