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The assassination of Hamas’s top negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, has effectively ended any possibility of an early ceasefire in Gaza as well as the hopes that Israel’s remaining hostages might be released any time soon.
The attack, which follows an Israeli airstrike Tuesday night that killed Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s senior commander in Beirut, effectively gets Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu off the hook with extreme right-wing members of his governing coalition who had threatened to withdraw from the government if he ended his onslaught in Gaza.
US officials had urged Netanyahu during his recent trip to Washington to make a ceasefire happen. Netanyahu pointedly did not inform the United States before launching the attacks. Israel, in fact, is refusing to say anything about either attack.
The assassination of Shukr might be understandable since he was suspected of having launched a Hezbollah missile attack which killed 12 children playing soccer in the Druze village of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights near the Syrian border last Sunday. The assassination of Haniyeh is harder to explain. Why would you kill the lead negotiator in peace talks aimed at getting hostages released unless you didn’t care about their release? Netanyahu is likely to come under pressure to answer that question from growing opposition in Israel itself. Netanyahu may have intended to turn his current strategy into an accomplished fact, regardless of opposition in Israel and from Washington.
Nevertheless, a major argument against assassinations in general is that intelligence agencies need to invest heavily in profiling the psychology of the key enemy figures in order to predict their actions in different situations. Once a key enemy personality is killed, the whole process has to start over again, usually from scratch. More than that, the victim of the assassination is likely to be replaced by someone who is even more radical and ambitious than his predecessor, and whose future actions are that much harder to predict. Despite his bellicose rhetoric, Haniyeh was generally considered a moderate and sophisticated diplomat whom it was possible to reason with. His replacement may be much more of a hard liner.
The Haniyeh assassination is even more complicated because Haniyeh was in Tehran to attend the inauguration of Iran’s newly elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, who is not considered to be a hardliner. The inauguration was attended by the leaders of Iran’s various surrogate militia movements, including Hamas and Hezbollah, in order to show Iran’s growing regional influence. The deliberate assassination of Haniyeh virtually requires a brutal response from Iran, which makes the prospect of peace in the region even more remote.
Since Hamas has been under attack for the last nine months, and was never a major force to begin with, Iran’s retaliation is most likely to come from Hezbollah, which could extend the war to all of Lebanon. Alternatively, the Iranians could launch serious missile attacks against Israel in an attempt to overwhelm Israel’s vaunted “Iron Dome” air defense system.
Iran launched 300 drones and missiles against Israel last April. Almost none of the missiles managed to get through Israel’s defenses, but that was due in large part to Iran having let the information leak in advance that the attack was coming. An extensive deployment of US Navy ships also played an important role in shooting down missiles and drones. Iran, it turned out, was mainly sending Israel a message. The next time, Israel may not be that lucky. The larger question, from an American point of view, is how long and to what extent the US wants to become involved in Netanyahu’s machinations.
