Pezeshkian names Qatar and Pakistan as the channel as Qatar’s premier calls Netanyahu the obstacle

In his Al Jazeera interview aired Saturday 26 September, Pezeshkian said Qatar and Pakistan are acting as intermediaries relaying messages between Tehran and Washington — not a European capital, not the UN. He denied Iranian responsibility for blocking the Strait of Hormuz, called for negotiations, and said the United States and Israel had sought to “prevent Iran from relying on itself” and had dragged regional states into a conflict they expected Iran to lose within days. A further set of quotations attributed to the same interview — that those who thought they could target Iranians with sanctions “miscalculated,” and that Iranians “stood firm” against American and Israeli attacks — reaches readers through the Jerusalem Post reporting what Iran International reported, a chain of two outlets hostile to the Islamic Republic, and should be weighed accordingly.

The same weekend, Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani said of the US-backed Gaza plan: “We have a long list of violations that, unfortunately, Netanyahu’s government are committing, and basically we have seen that he is the biggest obstacle right now in progressing this peace plan, while everyone among the mediators is trying to work very hard to make sure this agreement is upheld.” Answering Israeli allegations that Doha funded Hamas’s military wing, he said there was “no single penny” that reached it “intentionally or unintentionally,” and that no money flowed into Gaza “without the full coordination and consent of the United Nations and the Israeli government” — across governments, he added, “not only Netanyahu.” Both quotations were carried by the Times of Israel and the Jerusalem Post; The Files has not established the original interview venue.

The exchange is not new but it is sharpening. In an i24NEWS interview he shared on social media on Saturday 5 September, Benjamin Netanyahu called Qatar a “hostile” state and said: “I attacked Qatar, I also bombed it and attacked them during the war, and they attacked me.” Al Jazeera noted the remarks came days before the anniversary of Israel’s 9 September 2025 strike on Doha. A separate strand worth watching: a Jerusalem Post photo caption refers to a quadrilateral meeting format between the United States, Iran, Pakistan and Qatar at the Bürgenstock. The Files has not been able to establish a date for that meeting, and does not assert the format is currently operating.

Assessment: The significance is the simultaneity. Doha is carrying Tehran’s ceasefire message to Trump while publicly naming Trump’s closest regional partner as the obstacle on a different file. That is not incoherence; it is the Gulf mediation model working as designed, and it works only so long as Washington keeps the two files separate. The risk for Qatar is that a president who has just dismissed Iranian negotiators as “not decision makers” may decide the messengers are not worth much either. For the desk, Pakistan’s presence in the channel is the underweighted detail — Islamabad’s name is on the June memorandum and now on the wire to the White House.