GAZA — Leaked US documents reveal that key Arab states quietly expanded their security cooperation with Israel during the two-year genocide in Gaza.
According to The Washington Post, citing leaked US documents, over the past three years, facilitated by the US, senior military officials from Israel and six Arab countries, including Qatar, came together for planning meetings in Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan and Qatar.
On Wednesday, Israel and Hamas agreed to the first phase of a peace framework proposed by Trump that would result in the release of all the captives held in Gaza, end the genocide and a partial Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
US officials announced on Thursday that 200 US troops would be sent to Israel to provide support to the ceasefire agreement and would be joined by soldiers from several of the Arab countries that participated in this long-standing security cooperation.
In a joint statement, five of the six Arab countries said that they supported the establishment of a mechanism that “guarantees the security of all sides,” but they have stopped short of publicly committing to deploy military forces.
In May 2024, the documents show, senior Israeli and Arab military officials convened at al-Udeid Air Base, a major U.S. military facility in Qatar. A planning document for the event, written two days before it was set to begin, shows that the Israeli delegation was scheduled to fly directly to the air base, circumventing Qatar’s civilian points of entry that could have risked public exposure.
Five Centcom PowerPoint presentations, obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and reviewed by The Washington Post, detail the creation of what the U.S. military describes as the “Regional Security Construct.” In addition to Israel and Qatar, the construct includes Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The documents refer to Kuwait and Oman as “potential partners” that were briefed on all meetings.
The presentations are marked unclassified and were distributed to the construct’s partners, and in some cases also to the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and the United States. They were written between 2022 and 2025, before and after the launch of Israel’s war in Gaza in October 2023.
One meeting in particular, in January at the Army’s Fort Campbell in Kentucky, roughly an hour’s drive from Nashville, included sessions where US forces trained partners on how to detect and neutralize threats posed by subterranean tunnels. Another document describes partners from six countries participating in a training to destroy underground tunnels but did not name the countries. — QNN
