On Sunday, Prime Minister Netanyahu told negotiators to return to Doha to continue negotiations for the release of hostages. That Hamas has recently appeared more willing to come around to Israeli demands shows how greatly Western governments have misunderstood the war in Gaza, and how much Israel has gained by ignoring their counsel, as the Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz explains in an interview by Elliot Kaufman:

After months of rejecting Israeli ceasefire proposals and holding out for more concessions, Hamas has begun to offer concessions of its own. Israel is closer than ever to freeing many of its remaining hostages, and it has gained the leverage to demand terms that protect the strategic gains of the war.

If you believe the media drumbeat—that Israel’s war effort is futile, its strategy absent, and its political isolation growing—it’s impossible to account for the breakthrough. Why, after months of contemptuous stalling, did Hamas begin to bend?

“Two reasons,” says Israel Katz, Israel’s foreign minister, in an interview at the Journal’s office. “One, they understand now that there will be no ceasefire without a hostage deal. Two, the IDF is acting aggressively against the terrorists in Gaza. Especially important was entering Rafah,” Hamas’s stronghold at the southern end of the Strip.

Israeli intelligence confirms it. “We see now the signs that there is a lot of pressure from the military arm of Hamas. They push the leaders in the hotels outside”—Hamas’s politicians, who live in luxury in Qatar—“to achieve an agreement. It wasn’t like that before,” Mr. Katz says. Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, “didn’t want a deal before. Not even when we offered everything.”

It shouldn’t be a surprise that pressure on Hamas could yield gains in negotiations. Yet for months Western powers took the opposite approach, pressuring Israel to end the war and leave Hamas victorious. They called for an “immediate ceasefire,” increasingly delinked from a hostage deal. . . . No critics recanted, but the pressure on Israel quietly diminished.

How did Qatar, an American ally, become the nerve center of the leading Palestinian jihadist organization? Natalie Ecanow explains.

When Jordan expelled Hamas in 1999, Qatar offered sanctuary to the group, which had already become notorious for using suicide-bombing attacks over the previous decade. . . . Hamas chose to relocate to Syria. However, that arrangement lasted for only a decade. With the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, the terror group found its way back to Qatar.

In 2003, Hamas leaders reportedly convened in Qatar after the IDF attempted to eliminate Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, following a Hamas suicide bombing in Jerusalem that killed seven people, including two American citizens. This episode led to one of the first efforts by Qatar to advocate for its terror proxy.

Thirteen years and five wars between Hamas and Israel later, Qatar’s support for Hamas has not waned. . . . To this day, Qatari officials maintain that the office came at the “request from Washington to establish indirect lines of communication with Hamas.” However, an Obama White House official asserted that there was never any request from Washington. . . . Inexplicably, the United States government continues to rely on Qatar to negotiate for the release of the hostages held by Hamas, even as the regime hosts the terror group’s political elite.

A reckoning is needed between our two countries. Congressional hearings, legislation, executive orders, and other measures to regulate relations between our countries are long overdue.