When all else fails, Israel kills
While there may be a short-term emotional yield from scoring an enemy kill, Israel's decades-long assassinations policy has always been deeply counterproductive. Despite more than 2,700 targeted 'kills' under its belt, Tel Aviv now faces the most formidable opponents in its bloody history.
JAN 17, 2024
The recent surge in Israeli assassinations throughout West Asia is an integral part of the war it is waging on Gaza, extrajudicial murders that are both directly and indirectly endorsed by its primary US sponsor.
Under pressure by the US to fix the ‘optics’ of their Gaza genocide, the Israelis are implementing a partial withdrawal from the ground and reducing the frequency of airstrikes on North Gaza (phase 1) and South Gaza (phase 2). Having failed to rout Hamas from the Gaza Strip – a stated war objective – Tel Aviv's phase 3 is geared around scoring wins where it can; in this case, the targeted killings of senior officials within the region's Axis of Resistance.
This new wave of assassinations commenced in Damascus on 25 December, 2023 with the killing of Brigadier General Razi Mousavi, a military advisor to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). It was followed on 2 January with targeted drone strikes on Beirut, murdering Saleh al-Arouri, deputy head of the Hamas political bureau and a founding commander of the resistance group's military wing.
But while these killings are linked to the war in Gaza, they are also part of a longstanding Israeli policy of assassinations, extending beyond the occupied Palestinian territories to various global cities, from Tunis to Dubai, from London to Athens, Paris, Rome, Brussels, Vienna, Nicosia, among others.
Israel's covert assassinations legacy
Israel's history of more than 2,700 such extrajudicial killings, as detailed in Ronen Bergman's 2018 book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations, underscores its reputation as, arguably, the most voracious assassination machine in history. While these acts often violated the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states and were a blatant violation of international law, they were often a product of coordination and collaboration with foreign nations, most notably in Europe.
In some instances, the notorious Israeli intelligence services were assassins for hire: Bergman's book sheds light on the Mossad's alleged involvement in helping King Hassan II of Morocco eliminate opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka in 1965.
The startling frequency and nature of Israel's assassinations of Palestinian resistance leaders in the post-Oslo Accords era, reveals Tel Aviv's callous disregard for its political and security negotiation partners. The Israeli bypassed any understandings or agreements struck with the Palestinian Authority (PA) to kill perceived, even peaceful foes, opportunistically rather than in response to any immediate threat.
The Gaza Strip, a focal point for Israel's assassinations in the past few decades, witnessed a relentless pace even before Hamas emerged victorious in the 2006 elections. Four years earlier, in 2002, Al-Qassam Brigades Commander-in-Chief Salah Shehadeh was murdered alongside his family with a one-ton bomb dropped by an F-16 plane on a densely populated neighborhood in Gaza City.
In Gaza, the occupation state has long adopted a strategy of 'mowing the grass,’ formulated by Ephraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir as “a patient military strategy of attrition with limited goals: to diminish their opponents' capacity to harm Israel, and to accomplish temporary deterrence.” In essence, the policy is bombarding Gaza just enough, with some measure of frequency, to retard the Gaza Strip's military and civilian development.
Despite years of ‘mowing the Palestinian grass’, a strategy that spares no distinction between politicians, diplomats, fighters, or intellectuals, Tel Aviv has failed to break the will of the Palestinian resistance. Notably, the number of assassinations against Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in the past two decades surpasses those murdered in Israel's much longer conflict with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) since the 1960s.
Blowback: Past and present
In short, decades of targeted political killings have resulted in the unprecedented, resistance-led, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood of 7 October, so why would doubling down on its assassination tactics achieve anything of value for Israel?
Before the two recent assassinations in Damascus and Beirut, Shin Bet head Ronen Bar threatened to pursue Hamas leaders “in every location,” including Lebanon, Qatar and Turkiye.
Israel's open discourse about its ‘hit list’ reflects the occupation state's longstanding sense of immunity from international law. And it is this lack of global pushback that partially explains why Tel Aviv has kept the unsuccessful policy in play.
