When 200 top policymakers, analysts and government officials from the U.S. and the Middle East gathered on Wednesday for the second day of the high-profile MEAD conference, one topic was top of mind for everyone at the ritzy Washington confab: Israel’s strike on Doha a day earlier that targeted senior Hamas officials who were gathered in the Qatari capital. 

Although many at the conference were decidedly pro-Israel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s risky mission — Israel’s first-ever airstrikes on Qatar, a major non-NATO ally of the United States — faced significant skepticism, particularly as reports emerged that the attack may not have killed the high-level Hamas leaders that Israel hoped to target. 

In a rare on-the-record session, former Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid, Israel’s opposition leader, questioned whether the strike fit within Israel’s broader war aims.

“If you take the operation itself, per se, and you single it out from anything else, of course these are a bunch of bad people that we should have killed a long time ago, and whenever you have a chance to kill them, you should kill them,” Lapid said. “Having said that, as the hours go by, we understand two things. A is that it might not be as successful as we thought in the beginning, and B [is] that this has nothing to do with strategy. It’s just an operation.” 

That language marked a shift from Lapid’s initial reaction to the Qatar strike, which he described on Tuesday afternoon in a Hebrew-language tweet as “an exceptional operation to thwart our enemies.” 

A lot changed in the interim: President Donald Trump said he was “very unhappy” with the attack, and that it “does not advance Israel or America’s goals.” Arab nations rallied around Qatar, with the leaders of the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Saudi Arabia all visiting Doha this week. That led some MEAD attendees to argue that Israel’s strike could jeopardize regional integration efforts led by Washington. 

There was little sympathy among MEAD attendees for the Hamas leaders who live in Qatar, which has faced criticism for providing them a safe harbor. But Israel’s apparent failure to reach its targets prompted frustration even from many who were sympathetic to the operation, because it’s unlikely the U.S. will permit Israel to try again. 

The biggest problem, according to Lapid, was this divergence with the U.S., which Trump administration officials stood by on Wednesday. 

“Part of Israel’s strength in the region and elsewhere is the fact that everybody seemed to think that we are stepping in lockstep with the administration,” said Lapid. “When the region sees us as somebody who is not that coordinated with the administration, with the United States, it has a bad effect on our ability to influence the region.”