A worldwide campaign of assassinations of Hamas leaders announced by senior Israel officials is likely to be counterproductive, impractical and ineffective, targets of previous such efforts have suggested.
Benjamin Netanyahu first announced the new strategy two weeks after the 7 October attacks launched by Hamas into southern Israel which killed 1,200 people.
Officials in Israel have briefed journalists that a new operation called Nili, an acronym for a biblical phrase in Hebrew meaning “the eternal one of Israel will not lie”, would target senior leaders of the militant Islamist organisation.
Last month Netanyahu told a press conference that he had instructed Mossad, Israel’s overseas intelligence service, to “assassinate all the leaders of Hamas wherever they are”. In early December a leaked recording revealed Ronen Bar, the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, telling Israeli parliamentarians that Hamas leaders would be killed “in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, in Turkey, in Qatar, everywhere … It will take a few years, but we will be there in order to do it.”
Bar described the assassination campaign as “our Munich”, a reference to the campaign launched by Israel after the attack by Palestinian extremists on the Munich Olympics in 1972 that killed 11 Israeli sportsmen. That effort led to at least 10 assassinations between December 1972 and 1979, and was portrayed in the Steven Spielberg film Munich. Since then, Israel has conducted dozens more clandestine assassinations, with targets ranging from Palestinian leaders to Iranian nuclear scientists.
A group of Palestinian gunmen held Israeli athletes hostage in a 20-hour standoff at the Munich Olympic Village in 1972; 11 of the athletes, five of the Palestinians and a German policeman died. Photograph: Kurt Strumpf/AP
Currently, Israeli security services are focused on killing the leaders of Hamas in Gaza, analysts said. The Israeli military has said it is closing in on Yahya Sinwar, the suspected architect of the 7 October attacks, after a months-long offensive that has devastated swaths of the enclave and killed more than 20,000 people, the majority civilians, according to the Hamas-run health authorities there.
But the announced campaign has a much broader scope, potentially targeting leaders of Hamas based in Qatar, Turkey, Lebanon and the group’s support networks elsewhere.
“We understand that we have to … reach everyone in the [Hamas] leadership … because we will not paralyse this organisation without eliminating these very influential figures. They were deeply implicated in the murderous attack of October 7 and must pay the price,” said Prof Kobi Michael, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
But not all are convinced by such operations. Yossi Melman, a journalist and author who has covered the Israeli security services for decades, said the assassinations strategy “doesn’t solve anything”.
“The…
2023-12-23 00:00:16
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