The fact is, while able to impose some setbacks to the Palestinian national liberation movement, Israel's Murder Inc. has utterly failed to extinguish the flames of resistance, which burn stronger than ever before. The proof lies in the pudding: a full 76 years after the Nakba, Al-Aqsa Flood has triggered Israel’s longest, costliest, and most personally devastating war in the state's history, a testament to the fact that Palestinians will endure their struggle, no matter what.
If anything, Israel's assassinations over the past three decades have yielded deeply counterproductive results.
The 1992 extrajudicial murder of Hezbollah's former Secretary-General Abbas al-Musawi increased the Lebanese resistance group's popularity and hardened its resolve to overthrow the Israeli occupation. It achieved exactly that under Musawi's successor, the uber-charismatic Hassan Nasrallah, who ultimately forced the humiliating withdrawal of Israeli military forces from southern Lebanon, and is possibly the most feared Arab leader among Israelis today.
Similarly, the 1995 assassination of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) Founder Fathi al-Shaqaqi on the island of Malta strengthened the movement, transforming it into one of the most formidable and committed resistance factions in Palestinian history. The 2004 assassination of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin likewise bolstered the resistance group's reputation among Palestinians, forced Israel's 2005 withdrawal from the territory, and then propelled Hamas to unprecedented political power when it swept the 2006 elections and assumed total control of the Gaza Strip.
The pivotal question now revolves around whether the renewed phase of assassinations will restore the prestige Israel lost, possibly permanently, following the Al-Aqsa Flood.
Reviving a failed policy amid a regional war
Hezbollah's initial and prompt response to the assassination of Arouri in Beirut's southern suburb was to bombard Israel's critical Meron military base with a salvo of 62 rockets, a base that acts as a key control point for Israel's air force and its main surveillance center for the region.
Tel Aviv's murder of a top Hamas official, therefore, created an immediate disadvantage for its military flexibility and allowed its biggest adversary to set new deterrence lines. Importantly, it signaled that Hezbollah, although hesitant to initiate war, refuses to fear one. And despite numerous Hezbollah operations in northern occupied Palestine, it also drew attention to Israel's hesitancy – or inability – to respond in kind.
Amid a domestic political crisis that predates Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's extremist coalition government is exploiting unconditional US support for its Gaza war to chest-thump about escalating its aggression regionally. Simultaneously, it is contracting its war – according to a commitment to the Biden administration – by transitioning the war to a third phase, in which it will seek to rehabilitate its globally damaged image by focusing on stealthier, more targeted special operations, that include assassinations.
The alarming aspect of this new phase is Washington's multifaceted role as the official sponsor of the genocide in Gaza. Apart from providing political, diplomatic, and military cover (and weapons) for Israel, the US is aggressively ratcheting up its regional intervention. The White House is working overtime to control the Lebanese front, contain Iraqi resistance factions by killing Nujaba Movement Leader Mushtaq Talib al-Saidi, and force new US-Israeli deterrence terms on Yemen in the face of Ansarallah naval operations against Israeli-linked vessels in the Red Sea.
The expanding regional war is therefore already employing new dirty tactics such as assassinations, terrorist attacks in Iran’s Kerman (with Tehran’s requisite assertive response), and the reactivation of US-backed terrorist cells, as exemplified by the resurgence of ISIS attacks in Iraq, Syria, and potentially Lebanon.
Crucially, Ali Shamkhani, political advisor to the Leader of the Islamic Republic Ali Khamenei, highlights that terrorism is Israel's new tool for waging a gray zone war and achieving deceptive gains, while emphasizing the resistance's determination to neutralize this tool.
It is worth considering, however, that in the realm of ‘irregular warfare,’ which the US Pentagon has gamed against Iran and its alliance in countless virtual military exercises, the Americans have never won, unless they rig the game or cheat. But we are not in a virtual reality conflict. This war is very real and the rules cannot be changed on a whim when the US team suffers a setback.