General Views of the Lusail Stadium – Lusail, Qatar, March 28, 2022. General view inside the Lusail Stadium, the venue for the 2022 Qatar World Cup Final REUTERS/Pawel Kopczynski

i24 News – With less than three months to go before the 2022 soccer World Cup kicks off in Qatar, Israel has been upping its efforts to facilitate the arrival of thousands of Israeli soccer fans to the Gulf country, with whom Israel has no diplomatic relations.

i24NEWS learned that secret negotiations between the two nations fell apart ahead of a planned phone call between Israel’s Foreign Minister and interim Prime Minister Yair Lapid and his Qatari counterpart Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani.

Lapid’s insistence on making the call public, a demand that Doha firmly rejected, was the cause of the talks collapsing.

The planned phone call between Lapid and Al-Thani was considered a preliminary conversation ahead of a future phone call between Lapid and the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. Negotiations were aimed at opening an Israeli consular office in Doha that would manage affairs for Israeli nationals attending the World Cup.

Israel was hoping that the office would then continue operating in Qatar as a permanent presence in the Gulf state.

A response from the Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry to i24NEWS said that “the story is not true.”

The absence of an Israeli consular office in Doha during the games would mean that Israeli nationals will be left without assistance in case of lost passports, arrests or severe medical conditions.

Back in June, Israel announced that its nationals will be able to attend the games in Qatar, saying the move would open “a new door” to a country with whom Israel does not have formal diplomatic relations.

Unlike its Gulf neighbors the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which recently signed historic agreements with Israel, Qatar has conditioned normalizing relations on the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Doha also maintains close relations with Tehran, which firmly objects to Gulf ties with Jerusalem.

Qatar was the first Gulf state to establish diplomatic relations with Israel back in 1996, with Israel even opening a trade office there. But the office was closed by local authorities in 2000 and relations between the two nations formally ended in 2009 over an Israeli military operation in Gaza.