Israel’s strike on Hamas Leader Haniyeh signals defiance to Iran - opinion

The elimination of Ismail Haniyeh, chairman of the Hamas political bureau (2017-2024) and former Palestinian prime minister in Gaza (2006-2014), was a long time in coming and sends several important messages from Israel to Iran and its terror proxy network. 

Israel is widely assumed to be behind the action although it did not accept direct responsibility. The targeted killing would represent an important Rubicon that Israel has apparently now passed, from fear and containment to assertiveness and a policy of “no tolerance” for those trying to kill Israelis and destroy Israel.

Haniyeh’s elimination conveyed a particularly strong message to Iran. It insulted the Iranians, revealed their weakness, and broadcast that Iranian leaders or their proxy officials could be targeted and eliminated by Israel anywhere, at the place and time of Israel’s choosing. 

Haniyeh’s elimination may come to some as a surprise. Following the July 27 mass murder of 12 children in Israel’s Druze community of Majdal Shams and the subsequent elimination of the senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr (also known as Hajj Mohsin), the world’s attention was primarily focused on how the Hezbollah-Israel war might evolve. However, it appeared to be, in sports terms, a “head fake.” 

Haniyeh was deeply involved for years in the planning of the October 7 Hamas atrocities. He had made frequent trips to Iran to meet and strategize with his counterparts in the Islamic Republic’s Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the external terror organization under the command of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

The elimination of Haniyeh is particularly important since it occurred in Iran, and especially because he was the guest of the incoming president Masoud Pezeshkian. The message is a strong one to the IRGC and the Iranian leadership that Israel can reach, target, and neutralize them with its advanced intelligence network and operational capabilities. 

The targeted killing of Haniyeh was also an important “psyop” – psychological operation action by Israel – because it sent a resonant message to the Iranian terror network and its proxies across the Middle East beginning with Hamas, extending to Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, as well as the Iraqi forces under the Iranian regime’s control, and beyond – that Israel is capable of reaching any terrorist leader when it decides to reach them.

TAKING OUT Haniyeh was also important since it was directed against a senior Hamas leader and not specifically at Hezbollah, which may reduce Iran’s justification for launching a major attack. Haniyeh’s bloody past extended many years since the 2006 parliamentary and presidential elections in which he defeated Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas by a landslide. 

That election was then ignored by the US-backed Palestinian Authority because Hamas did not abide by the three conditions that the Oslo peace accords had determined for the Oslo-sanctioned election of a Palestinian leadership.

Haniyeh's reign of terror

Needless to say, the Hamas government that Haniyeh led in Gaza, until he was replaced in 2016 by Yahya Sinwar, had militarized Hamas’s operational capabilities extraordinarily since the early 2000s, with the assistance of Iran. Under Haniyeh’s leadership, Hamas prosecuted several terror wars, including in 2008-2009, the attacks of 2011-2012, 2014-2015, and the well-known Guardian of the Walls counterterror operation, following Hamas’s onslaught in 2021, triggering substantial violence within Israel. 

The operation to assassinate Haniyeh was a fitting reversal of his successful psychological warfare against Israel. His psychological operations and political warfare in 2014, including speaking in front of thousands of Gazans, using as a backdrop photos of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, and Mahatma Gandhi to issue a psyop message to the world that Hamas was merely a resistance fighter organization defending its own people as opposed to a radical Islamic terror group being mobilized and operated by the Iranian regime. 

Even though he was a Sunni leader of Hamas, Haniyeh had become a well-known representative of the Iranian Shi’ite regime. Mobilized and directed by Tehran, Hamas had used “hybrid warfare” – traditional terror actions combined with popular mobilization of the public. It was Haniyeh who presided over Hamas when he directed and motivated thousands of Gazan boys and girls to try to storm the fence in 2018 in what was called the “Great March of Return,” another psychological operation. 

It has been reported recently that Haniyeh had made his operational headquarters in Doha, Qatar, and had been behind some of the intensive Qatari-sponsored efforts to implement a ceasefire, positioning himself in Western media as a peacemaker. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Haniyeh’s interest was in saving the Hamas regime, keeping it in the cockpit, and also “blowing up” the negotiations between Israel and Hamas by intensifying Hamas’s demands.  

Haniyeh’s elimination comes many months following Israeli reactive policy toward Hezbollah and Iran’s direct attacks on April 14. Israel took responsibility for the Beirut attack on Shukr. If it is also behind the attack in Tehran, this action would prove that Israel crossed a fear-Rubicon, and speaks and acts according to the political culture of the Middle East by eliminating any terrorist leader or operative who attempts to harm Israel or its people.

The writer is president of the Jerusalem Center for Foreign Affairs.