Israeli warplanes unleashed airstrikes on Qatar’s capital on Tuesday, targeting senior Hamas leaders who were gathered for clandestine meetings about the latest U.S.-brokered ceasefire proposal for Gaza.
Where was their gathering place? This strike came just days after a photograph began circulating online—an unassuming image of a Ritz-Carlton meeting room. Orange and green wallpaper, a centered abstract painting, water bottles, pens, neatly arranged flowers: it looked like any other business meeting.
What looked like any other corporate boardroom was actually the likely nerve center of Hamas.
According to United Against Nuclear Iran sources, the photo shows senior Hamas figure Khalil al-Hayya meeting Iranian Foreign Minister Seyyed Abbas Araghchi and his Tehran-based delegation inside the Doha Ritz-Carlton.
There’s no evidence Tuesday’s Israeli strikes targeted the Ritz specifically but the picture lends the freshest evidence that the gathering was taking place.
Instead, Tuesday’s strikes focused on a residential headquarters housing several members of Hamas’s political bureau, including part of their negotiating delegation involved in ceasefire talks.
Early reports indicate that the Israeli strike in Doha resulted in at least two fatalities, including the son of a Hamas negotiator.
In response to the photo and the discovery of its location, Ambassador Mark Wallace, the CEO of United Against Nuclear Iran, wrote a strongly worded letter addressed to the president of Marriott International hotels, which is headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, on the outskirts of the nation’s capital.
In the letter he shared exclusively with the Daily Mail, Wallace said hosting Hamas poses ‘exceptional reputational and legal risks’, asking for Marriott to respond publicly and transparently with how the decision was made to host the militant terrorist group.
Wallace requests a response within 48 hours of receiving the letter.
Wallace tells that Daily Mail that American companies like Marriott International, listed on the New York Stock Exchange and subject to U.S. laws and sanctions, should not be offering their hotel facilities to state-sponsors of terrorism with the ‘blood of U.S. citizens on their hands’.
‘While these terror officials enjoy meeting accommodations in the lap of luxury of a Marriott-managed hotel, Iran is plotting to assassinate American citizens and holding them hostage. Hamas continues to hold Israeli hostages and refuses to turn the bodies of the Americans it killed over to their families,’ Wallace said.
He added: ‘The Ritz-Carlton Doha should not be a convening space for members of Iran’s terror axis to coordinate in threatening American interests.’
The quiet luxury of the Ritz setting masked what many Western officials see as a perilous alliance amid fresh concerns about the deepening ties between Hamas and the Islamic republic.
Iran, a longtime sponsor of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, has built a sprawling proxy network that continues to destabilize the Middle East.
Hamas remains a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, while Iran has been officially labeled by the State Department as the world’s leading state-sponsor of terrorism since 1984.
Iran’s regime has orchestrated multiple assassination plots targeting high-profile Americans — including President Donald Trump, former national security advisors, and a former U.S. secretary of state — as well as members of Jewish and Iranian communities abroad.
The Daily Mail reached out to the Ritz-Carlton for a response on this story.
