Tel Aviv has been planning to assassinate Hamas leaders abroad since the day after the attack October
The Wall Street Journal
🔴 Israeli intelligence services are preparing to kill Hamas leaders around the world when the war in the Gaza Strip ends, paving the way for a years-long campaign to hunt down the militants responsible for the October 7 attack, Israeli officials said.
🔴 Officials said that on the orders of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, major Israeli spy agencies are working on plans to hunt down Hamas leaders living in Lebanon, Turkey and Qatar, the small Gulf state that has allowed the group to run a political office in Doha for a decade.
🔴 The assassination campaign will be an extension of Israel's decades-long secret operations that have become the subject of both Hollywood and world condemnation. Israeli assassins chased Palestinian militants in Beirut while dressed as women, and killed a Hamas leader in Dubai while disguised as tourists. Israel used a car bomb to assassinate a Hezbollah leader in Syria and a remote-controlled rifle to kill a nuclear scientist in Iran, according to former Israeli officials.
🔴 For years, countries such as Qatar, Lebanon, Iran, Russia and Turkey have provided Hamas, a terrorist group classified by the United States, with a measure of protection. Israel has at times refrained from targeting Palestinian militants to avoid creating diplomatic crises.
🔴 The new plans will represent a second chance for Netanyahu, who ordered a failed attempt in 1997 to poison Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Jordan. The attempt instead led to the release of Hamas ' spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
"I have instructed the Mossad to act against the heads of Hamas wherever they are," Netanyahu said, referring to Israel's Foreign Intelligence Service.
🔴 In the same speech, Defense Minister Yoav Galant said that Hamas leaders are living in their"last time".
🔴 "They were sentenced to death," he said. "The struggle is all over the world, both the terrorists in Gaza and those who fly in expensive airplanes."
🔴 While Israel usually tries to keep these efforts secret, Israel's leaders have shown few reservations about revealing their intentions to hunt down everyone responsible for the October 7 attack, just as they did with those responsible for the Palestinian terrorist attack that claimed the lives of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the Munich Olympics in 1972.
🔴 Officials said that Israel is already working to kill or capture Hamas leaders inside Gaza. The officials said that the question now for Israeli leaders is not about whether they will try to kill Hamas leaders elsewhere in the world, but where - and how.
🔴 The evolving plans are an extension of Israel's war in Gaza and a reflection of its intentions to ensure that Hamas can never again pose a serious threat to Israel - just as the United States led a global coalition against Islamic State militants who have established a self-proclaimed caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria. As part of the effort, Israel is also considering whether it can forcibly expel thousands of low-level Hamas fighters from Gaza as a way to shorten the war.
🔴 Targeted killings abroad can violate international law and risk rejection from countries where the killers operate without their permission. However, in practice, Israel and others pursued targeted killings and bypassed the repercussions.
Israel's plans to target Hamas leaders began to take shape shortly after 7 October.
🔴 Officials said that some Israeli officials wanted to launch an immediate campaign to kill Meshaal and other Hamas leaders living abroad. Officials were particularly angered by a video of Meshaal, and other Hamas leaders, including its top political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, celebrating and praying in one of their offices while watching live news coverage of the October 7 attacks.
🔴 Officials said that it is not known that Israel carried out any targeted killings in Qatar, and to do so after October 7 could have torpedoed ongoing efforts to negotiate the release of hostage-takers. They said that these fears helped calm efforts to immediately launch the assassination campaign, but planning continues.
Qatar has become the Central country for hostage talks, as Mossad chief David Barnea met with CIA chief William Burns in Doha earlier this week for further discussions. Doha helped secure the release of dozens of Israeli hostages held by Gaza militants in exchange for the release of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. More than 130 hostages remain in Gaza, according to Israel's version.
Netanyahu's pledge to hunt down Hamas leaders around the world sparked a debate among former intelligence officials.
