Ismail Haniyeh assassination: Where to next for the Middle East?

A cluster of assassinations, or targeted killings, initiated by Israel in recent weeks directed at key members of the pro-Iranian network of terror proxies in the Middle East, is expected to soon lead to further escalation in the ongoing regional war raging there since 7 October.

One may argue there is a moral justification for the extrajudicial killing of leading figures in the terrorist organisations Hamas and Hezbollah (both listed as terror groups by Australia), who were responsible for the murders and kidnapping, and other atrocities, of thousands – Israelis, Palestinians, Americans, and many others.

At the same time, circumstances surrounding the recent assassinations call into question the motives, validity, and effectiveness of the tactic of targeted killings in the Israeli context.

The killing of three arch-terrorists

Since the deadly 7 October massacre by Hamas in Israel, the Israeli army (IDF) and other government agencies have been systematically dismantling Hamas’ capabilities.

This campaign scored a major achievement when the commander of the military wing of Hamas, Mohammed Deif, was “eliminated” (as the Israelis call it) on 13 July at an encampment in Khan Yunis in the southern part of the Gaza Strip.

He was the mastermind of many of Hamas’ worst terror attacks, and his fingerprints were all over the planning and execution of the “Black Saturday” massacre of 7 October.

Deif had survived at least seven attempts on his life over three decades, which left him partly disabled, but still able to function as a military planner and commander.

An attack by advanced US-made Israeli F-35 fighter jets on Beirut’s Dahia neighbourhood on 30 July resulted in the death of Hezbollah’s senior commander, Fuad Shukr (Abu Mohsin).

Considered second only to the organisation’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, Shukr was more than a personal confidant to his boss. He was in charge of advanced weapons development and deployment in Lebanon, and was behind significant aspects of Hezbollah’s ongoing attacks on Israel since 7 October, including the heavy Falaq 1 rocket fired from Lebanon that killed 12 Israeli Druze children and teenagers playing soccer in the village of Majdal Shams on 28 July.

There was also an American bounty of US$5 million on his head for his role in an attack in Beirut in 1983 that killed about 300 US and French soldiers.

The subject of the latest targeted killing was the highest-profile figure of all – 62-year-old Ismail Haniyeh, one of Hamas’ most senior leaders.

A bureaucrat turned politician and later a diplomat, Haniyeh didn’t get his hands dirty with fighting. Instead, he preferred the spoils of power, especially after moving to Qatar in recent years, where he enjoyed a decadent luxury lifestyle.

Meanwhile, people in Gaza have been suffering immensely under Hamas rule since 2007, and even more so since 7 October because of the devastating effects of the Israeli attack on the Strip.

Make no mistake – he may not himself have fired a gun, but Haniyeh was an arch-terrorist. As the head of Hamas’ political bureau, he travelled to Arab capitals, Turkey, and Iran to collect funds for the organisation’s terror activities, coordinate strategies, and facilitate weapon shipments, military guidance, and anything else needed to sustain Hamas’ fight against Israel.

Haniyeh died the same way he lived – spectacularly and flamboyantly. He was in Iran to participate in the ceremonial inauguration of incoming President Masoud Pezeshkian, and was killed in the early hours of 31 July, allegedly when a bomb at the Teheran apartment where he was staying exploded. The bomb was reportedly planted inside the special building where he was staying – run by Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – about two months ago.

This bold attack sent shockwaves across the Arab world and sowed fear within the ranks of Iran’s ruling ayatollahs.

Angered and confused, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei ordered a thorough investigation to determine how this happened, while the IRGC insists a missile killed Haniyeh (possibly to reduce its own responsibility for the blunder).

Dozens of arrests followed, with panic recorded among IRGC ranks, as the operation was clear evidence of Israel’s ability to infiltrate deep into the most intimate parts of Iran’s elite.

Mowing the perennial grass of terror

“Targeted killings” (actually termed “focused thwarting” in the Hebrew jargon used by Israeli security forces) began as revenge assassinations of Nazis and collaborators by Jews in post-Holocaust Europe in the late 1940s, then later became a staple of Israeli modus operandi against its enemies.

Since the 1980s, Israel has concluded that deterrence is largely irrelevant against Jihadist terrorists such as Hamas and Hezbollah, which follow an ideology of self-sacrifice and martyrdom. Instead, the IDF chooses to seek to remove “ticking bomb” terror operatives and cells via targeted killings.

This tactic has been unofficially labelled “Mowing the Grass” – a metaphor comparing terror to a lawn that must be cut periodically to keep it in check, while acknowledging that the grass will continuously regrow and will require constant additional efforts to control it, unless completely rooted out.

Yet rooting out extremist views popular among segments of the Muslim world is a long-term project, requiring a significant shift in the education of millions of youngsters in the region – something largely beyond Israel’s capabilities.

In the meantime, the never-ending cycle of eliminating key operational figures in terror organisations has taken centre-stage among other Israeli tactics for fighting terror.

Over time, Israel has become the world leader in targeted killings. As Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Ronen Bergman explained in his canonical 2018 book Rise and Kill First, highly-developed intelligence capabilities and weapon accuracy “made Israel’s war on terror the most effective ever waged by a Western country”.

