Israel steps up Hamas assassination campaign with double strike

The commander of Hamas’s national security force and the organisation’s most senior woman have been killed.

Jamila Al-Shanti, centre, the first woman elected to Hamas' political bureau, was killed during an Israeli raid in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip. Picture: AFP

The commander of Hamas’s national security force has been killed in an Israeli strike on his home in Gaza City, the militant group said.

Major General Jihad Muheisen was killed with members of his family, according to Hamas’s press office. The group also claimed that a strike had killed Jamila al-Shanti, the widow of one of the founders of the Islamist movement and the most senior woman in the organisation.

Before Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007, she was the first woman elected to political office and served in the group’s 15-member politburo, Hamas’s main decision-making body. The politburo is led by Ismail Haniyeh, who is based in Qatar.

If confirmed by the Israel defence forces (IDF) as assassinations, the deaths suggest a broadening of Israel’s campaign against Hamas, which began with strikes against the commanders most closely associated with the cross-border attacks on Israeli communities on October 7. Hamas murdered 1,400 people from more than 40 countries in the raids and took at least 203 people hostage.

In the aftermath, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, said that members of Hamas had two options: surrender or die. “Our warplanes will reach everywhere. Every missile has an address. We will reach each and every one of the members of Hamas,” Gallant told jet pilots at the Nevatim airbase.

“Hamas members have two options: either die in their positions or surrender unconditionally. There is no third option. We will wipe out the Hamas organisation and dismantle all of its capabilities.”

The most high-ranking Hamas figure to be killed since October 7 is Ayman Nofal, the head of its military wing in central Gaza, considered one of Israel’s top five targets. The IDF has also killed two other senior operatives: Muhammad Awdallah, the commander of the anti-tank missile system in Gaza City, and Akram Hijazi, a commander in Hamas’s Nukhba (elite) special forces unit. Israeli sources said that in addition to directing the terrorist attacks against Israel, Hijazi was an arms dealer.

The Israeli government announced yesterday (Thursday) that it had killed ten commanders in the Nukhba, which played the lead role in the cross-border assault. The failure to anticipate and thwart the attacks, the worst in Israel’s history, has heaped pressure on the leaders of the domestic intelligence agency, Shin Bet, and its military equivalent, Aman. Israel’s famous foreign intelligence service, Mossad, is responsible for external operations. In a missive last week, the head of Shin Bet took personal responsibility for the intelligence failures that allowed Hamas free rein to break through the border fence and attack communities.

“Despite a series of actions we carried out, unfortunately on Saturday we were unable to generate a sufficient warning that would allow the attack to be thwarted,” Ronen Bar wrote. “As the one who heads the organisation, the responsibility for this is mine. There will be time for investigations. Now we are fighting.”

Former intelligence operatives have blamed the failure on several causes, from political pressure to focus on securing settler communities in the West Bank to a failure to make connections between separate pieces of information.

One former senior official also blamed Shin Bet’s increased reliance on technology and signals intelligence collection rather than human contact and information. It has been revealed that certain surveillance measures had been allowed to lapse, including balloons that kept watch over Gaza. Those who planned the attacks are believed to have kept to analogue communications to evade detection.

The vast majority of assassinations are carried out by the Israeli air force, either in air-dropped missile strikes, helicopter-fired missiles or drone attacks, acting on intelligence passed to it from Aman and Shin Bet.

One of Shin Bet’s most successful intelligence streams has been from informants inside militant networks in Gaza and the West Bank. It will be seeking to maximise those contacts as it hunts down senior figures for assassination.

Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel can pay a heavy price. During the 2014 Gaza conflict, Hamas carried out a campaign of abductions, torture and execution of those suspected of passing information to Israel.

A former Hamas military commander arrested by the group in 2019 on charges of mapping its tunnel network for Israel escaped a maximum-security prison in Gaza, presumably to safety in Israel. Abed al-Karim Abu Odeh, 35, was accused of using a tracking device given to him by Israeli handlers to produce a map of the underground network Hamas that relied on to store weapons, protect fighters and penetrate Israeli territory.

The Times