Exclusive: Rubio says US-Israel alliance remains firm as he heads to Qatar amid backlash over Doha strikes

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JERUSALEM: Secretary of State Marco Rubio insists the U.S. relationship with Israel remains unchanged, despite the blowback over Israel's strike targeting Hamas negotiators in Qatar last week.

"We're going to continue to be strong allies and partners," Rubio vowed in an exclusive and wide-ranging interview with Fox News in Jerusalem. "As the president said, he wasn't happy with the way things went down. That doesn't mean we're going [to] stop being their partner and their ally."

Rubio told Fox News he is now heading to Doha on Tuesday where he'll urge Qatar to continue playing a "constructive role" in ending the war in Gaza and securing the release of hostages still being held by Hamas.

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"We're visiting again with them very shortly here in the next day as well," Rubio said. "We understand they're upset about it. We understand the Israeli position on it. Irrespective of that, we still have hostages that we want released. We still have a Hamas that needs to be defeated or eradicated or removed so that we can get to the peace that everybody says they want."

Rubio's trip to Qatar, a major non-NATO ally, comes just a day after the country hosted an Arab-Islamic summit over Israel's strike. A draft resolution from the summit blames Israel for "threatening the prospects of peace and coexistence in the region."

"We're trying to get everybody to stay focused on what happens moving forward, not just only focus on what's already happened with what happened last week in Doha," Rubio told Fox News. "We want everybody focused on [what] comes next, because we still have these problems we have to solve."

Rubio refused to say whether the United States supports Israel's plans to move forward with annexation in parts of the West Bank, but blamed countries for forcing Israel's hand for saying they would recognize a Palestinian state.

"We warned it would force Israel to now do things in reaction to that, and I think part of this conversation about annexation is in response to what's been coming out of Europe and Canada and other countries with this Palestinian statehood move, which is largely symbolic, but yet has these real-world implications in terms of making it harder to achieve peace."

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Rubio denied Russian President Vladimir Putin was "emboldened" by his summit with President Trump last month, despite recent Russian drone incursions in both Poland and Romania.

"This is an example of why this war, the President thinks, needs to end. Wars generally will escalate. They'll actually get worse, not better," Rubio told Fox News. "Understand that these drone operations are far from the front lines. They have no impact on the front lines. They're designed largely to weaken one another, and Ukraine is conducting strikes in Russia as well, and it's one of the reasons why the President has said he wants this war to end."

Rubio also took issue with claims the United States "put a bounty" on Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro's head after announcing last month a $50 million reward for information leading to his arrest.

"Nicolas Maduro was indicted by the Southern District of New York. A grand jury returned an indictment. They read the evidence, they saw the evidence, they returned an indictment, not just against him personally, but against a network of people in that country who use the apparatus of what they claim to be of government to conduct drug trafficking operations against the United States," Rubio said.

"He's not the president of Venezuela, that's the title he's given himself," he added. "What he is, is someone who's empowered himself of some of the instruments of government, and they're using that to operate a drug cartel from Venezuelan territory," he added.

"When you traffic drugs into the United States, you're meddling into the internal affairs of America, when you are pushing drugs towards the United States of America, you are a direct threat to the national security and the national interest of the United States. And that's what we're addressing here."