Israel is good at assassinating its enemies. Does it make a difference? - analysis

For decades, Israel’s leaders have sent a message to their enemies, loud and clear: Hit us, and you will die.

It was true when Israel went after the terrorists who directed and carried out the attack that killed 11 Israelis at the 1972 Munich Olympics. And it is now true of the Hamas terrorists who directed and carried out the Oct. 7 massacre.

Just 10 days after Hamas’ invasion, Mark Regev, then a government spokesman, made it explicit.

“Our position is anyone in the Hamas command structure who was responsible for the Oct. 7 massacre will pay a price,” Regev said at a Tel Aviv press conference. “We will reach them, and justice will be done.”

Early Wednesday morning, Israel reached Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, in Tehran — the most senior Hamas official killed in the war. Israel has not claimed responsibility for the hit, but Hamas and Iran have blamed Israel. Earlier in July, Israel killed another top Hamas official: the commander of its military wing, Mohammed Deif.

The United States has also carried out targeted assassinations — notably of Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden in 2011 and top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in 2020 — but for Israel, they have become a commonplace tool. It has killed at least 13 enemy officials outside the borders of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank in the last year, and dozens over the decades.

Exactly what such killings — which Israel’s top court ruled in 2006 are legal — accomplish isn’t clear cut, analysts say.

Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think tank, said that sometimes, the assassinations kill someone whose knowledge is essential to a group’s operations — setting their cause back in a concrete way, as Israel did by killing weapons scientists in Egypt, Iraq and Iran over the decades.

But other times, the victim is quickly replaced.

“I believe very strongly that some targeted assassinations make more sense and some make no sense at all,”  he said.

He cited the example of Fuad Shukr, the Hezbollah military commander whom Israel acknowledged killing in Beirut the day before Haniyeh was killed. Shukr is believed to be behind the missile strike last weekend on the Golan Heights town of Majdal Shams, which killed 12 youths.

“[The assassination of] Shukr will be effective because it upsets their whole operational structure, because it affects the command and might inhibit further attacks in that sense in the longer term,” Levitt said. “They’ve taken out someone who just played a very central role in a lot of different things. And he was the boss for a lot of sensitive things.”

Haniyeh’s killing, by contrast, is “just supposed to say we’re holding people accountable for those who are involved in Oct. 7,” he said.

An analysis of assassinations

Most scholarly assessments of targeted killings or government-directed assassinations have focused on their legality and morality. The handful that have focused on efficacy are inconclusive. A 2017 analysis by an Indiana University professor concluded that US targeted killings had “negligible effects on countering jihadist terrorism.”

Israel’s history of killing high-level Hamas operatives did not prevent the terror group from being able to carry out the Oct. 7 attack. And some of its past targeted killings are understood to have likely strengthened the group, such as the 2004 assassination of Sheikh Yassin in Gaza, which is seen as having removed an obstacle to Hamas’ alliance with Iran.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the outset of the current war that its main aim was the dismantling of Hamas. That includes the violent removal of Hamas’s leaders, said Michael Makovsky, CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, a conservative think tank. By killing Haniyeh and Deif, Israel is making good on that threat.

“They said they would go ahead and kill Hamas leaders. That was clear,” Makovsky said. “You know they were going to kill these guys. So they had an opportunity.”

An added plus, Makovsky said, is that by breaching Iran’s vaunted security apparatus, Israel dealt a blow to Iran’s deterrence.

“They embarrassed the Iranians and there’s no downside, because it’s not as if it’s going to hurt their relations with the Iranians,” he said.

Levitt, who previously worked in US intelligence, noted that Shukr and Haniyeh were key interlocutors between their organizations and Iran. Removing them would at least for a time inhibit Iran’s closeness to its proxies.

“Iran has now lost two of its key personnel,” he said. “It was comfortable working with Shukr and Ismail Haniyeh.”

But while the killings of Haniyeh and Shukr may hinder attacks for now, they won’t dent Israel’s conflicts with the terror groups in the long run, said Levitt, whose think tank has close relationships with Israeli and other Middle Eastern officials.

“Long term, even short term, neither of them is going to undermine Hezbollah, or Hamas,” Levitt said about the assassinations. Though for Israel, he added, “They’re trying to change something in the moment.”

Human rights groups have raised objections to targeted killings, saying they are gross violations of due process and endanger civilians. Agnes Callamard, now secretary general of Amnesty International, noted such concerns in 2020 after the killing of an Iranian nuclear scientist that was attributed to Israel.

“State[s] engaged in acts of aggression resulting in deprivation of life violate ipso facto their treaty obligations,” she tweeted. “States that fail to take reasonable measures to settle their int’l disputes by peaceful mean[s] fail to comply with their positive obligation to ensure the right to life.”

US governments routinely criticized Israel for targeted killings until the mid-2000s.

“This heavy-handed action does not contribute to peace,” Ari Fleischer, President George W. Bush’s spokesperson, said in 2002 after the targeted assassination of a Hamas commander in Gaza. “This message will be conveyed to Israeli authorities, and the United States regrets the loss of life.”

Later, the Bush administration adopted the practice — and it has been continued by subsequent US governments.

Some assassinations of obscure figures are meant to achieve a goal rather than make a point, said Harel Chorev, a senior researcher at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University. He pointed to the 2010 assassination in the United Arab Emirates of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, an otherwise unknown Hamas operative responsible for smuggling weapons into the Gaza Strip. Israel did not publicly acknowledge a role in the killing.

“He was a nobody,” he said. ”But then we found out that he was a major pipeline to Iran: He was channeling the money and a major player in the connection between Iran and Hamas.”

Chorev likened the people ordering assassinations to snipers, who are habituated to taking out the most senior officers in their sightline, under the logic that eliminating the person giving orders is the most effective way of hobbling the enemy on the battlefield.

“Nobody will ask, ‘Hey, why did you do this?’” of snipers in battle, he said. “It would be obvious that these are the right targets that snipers should search for.”

Another salutary effect of the Haniyah killing, analysts say, is on an Israeli population devastated by 10 months of war, and the massive governmental, military and intelligence failure that took place on Oct. 7.

“It’s a huge morale boost for Israelis and reasserts confidence in Israeli intelligence and military capabilities,” said David Halperin, the CEO of the Israel Policy Forum, a group that favors the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Shira Efron, IPF’s senior director of policy research, said the assassinations send a message — but one that has an expiration date.

“They sent a message, that we have intelligence, that we have operational capabilities, that your lives are broken, that you’re very permeable,” she said.

“But in the long term, and I’m sorry to say this, it may take more time or less time, but we eventually see that leaders or commanders in those organizations seem to be quite fungible. They’re always replaced,” Efron added. “They don’t say, ‘Oh, you know what, we got it. We’re going to lay our arms down.’ The next person, the next guy — it’s always a guy — is going to be on the same page as the last guy.”