Several Hamas Leaders Are Dead. Is Israel Safer?

Hamas has proved adept at regrouping, often producers new leaders more eager to fight Israel, reviving debate on whether targeted killings help end violence – or worsen it.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators take part in a rally to condemn the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, at Hagia Sophia Square in Istanbul, on August 3, 2024. Picture: AFP

When Israel killed the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, Benjamin Netanyahu predicted it would prove to be the blow that deterred the Islamist movement from daring to fight Israel.

“Even if in the short term there will be a harsh response from Hamas,” Netanyahu said, “in the long term the effect will be to rein in Hamas and the rest of the terror organisations, because their leaders will know that they will be destroyed.” That was 20 years ago -- the Hamas leader was Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and Netanyahu was finance minister -- and Israel is still hunting down leaders of Hamas. The cycle is reigniting a debate about the effectiveness of targeted killings of militant leaders and whether they will help end the violence or worsen it.

Netanyahu, now Israel’s prime minister, signalled his intention to hunt down Hamas leaders at the start of the war in Gaza. Israeli officials say the spate of killings is important to create fear among its enemies after the security failure that allowed the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7 that killed 1,200 people and sparked Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip.

In 10 months of war in Gaza, Israel says it has killed Hamas’s military chief, his deputy and a number of lower-level commanders. Recently, Israel is accused of killing Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in an explosion last month in Tehran. Israel hasn’t commented publicly on Haniyeh’s killing.

Demonstrators lift placards and flags of Palestine during a rally in Rabat, Morocco, protesting the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Picture: AFP

Hamas, however, has proven adept at regrouping after such blows and in many cases has produced new leaders more eager to fight Israel. Hamas this week decided to fill Haniyeh’s position with another experienced leader -- Yahya Sinwar, a convicted murderer, the suspected architect of the Oct. 7 attacks and a leader with close ties to Iran, which shares Sinwar’s goal of destroying Israel in pursuit of a Palestinian state.

“The past 30 years have proven that assassinations only embolden the movement,” said Azzam Tamimi, who wrote a book on Hamas. “They make it stronger and more popular.” The risks of a miscalculation for Israel are high. Its campaign has extended beyond the war in Gaza to Lebanon and Syria, as it seeks to hamper Iran’s attempt to arm its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, which backs Hamas.

Yahya Sinwar, right, was appointed by Hamas on August 6, 2024, as the group's new political leader replacing Ismail Haniyeh, left, who was killed in Tehran. Picture: AFP

On Friday, an Israeli air strike in the southern Lebanese city of Sidon killed a local Hamas commander who Israel said was responsible for launching missiles and rockets toward Israeli territory -- at least the seventh Hamas commander killed on Lebanese soil since Israel launched its war in Gaza.

Security forces on the scene said that no one else was killed and that a bystander had been wounded. In front of a gas station that had its windows blown out, the nephew of the commander wept on a friend’s shoulder before departing on a scooter. The station owner said he narrowly escaped the blast because he had gone to buy fruit.

Haniyeh’s death in Tehran last month came hours after the Israeli military killed a senior Hezbollah commander in Beirut in response to a rocket strike from Lebanon that killed 12 young people in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.

The site in Beirut where top Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr was killed following an Israeli strike on July 30. Picture: Getty

Israel is now awaiting a response to the killings from both Iran and Hezbollah, with Western diplomats fearful a misjudgment or targeting error by either could set off a wider Middle East conflict.

The standoff echoes the situation in April, when Israel was accused of striking a gathering of Iranian military leaders at a diplomatic building in the Syrian capital Damascus. Tehran responded nearly two weeks later with a volley of more than 300 missiles and drones in a rare direct attack on Israeli soil that surprised Israeli officials in its scale.

A coalition led by the US helped Israel fight off that assault. But the attack showed the broader risk of an Israeli miscalculation in killing officials from Iran and its proxies.

“Often, these targeted killings have led to a lot of Israelis being killed in retaliation,” said Gershon Baskin, a former Israeli interlocutor with Hamas. “They’re very dangerous and a huge calculated risk.” The effectiveness of targeted killings has been debated in Israel for as long as it has engaged in the practice, which predates the establishment of the state in 1948. Jewish militants seeking to expel the British from Mandatory Palestine assassinated officers and diplomats.

Since World War II, Israel has used targeted killings in more than 2,700 operations, more than any other country in the Western world, according to the 2018 book “Rise and Kill First” by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman.

Those missions had myriad aims: to deter attacks on Israelis, stunt an enemy’s military capabilities or send a message that Israel would kill anyone who seeks it harm.

After the killings in 1972 of Israeli athletes and coaches in the Munich Olympic Village by a Palestinian faction known as Black September, Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered spies to hunt down those involved in a campaign dubbed Operation Wrath of God.

A member of the militant group which seized Israeli team members at the Munich Olympic Village in September 1972. Picture: News Corp

That operation, later portrayed in a film by Steven Spielberg, highlighted how killings can backfire. A team of Israelis killed a Moroccan waiter in Norway whom they mistakenly identified as a Palestinian militant, and five operatives were sentenced to short prison terms.

