“Of course everyone is concerned that this conflict should spread with Iran,” CEO Mark Lashier said.

“I think the Middle East was making great progress with a country like Saudi Arabia engaging with Israel in a positive way, and I suspect that in some regards (that) may have triggered this activity — that Iran was getting nervous and they thought, ‘Maybe we better go now rather than later’ because there may not be another opportunity for them,” he said.

Lashier, whose company was founded in Bartlesville and still has a large presence there, made the comments Tuesday in answering an audience member’s question during a Bartlesville Chamber of Commerce forum.

“It’s a horrible thing that’s happened in Israel. We have business colleagues that are on the ground there — business colleagues that own homes there and have children in the Israeli army there, so it’s very real and very personal for some of us to see what’s going on there.”

Over the years, Hamas — an Islamist militant movement and one of the Palestinian territories’ two major political parties — has received backing from Arab countries such as Qatar and Turkey. Recently, however, it’s moved closer to Iran and its allies, The Associated Press reported.

Iranian senior officials have praised Hamas’ incursion into Israel.

Saudi Arabia and Iran are bitter rivals in the region and are fighting a proxy war in Yemen, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Following Lashier’s comments during the forum, he spoke with the Tulsa World and two Bartlesville news reporters.

Chevron Phillips has a major chemical venture in Qatar, a small Persian Gulf country more than 1,100 miles southeast of the Gaza strip that hosted the world’s biggest sporting event — soccer’s World Cup — last year.

Asked by a Bartlesville newspaper reporter how he would “reconcile” business dealings with Qatar, which has a direct line of communication with Hamas and is reportedly in talks to negotiate swapping hostages for prisoners, Lashier said:

“I’m not an expert on politics, but I would say Qatar tends to play a role more akin to what Switzerland does to try to bring parties together to resolve things. I would hesitate to call Qatar a supporter of Hamas.

“I think that we need places in the world, we need governments in the world that are willing to talk to each other instead of shooting each other, and I would put Qatar squarely in that case. They’re not big enough to start a war with anybody, but they certainly have the capability to bring opposite sides together to try to resolve things.”

Worldwide, Phillips 66 employs about 14,600 in 65 countries and is ranked 29th on the Fortune 500 list as of 2022 with revenues of over $115 billion.

Phillips Petroleum was begun by Frank and L.E. Phillips in Bartlesville in 1917.