This Saturday (31), marks one month since the death of the political leader of the terrorist group Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh. Sources heard by the United States press indicated that he was killed with an explosive device that had been placed about two months earlier in the house where he was staying in Tehran, the capital of Iran.
The hidden device was detonated remotely while Haniyeh was inside his regular bedroom in the house, the sources said. The London-based Jewish newspaper The Jewish Chronicle reported that the device was placed under Haniyeh’s bed by two members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who had been recruited by Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency.
The Israeli government has neither claimed responsibility for the assassination nor denied it. Haniyeh was probably feeling safe that day in Tehran. Had he studied Israeli history more closely, he might not have been so confident.
The assassination of Hamas’s political leader is just the latest episode in an Israeli defense policy based on a phrase from the Talmud: “If anyone comes to kill you, stand up and kill him first.”
The second half of this sentence, “Rise Up and Kill First,” is the title of a book by Israeli Ronan Bergman, released in Brazil in 2020 by Record Publishing, which describes the decades-long history of what the journalist calls “targeted killings” by Israel.
Israel is a small country surrounded by enemies who have rejected its right to exist from the beginning. As such, it has always resorted to targeted operations in other countries to eliminate individuals who pose a threat to its security.
Some of these cases are preventative, such as the assassinations of Iranian scientists involved in Tehran’s nuclear program: Iran having nuclear weapons is Israel’s greatest fear today.
However, the most famous episodes were those in which Israel retaliated against people who promoted violence against Jews and Israelis.
The fame of Israel’s special forces is largely due to a daring operation that took place in South America.
In 1960, after locating Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann living under an assumed name on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Argentina, Mossad agents devised a highly complex plan that involved capturing him without attracting attention, secretly taking him to a plane used by Israeli diplomats, and flying him to Israel. All of this without the Argentine government (at the time not very interested in searching for Nazis) suspecting anything.
Eichmann was tried in Jerusalem and sentenced to death, a sentence carried out on June 1, 1962.
By the beginning of the following decade, Israel had adopted the tactic of eliminating terrorist targets before they struck. But the 1972 attack on the Munich Olympics and the disastrous handling of the incident by German authorities, which resulted in the deaths of 11 members of the Israeli delegation, rekindled the sense in Israel that it needed to take matters into its own hands.
From then on, the Prime Minister would authorize attacks even in friendly countries, without local authorities being notified in advance.
The first member of Black September, the Palestinian terrorist group responsible for the Munich massacre, to be killed was Wael Zwaiter, who was shot dead in Rome. The extent of his involvement in the attack is debatable, but he was certainly a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Then it was the turn of Mahmoud Hamshari, Black September’s number 2. Israeli agents infiltrated his apartment and replaced the table where he kept his telephone with an identical one — but one packed with explosives. He received a phone call and the last words he heard before being eliminated were: “Is this Doctor Hamshari?”
In Beirut, Israeli forces (including men disguised as women) stormed two apartment buildings and killed three terrorist leaders at once. In Paris, they killed Basil al-Kubaisi.
Zaid Muchassi was killed in Athens, unaware that there was a bomb under the bed in his hotel room. A similar fate befell Hussein Abd al-Chir.
Ali Hassan Salameh, one of the leaders of Black September, was a particular target and was shot dead in Lillehammer, Norway. At least, that’s what the Israelis believed. In reality, they killed Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan immigrant who worked as a waiter and pool cleaner.
In 1978, an agent replaced the toothpaste of Wadie Haddad, another target, with a tube containing a lethal toxin developed by Israeli researchers. He was gradually poisoned and died in agony in a hospital in East Berlin.
Salameh would only be killed in 1979, when his car was blown up while he was driving through Beirut.
Over the decades, Israel’s policy of “targeted killings” has sparked arguments with allies such as the United States and even diplomatic crises.
In 2010, for example, the Irish government expelled an Israeli diplomat in protest at the use of false Irish passports during a raid in Dubai in which Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a Hamas leader, was killed.
Still, as Bergman’s book shows, the general view in the Israeli intelligence community is that, despite some mistakes and international condemnation, the policy of “targeted killings” has been successful and has made the country safer and more respected.
Expert points out differences
In an interview with People’s Gazettepolitical scientist Igor Sabino, content manager at StandWithUs Brasil, a non-profit educational institution about Israel, and member of The Philos Project, an organization that promotes Christian engagement in the Middle East, stated that the current moment and Haniyeh’s death have some differences in relation to other “eliminations” carried out by the Israeli government.
In the Eichmann case, Israel perceived that there were no adequate international mechanisms, such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) – which would only be created at the beginning of this century – to punish Nazi criminals, despite the Nuremberg Tribunal and other trials.
“Many Nazis fled and found shelter in Arab countries and even in Latin America. Josef Mengele died in Brazil [em 1979] without ever having been judged,” explained Sabino.
The Munich attack reinforced this impression of the need to “act on one’s own”. “Israeli athletes were killed at the Olympics in Germany, less than three decades after the Holocaust, when Israel’s intelligence forces, the Mossad, had offered to provide security for those athletes and Germany refused. Later, in the negotiations during the kidnapping, there were also failures on the part of the German police,” said the political scientist.
Over the decades, Israel’s enemies have gone from secular Arab movements to being targeted by Islamic groups, financed by Iran since the ayatollahs took power in 1979.
The policy of “targeted assassinations” remained, but, according to Sabino, it ceased to be discreet after the Hamas attacks on October 7 last year, due to the deep trauma it caused in Israeli society.
“The stance towards Hamas has changed, Israel has made it clear that it will pursue all those involved in planning October 7th, all will be killed. The [primeiro-ministro Benjamin] Netanyahu said that every Hamas member responsible for the attacks is a dead man,” Sabino said.
The political scientist pointed out that, if in 1960 Israel regretted the lack of an international court to deal with Eichmann, today the Israeli government has a different stance.
“In Haniyeh’s case, it’s different, because he was being investig
ated by the ICC, which was willing to judge him, but which also gave indications that it will judge Netanyahu and other Israeli authorities,” compared Sabino.
“Now, Israel claims that it makes no sense for an international criminal court to want to judge its leaders for the conduct of the current war and equate them with the leaders of Hamas, precisely because Israel is an independent country, has a supreme court, and is capable of dealing with this internally,” he explained.
The political scientist stressed that, unlike Argentina 64 years ago, Iran cannot claim that there was disrespect for its national sovereignty in the operation against Haniyeh, because Israel and Tehran are technically at war, first by proxy (through the terrorist groups that Iran helps) and then directly, with the exchange of attacks recorded this year.
“The way international law is interpreted is very complicated, and what can be done according to the interests of states. We live in an international anarchy. For example, the UN Security Council does not consider Hamas a terrorist group, although Hamas’ actions could be classified under the UN’s own definition of terrorism. But this ends up not happening because when it comes to voting, Russia does not accept that Hamas is considered a terrorist group, just like China, and both have veto power,” said Sabino.
“One of the criticisms made of Israel is that the country makes very broad interpretations of international law, but that does not mean that it is acting against it,” he pondered.
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