Israel’s fights with Hezbollah and Hamas have been going on for well over 40 years. Over this period members of both organisations have been killed by Israel, many since last October. On the afternoon of 30 July Israel killed Fuad Shukur, a top figure in Hezbollah’s military council, in an air strike in Beirut. He was part of the organisation’s history, there in October 1982 when it came to prominence by blowing up 241 American and 54 French military personnel deployed to Beirut on a peacekeeping mission. According to the Israelis, his most recent role was liaising with Iran to get supplies of missiles into Lebanon.
Less than 12 hours after Shukur was killed, a bomb (apparently planted in advance) killed Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, along with his bodyguard, in his room in the compound of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IGRC) in the middle of Tehran. Earlier in the month a large strike in Gaza took out Mohammed Deif, the military commander most responsible for the 7 October attacks. His deputy, Marwan Issa, was killed in March. Another senior military figure, Saleh al-Arouri, was killed in January. It seems that, as long as its military knows where to find its targets, Israel is able to act with impunity.
Reliance on this tactic goes back to the start of this century when Israel was being rocked by the violence of the Second Intifada, with bombs regularly being planted in Israeli cities. The number of assassinations went up from 31 in 2001 to 78 in 2002, after which they declined, along with the attacks on Israeli cities. They made a difference because skilled bomb-makers and experienced leaders were scarce, and as their numbers were depleted Hamas’s campaign became less effective. Figures who knew they were likely to be targeted had to spend time protecting themselves. In 2004 Israel assassinated Hamas’s founder, Sheik Yasin. As the bombings continued two months later his successor, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, was also killed.
This may have established the idea that decapitating radical terrorist organisations could work. Although, in some cases, as with al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden (eventually found in Pakistan) this took a decade. And it took another decade to kill his successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in a drone strike. In a notably provocative move, President Trump ordered a drone strike which killed Qasem Soleimani, the head of the IRGC and a key figure in the Iranian regime, as he got into a car at Baghdad Airport. He was with other figures in his network, including Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, commander of Iraq’s Kata’ib Hezbollah militia. This followed attacks on American personnel based in Iraq.
The first rationale in most of these cases is to punish these individuals for the harm that they have done. It is a form of crude accountability. But they are also justified as preventing future attacks: taking out the leadership of an organisation can disrupt its workings and leave it weakened. Anybody contemplating a leadership role in either Hamas or Hezbollah knows the job comes with a risk of martyrdom. But the effects may be fleeting. Hamas and Hezbollah found new leaders, and they graduated from bombs to rockets.
A change in leadership nonetheless can make a difference. An immediate response to Haniyeh’s assassination was that this would also kill off any hope of an early ceasefire in Gaza, often coupled with the thought that this was the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intention. I suspect that the attack was more opportunistic. Netanyahu has not been short of ways of complicating these negotiations, and there is an argument, on which I would not over-rely, that this action gives Netanyahu more political cover to do a deal (by demonstrating that Hamas is closer to elimination, if not quite there) in the face of opposition from the extremists within his coalition. Haniyeh was reportedly keener on a ceasefire but, on Hamas’s side, the key figure was always the head of the military wing, Yahya Sinwar, who has yet to be found by Israel and is still assumed to be hiding somewhere in Gaza.
The arguments on both sides for a ceasefire are strong, even if both leaderships are reluctant to make a deal. Without one, Israel has no chance of getting the hostages back. Other than finding Sinwar, it is not clear what else it can achieve militarily, especially now that Hamas fighters keeping on popping up in places from which they have supposedly been cleared. The political costs mount too, as Israel is castigated for the ferocity of its campaign and breaches of international humanitarian law. Without a ceasefire, vital work on relief, reconstruction and governance cannot progress. On the Hamas side, it may be that anger with Israel makes a deal impossible but there remains a desperate need to end the chaos and suffering in Gaza. Hamas has been badly battered by months of fighting, and recent events argue for gaining time to regroup and recover.
It is a measure of Hamas’s weakness that, for now, if it wants vengeance for Haniyeh’s murder, it has to look to Iran to take action. While Hezbollah has already shown its displeasure by launching some missiles at Israel, Hamas has nothing spare. Tehran has promised a response. It was furious and embarrassed by what happened. Haniyeh was murdered after attending the inauguration of Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, and not long after he had met the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. Alarmingly for the regime, this implies inside information. The ease with which Haniyeh was killed has even led to a conspiratorial turn of mind in the region: that he was sacrificed to Israel as part of a deal (the Taliban in Afghanistan, who have their own arguments with Iran, have made this allegation).
Khaled Mashal, Haniyeh’s successor, is known to be wary of the turn towards Tehran. As a former leader, who made way for Haniyeh in 2017, he fell out with the Iranians because he refused to support Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown on rebels in the Syrian Civil War, which led to Hamas’s HQ being moved from Damascus to Qatar. His preferred strategy was to rebuild relations with the mainstream Sunni Arab states, who are also wary about Hamas’s links to Iran. He also does not come from Gaza and therefore has more focus on the situation in the West Bank and Jerusalem (he also survived a botched Israeli assassination attempt in 1997).
For all these reasons he may not have much influence while the rest of the leadership remain close to Tehran. But from the start of this war there has been concern within Hamas about whether Iran has done enough to support it in its struggle against the Israeli onslaught. From the start it has encouraged its proxies to act in ways that will distract and discomfort Israel and its supporters, including the Houthis disrupting commercial shipping in the Red Sea, as well as Hezbollah launching missiles and drones into Israel. But has also made clear that it does not want a wider war with Israel, let alone the United States.
All these considerations will be factored into the Iranian calculations about how to fulfil its promise to mount a harsh response to the murder of their guest. Yet they are also suggesting that part of the Israeli intention is to trigger a big war. Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hezbollah, spoke of a “new phase of the conflict where all fronts will be open to war.” He added: “We are angry, but we are wise. Our response could come from anywhere and [at] any time… We are searching for a response that is both strong and calculated.” He also maintained the current position that the fighting will continue until a ceasefire is reached in Gaza. If this happens there are further diplomatic options about ramping down.
The problem is that all actors in this tragedy are locked in a struggle without an obvious end. Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas dearly wish that Israel did not exist and Israel feels the same about them. But they will all continue to survive in one form or another. They dare not show weakness, yet they are unable to secure decisive victories. When Netanyahu promised a response to the strike that killed 12 Druze children in the Golan Heights border area on 27 July, he said it would be “harsh”. Khamenei said the response to Haniyeh’s death would also be “harsh”. On all sides there may be talk of eventual victory but much of the language is about punishment and vengeance, and then resilience and resistance. Assassinations and rocket attacks are now part of the routine cycles of violence, and make less difference to the underlying strategic logic than the headlines may suggest.
[See also: Israel’s two-front war]
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