Ephraim Halevy, a former Mossad director, called it unwise. Killing Hamas leaders will not eliminate the threat, he said. The command can instead inflame the group's followers and accelerate the creation of even worse threats.
🔴 "Following Hamas on a global scale and trying to systematically remove all its leaders from this world is a desire for revenge, not a desire to achieve a strategic goal," said Halevi, who called the plan "far-fetched".
🔴 Amos yadrin, a retired Israeli general who once led the military intelligence agency, said that the campaign "is what justice requires".
"All Hamas leaders, all those who participated in the attack, who planned the attack, who ordered the attack, must be brought to justice or eliminated,"Yadin said. "It's the right policy."
🔴 Perhaps no other country has Israel's experience in carrying out assassination campaigns around the world. Since the Second World War, Israel has conducted more than 2,700 such operations, according to the book "Get Up and kill first", by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman.
🔴 Even before the establishment of Israel in 1948, Jewish militants killed European diplomats who participated in the British administration of Mandatory Palestine. In the Sixties, Israeli spies used letter bombs to target former Nazi Germany scientists who helped Egypt develop missiles.
Campaigns have sometimes backfired.
🔴 In 1997, Netanyahu, serving his first term as prime minister, ordered Israeli spies to kill Meshaal, the head of Hamas who was then living in Jordan. The Israeli team entered Jordan posing as Canadian tourists and attacked Meshaal outside the Hamas political office in Amman. One of the Israeli assassins sprayed poison into Meshaal's ear but was captured along with another member of the team before they could escape.
Meshaal went into a coma, and Jordan threatened to terminate the peace treaty with Israel. Then-President Bill Clinton pressured Netanyahu to end the crisis by sending the Mossad chief to Amman with the antidote that saved Meshaal's life. Israel then secured the freedom of its agents in Jordan by agreeing to release Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, and 70 other Palestinian prisoners.
Meshaal later described the failed assassination attempt as a" turning point " that helped empower Hamas.
Israel has continued its assassination campaign against Hamas for years.
🔴 In 2010, a team of Israeli agents using fake European passports flew to Dubai, where they disguised themselves as tourists waiting for the arrival of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the founder of Hamas's military wing who led the group's efforts to purchase weapons.
surveillance video later took the team members, dressed as tennis players, to his room, where the Israelis paralyzed and then strangled the Hamas leader. While it initially appeared that al-Mabhouh had died of natural causes, Dubai officials eventually identified the hit team and accused Israel of the assassination.
🔴 It took years to repair the damage done to Israel's relations with the UAE.
🔴 It was the deadly Palestinian deadly attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics that strengthened Tel Aviv's embrace of secret assassinations as a tool of government policy.
🔴 Palestinian militants with a group known as Black September took a group of Israeli athletes and coaches hostage in the Olympic Village, which led to a two-day confrontation that ended in an unsuccessful rescue attempt by the West German police. All eleven Israeli hostages were killed.
🔴 In response, then-prime minister Golda Meir ordered Israeli spies to hunt down and kill all Palestinian militants involved in the attack. The secret campaign was called Operation Wrath of God and became the subject of Steven Spielberg's 2005 Oscar-nominated film.
🔴 Israeli assassins spent 20 years hunting down those associated with the Munich attack. They killed Palestinians in France, Italy, Greece, Cyprus and Lebanon. They used a remote-controlled bomb hidden inside a phone in France and used shotguns with silencers to kill targets on the streets of Rome.
🔴 Among those who participated in the years-long effort was Ehud Barak, a young Israeli commando who became prime minister. In 1973, Barak, dressed as a woman, was part of a team that infiltrated Beirut to kill three Palestinian militants linked to the Munich attack. They killed all three within minutes.
🔴 But Operation Wrath of God also led to one of the most embarrassing secret failures in Israel in 1973, when a team of Israeli activists killed a Moroccan waiter in Norway whom they mistakenly identified as a Palestinian involved in the Munich attack. Six of the fifteen Israeli agents were arrested and five were sentenced to short prison terms for their role in the murder.