Hamas’s emergence in the late 1980s significantly increased Israel’s use of targeted killings. One of the group’s early military leaders, Yahya Ayyash, learned how to create improvised explosive devices, ushering in an era of suicide bombings in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

After a series of bombings in the 1990s, Israel killed Ayyash by placing a secret explosive in a phone that later detonated next to his ear. But suicide attacks increased under new Hamas military leaders, including Mohammed Deif, the military leader Israel said it killed in a strike last month.

In 1997, Israel targeted Khaled Meshaal, a Hamas founder living in Jordan. The Israeli team entered the country posing as Canadian tourists and attacked Meshaal outside the Hamas political office in Amman. One Israeli agent sprayed a poison into Meshaal’s ear, but he was captured along with another member of the team before they could escape.

Meshaal fell into a coma, and Jordan threatened to terminate its peace treaty with Israel unless Israel provided the antidote that saved Meshaal’s life. At the time, Efraim Halevy, an Israeli official who had helped build clandestine ties with Jordan, suggested Israel should release Sheikh Yassin from prison to allow Jordan to save face and secure the freedom of the Israeli Mossad operatives.

In an interview, Halevy said Israel’s policy of killing Hamas leaders in regular rounds of violence, which became known in the Israeli security establishment as mowing the lawn, was ineffective and sometimes produced more dangerous leaders.

Former Israeli officials often point to the killing in 1992 of one of the founders of Hezbollah, Abbas al-Musawi, and how that led to the ascension of the Lebanese militia’s current chief, Hassan Nasrallah, who has built the group into a more potent enemy.

“I never thought that mowing the lawn prevented the lawn from growing up again,” said Halevy, who a year after the botched Meshaal operation became head of Mossad in 1998.

The rise in Israeli operations coincided with 9/11 and America’s own shift to using targeted killings in its fight against al Qa’ida and in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Academics say the record of their usefulness is inconclusive.

Killing leaders carries a heavy moral burden, risks diplomatic condemnation and potentially violates international laws. But it also can disrupt a group’s operations, force its leaders underground, and at times even cripple a group permanently.

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, in 2003. Picture: AP

“There has been a lot of research into the effectiveness of targeted killing, and the findings are mixed,” said Matthew Waxman, a professor at Columbia Law School who served as a national security official in the Bush administration. “Many groups have been able to replace leaders, but it can be quite effective in disrupting their operations and it can have important symbolic effects.”

Yassin’s killing in 2004 remains one of the most symbolic in the conflict between Israel and Hamas. An Israeli helicopter fired missiles at Yassin, a wheelchair-using quadriplegic, as he was being pushed home from prayers at a mosque. Israel assessed that Yassin was involved in directing suicide bomb attacks against Israelis.

One of the Israeli officials who voted to kill Yassin in 2004 was former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who at the time was minister of industry. While Olmert is skeptical that targeted killings are always effective, he believes that killing Yassin was helpful in blunting the threat of Hamas.

“He was the ultimate leader of Hamas, and his elimination was very significant in creating a leadership crisis for a period of time in Hamas,” Olmert said.

A Palestinian woman holds a gun in front of the house of Hamas Founder Ahmed Yassin during his funeral on March 22, 2004 in Gaza City, Gaza Strip. Picture: Getty

Yassin’s death, one in a series of killings of Hamas leaders at the time, helped push the group to end hostilities during what became known as the Second Intifada.

Two years later, Hamas engaged in a nonviolent political track, winning Palestinian legislative elections that were boycotted by the US and Israel. Hamas in 2007 wrested control of Gaza, giving the US-designated terrorist group the platform to launch the Oct. 7 assaults.

In a sense, Netanyahu’s 2004 prediction had it reversed -- the killing undermined Hamas in the short term but ultimately wasn’t effective in deterring the group. Israel’s fight with Hamas went on, with short conflicts in Gaza in 2008, 2011, 2014 and 2021.

Olmert believes that if Israel had killed the military commander Deif earlier than this year, it would have set back Hamas’s military capabilities, blunting the group’s ability to wage those wars.

While serving as prime minister in 2007, Olmert said, he was called out of a meeting with Arab leaders in Egypt’s Sharm El Sheikh and told by his intelligence services that Israel had a warplane in the air ready to fire on Deif and other Hamas leaders in a building in Gaza.

After weighing the opportunity, he called off the attack, fearing it would embarrass his Arab hosts.

“It wouldn’t have removed Hamas from the face of the earth,” he said. But it would have “definitely affected the military capacity, the growth of the military power” of Hamas, Olmert said.

When Israel got another shot at Deif in July, it didn’t hold back, dropping eight 900-kilogram bombs in a strike that Gaza health authorities said killed 90 Palestinians and injured hundreds more.

“Sometimes there are certain personalities that are very, very significant, and their removal can make a difference,” Olmert said.

A damaged building in Khan Younis, Gaza. The war between Hamas and Israel has left large parts of the Palestinian enclave in ruins. Picture: Getty