How Israel turned assassination into its political weapon of choice

On July 13, yet another “breaking news” from Gaza flashed on TV screens and social media feeds of news outlets across the world. For those who have been following the news cycle from Gaza since October 7, 2023, this has become an almost daily occurrence.

Initial reports on the latest massacre in southern Gaza suggested that at least 370 people had been killed in Israeli attacks, but the number was later revised to under 100.

Each of these massacres follows a sinister ploy by Israel – its well-oiled propaganda machine starts working relentlessly to divert attention from the attack on civilians to fabricated news.

This time, Israel announced the killing of Muhammad Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades. Hamas later denied his death, but the chain of events remains unclear in the haze of war. Even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was not sure about Deif’s death.

Western news outlets, most of them pro-Israel, furthered the Zionist state’s narrative by putting out news reports that gave a sort of finality to the alleged killing of Deif: “Who is Muhammad Deif? and “What was his role in the attacks on October 7?” Qassam Brigades, without a doubt, is one of the most critical actors among the Palestinian resistance forces fighting against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

This is the reason why, in times like these, it is better to take a step back and deconstruct the very policy Israel resorts to: “targeted killings”. During the so-called war on terror launched by the United States following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, this has become a common practice among nations.

If we consider this history, along with Israel’s use of targeted killings, a much more dangerous future lies ahead of us, not just domestically or regionally but globally.

The policy of killing

Assassinations have been chiefly affiliated with illegal, violent, non-state actors. Yet, as the 20th century was a time for extreme events like world wars, it was also the era where states started to internalise, professionalise, and technicalise it.

Of course, if you change the word “assassination” with “targeted killings,” it may sound like a surgical or legitimate act, but the result is the same, “eliminating” enemies.

Israel is the prime example of this adaptation, especially in its fight against Palestinian opposition; this has become a much apparent reality, and the threat knows no borders.

There has been a long discussion among intelligence and security circles about whether targeting the leader of a violent non-state group to dissolve is a good strategy.

Still, there is no concrete answer to that. In the case of Palestine, where the resistance to occupation has continued for more than 75 years now, the resistance has survived all attempts by Israel to eliminate it.

Yet, it wouldn’t be wrong to state that the general mindset of Israel’s adaptation of this assassination policy is to disrupt the movement that it is targeting, to force it to change from the inside and gain the widespread support of Israeli citizens by sending the message that they have the upper hand.

Israel’s “targeted killings” strategy operates in addition to daily occupational practices and occasional military incursions, as have been seen since the blockade of Gaza in 2007.

To understand the current dynamics, we can start from the mid-1970s, as was famously depicted by Steven Spielberg’s 2005 movie titled Munich; the Israeli intelligence operators targeted numerous Palestinian Liberation Organization affiliates in European cities.

These assassinations were against the killings of Israeli athletes in the 1972 Munich Olympics. This was one of the earliest clues where it became apparent that Israel wouldn’t hesitate to bring violence wherever their adversary was, even if it were in Europe.

Although this signified the globalisation of Israel’s assassination policy, their eyes were always on the top leadership of Palestinian politics. Israel used everything in its capacity to banish resistance forces as far from Palestine as possible.

Hence, when the Palestinian groups settled in Jordan first, they were forced to leave for Lebanon. When they started to be seen as a threat by Israel in Lebanon, too, Israel didn’t hesitate to invade the country's capital, Beirut, and again force Palestinian factions to settle, this time in Tunisia.

Yet Israel tracked their route even where it killed number two in PLO, Abu Jihad, in Tunisia’s capital, Tunis, in 1988. This date coincided with the times when there was a grassroots, leaderless uprising on the streets of Palestine against the Israeli occupation, which later started to be known as the First Intifada.

The killing of Abu Jihad, combined with the Intifada atmosphere, people would have expected the rise of violence. On the contrary, just five years later, in 1993, everyone was surprised to see the leader of PLO, Yaser Arafat, shaking hands with Yitzhak Rabin at the White House in the presence of US President Bill Clinton.

The meeting between Rabin and Arafat was to announce the new road map for peace between the two countries, the Oslo Accords. As they were burying their hatches, Israel found its main target for assassination: political movements who openly opposed the Oslo Accords.

The Islamic resistance movements in Palestine and primarily the two main organisations that represented it, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, were the prime examples of these.

Yet staunch Marxist-Leninist secular critics of Arafat, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), were also listed among the targets of Israel. Top leaders such as Fathi Shiqaqi (Islamic Jihad), Yahya Ayyash (Qassam Brigades), Ahmed Yassin (Hamas), Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi (Hamas), Mustafa Ali Zabri (PFLP) were killed by Israel.

On the doorsteps of total war?

The mass atrocities on Gaza since October 7 opened the Pandora's box on a regional and global scale. Israel not only used aerial or ground bombardment of Gaza but also used every action in its playbook to inflict brutality beyond its borders, primarily Lebanon.

Mohammed Deif is the last and the most critical figure so far that Israel claimed to have killed since the war started. In the early days of the crisis, the killing of Ayman Nawfal, a senior commander of the Qassam Brigades, was announced and accepted by the resistance forces.

On the second day of 2024, January 2, Salih el Aruri, a senior Hamas leader and one of the founders of Qassam Brigades, was assassinated in a drone strike by Israel, not in Palestine but in the capital of Lebanon, Beirut.

The international community should be alert, prepared, and aware of what Israel is about to start globally.

It won’t be a shock to anyone if Israel dares to spread fear and violence to the streets of Europe and the US to suppress the solidarity movement for Palestine, just like it did after the Munich Olympics in the 1970s.