“On numerous occasions, it was targeted killing that saved Israel from very grave crises.”

However, danger arises when the process turns into the purpose, and the tactic into a strategy. While Israeli security forces became “the most robust and streamlined assassination machine in history”, Bergman says, successful use of the tactic of targeted killing may have blinded Israel to the need to address the bigger picture.

For example, when one terror leader is assassinated, will the replacement be even more dangerous?

After the 1992 elimination of Hezbollah General Secretary Abbas al-Musawi by Israel, the successor, Hassan Nasrallah, elevated the terror organisation to the most formidable non-state military force in the Middle East, becoming a major threat to Israel.

Similar blindness, powered by success, can lead to Israeli overconfidence in its ability to defeat enemies and predict attacks. This vanity led to the resounding intelligence failures of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and the devastating Hamas terror attack on 7 October, 2023.

Revenge or counterterrorism?

The rationale for removing Shukr and Deif is operational – they were the experienced hands-on commanders of the military aspects of their organisations. There is reason to believe that without these two, the performance and capabilities of Hamas and Hezbollah will be significantly undermined.

Targeting Haniyeh appears to be the fruit of a different set of motivations. He was a politician, seminal to the “Hamas abroad” branch of the organisation. Killing him is not expected to directly impact the war – Hamas’ Gaza leader, Yahya Sinwar, along with Deif and his brother Muhammed, were the ones actually calling the shots in the Strip militarily.

This is also true regarding Haniyeh’s role in the never-ending negotiations for a second ceasefire and hostage release deal (the first one collapsed in November 2023).

After Haniyeh was eliminated, Israeli sources claimed he had been having a negative influence on the talks, contradicting earlier reports that Haniyeh’s role was limited to being a channel to pass information to Sinwar, the real decision-maker.

In any case, negotiations are now stalled, while critics of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accuse him of delaying or even sabotaging a possible deal by approving the operation in order prevent an agreement they argue he doesn’t want because of his own narrow political considerations.

A hint of what led to the decision to get rid of Haniyeh in such a dramatic and public fashion can be found in the words of Ronen Bar, the current head of Israel’s internal security agency, the Shabak.

In December last year, Bar labelled the 7 October Hamas attack “our Munich,” a reference to the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympic Games held at the (then West) German city.

The head of the Shabak was thus actually hinting at the “Golda doctrine” – the order given by the PM of Israel at the time, Golda Meir, to the Israeli Mossad spy agency to kill anyone directly and indirectly involved in the Munich massacre. That led to Operation “Wrath of God” – a long series of targeted killing operations by the Mossad on European soil and in Lebanon.

The debate regarding Wrath of God remains ongoing. Was it a campaign of revenge, or a legitimate counter-terrorism operation, designed to prevent the occurrence of another Munich massacre?

Similar questions are now being asked about Haniyeh’s death.

Dangerous miscalculation?

Returning to the latest events, this isn’t the first time Israel has operated on Iranian soil.

There’s a very long list of operations attributed to the Israelis in the Islamic Republic, including sabotaging military and nuclear facilities, multiple assassinations of both terrorists (such as an al Qaeda leader in 2020) and nuclear scientists (most notably the head of the nuclear weapons program, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, in a 2021 operation), and even the theft of the secret nuclear archive from the heart of Tehran in late January 2018.

Israeli drones, missiles, and other forms of weaponry were reportedly involved in several attacks within Iran.

Humiliated once again by Israel’s penetration of an IRGC inner sanctum, the regime in Tehran now promises stronger retribution for the murder of the Hamas leader in its own backyard.

Efforts at coordination of both the Iranian proxy network on one hand and the Israel-US regional axis on the other are in full swing as these lines are being written. The results of any upcoming retaliatory attack (including one by Hezbollah, which is vowing to separately avenge the slaying of Shukr, even as its masters in Teheran plot their own response) are yet to be known.

In the Middle East, estimating incorrectly your rivals' intentions and actions has led to major bloodshed.

In 2006, for example, the killing and abduction of two Israeli soldiers (Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev) from Israel by Hezbollah led to the Second Lebanon War. Nasrallah later admitted he was surprised that a major war ensued from this incident – meaning that he badly miscalculated Israel’s response to it.

More recently, in April 2024, an Israeli airstrike killed senior Iranian official General Mohammad Reza Zahedi (also known as Hassan Mahdawi) in Syria. This resulted in an unprecedented direct Iranian attack on the Jewish state on 14 April, one of the most massive single-day airborne assaults in Middle Eastern history.

Yet Israel, the US, and a coalition of Western (UK, France) and regional states (Jordan, UAE, and possibly also Saudi Arabia) were able to intercept more than 300 flying explosive projectiles fired by Iran and its proxies from Yemen and Iraq, minimising to almost zero consequences of that attack.

Yet, in hindsight, Israel underestimated and “miscalculated” Iran’s possible reaction to the killing of its general, mistakenly believing Tehran’s actions would remain constrained.

So, ignoring the motives for it, was killing Haniyeh while he was in Iran a smart move, or a dangerous “miscalculation” that will lead to another round of deadly and costly regional war? Only time will tell.