President Donald Trump has called on Qatar to stop funding terrorism as his state department urged Arab states to ease their blockade on the country and calm tensions that intensified with a Turkish offer to send military forces to aid its Qatari ally.
"The nation of Qatar unfortunately has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level," Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday.
"We had a decision to make, do we take the easy road or do we finally take a hard but necessary action. We have to stop the funding of terrorism. I decided ... the time had come to call on Qatar to end its funding."
Qatari foreign minister strikes a defiant tone
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt and Bahrain severed ties with Qatar on Monday over long-standing allegations that Doha was courting Iran and fomenting instability in the region.
Gulf allies tightened their squeeze on Qatar on Friday by putting dozens of figures with links to the tiny, wealthy nation on terrorism blacklists.
Taking what appeared to be a different position to Trump's hard line, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson made clear he expects all parties to end the crisis.
Tillerson told reporters at the State Department that the crisis, which has cut transportation links and trade, had begun to hurt ordinary people in Qatar, impaired business dealings and harmed the US battle against the Islamic State militant group.
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Qatar is home to a vital US military base.
In an apparent escalation of the crisis, staff at Al Jazeera, Qatar's influential satellite television news channel which often infuriates the rulers of the Arab world, said its computer systems had come under cyber attack.
Riyadh, Cairo and their allies accuse Qatar, the world's richest country per capita, of supporting militant Islamist movements across the region.
Qatar, which has developed an assertive foreign policy over the past decade, denies that it supports militants and says it is helping to reduce the threat of terrorism by backing groups that fight poverty and seek political reform.
