By authorising the assassination of Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran – and it’s a pretty safe assumption that he did – Benjamin Netanyahu has surely taken the biggest military risk since the armed faction launched its attack on Israel nine months ago.
Coming so soon after the strike on Beirut which the Israeli military says killed Fuad Shukr, the Hezbollah commander it holds responsible for the rocket launch that killed 12 children and teenagers in Majdal Shams on Saturday, it will certainly be read in Tehran as an even graver provocation. As such it will make all the harder the intense efforts of the international community – and especially the US — to avert a full scale regional conflagration.
It’s almost certain that Israel deliberately chose to strike while Haniyeh was in Tehran – attending the inauguration of Iran’s new President Masoud Pezeshkian, rather than in Doha, Qatar where Haniyeh was usually based. Given that Qatar, with whom Israel has a relationship, however uneasy, is the one country trusted by the US to mediate between all sides, that had presumably been ruled out.
Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Al Khamenei has lost little time in vowing revenge for the attack. How exactly Iran and/or its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah will react to the lethal air strikes in two regional capitals is so far unclear. But Washington will have been desperately hoping that the strike on Fuad Shukr, despite being a serious blow to the Shiite militia – might just have fulfilled Israel’s desire to retaliate for the carnage in Majd el Shams without provoking an all out war across Israel’s northern border.
The extra-judicial execution of Haniyeh on Iranian territory makes that an even less safe bet than it already was—and risks dragging Iran itself into the conflict. And it further complicates the fraught negotiations on a ceasefire in Gaza – the one development which might have prompted Hezbollah to call off the repeated rocket attacks it started launching in support of Hamas on October 8.
While the risks of assassinating Haniyeh are all too plain, the potential rewards for Israel are a good deal harder to detect at present. Haniyeh, unlike Yahya Sinwar, who replaced him as Hamas’s leader in Gaza, and Sinwar’s co-architect of the October 7 massacres Mohammed Deif, was essentially a politician rather than a fighter.
In 2006, it was he who led Hamas’ then unprecedented decision to participate in the last Palestinian elections — and as a relatively popular figure in Gaza to take first place on the victorious Hamas list of candidates for the Palestinian Legislative Council. And although as head of Hamas’s political bureau he was one the three Hamas leaders against whom the ICC’s prosecutor Karim Khan has sought arrest warrants, it was almost certainly the other two – Deif and Sinwar – who planned the details of the attack which killed 1,200 Israelis on 7 October.
Even more pertinently, Haniyeh was the main Hamas figure involved in the negotiations, mediated by Qatar and Egypt and closely involving US officials including CIA director William Burns, aimed at securing a Gaza ceasefire in which there would be a phased return of 130 Israeli hostages, dozens of whom are already believed to be dead. Ir’s hard to see how his removal from the scene will make those negotiations, based on a proposal by US President Joe Biden, any easier.
The strike may fuel fears among some desperate families of the hostages that their agonising wait for the release of family members may be prolonged even further. No doubt the assassination of a man who had been a prominent Hamas leader for two decades will be welcomed by many Israelis. But pending any yet to emerge details of the thinking behind the act, it could fuel criticisms that the Israeli Prime Minister has been trying to prolong the war—and delay a hostage deal –more in his own rather than his country’s interests.
There is a long history of Israel assassinating Hamas leaders – especially in Gaza—including in the early 2000’s Hamas’s founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, his immediate successor Abdel Aziz al Rantisi, and Yahya Ayash, the miliary wing’s chief bombmaker. None of these killings seem tangibly to have stopped the movement in its tracks. It remains for Israel to show how, in view of the risks it entails, this one will be different.
