While there may be a short-term emotional yield from scoring an enemy kill, Israel’s decades-long assassinations policy has always been deeply counterproductive. Despite more than 2,700 targeted ‘kills’ under its belt, Tel Aviv now faces the most formidable opponents in its bloody history.
JAN 17, 2024 – The Cradle
Photo Credit: The Cradle
The recent surge in Israeli assassinations throughout West Asia is an integral part of the war it is waging on Gaza, extrajudicial murders that are both directly and indirectly endorsed by its primary US sponsor.
Under pressure by the US to fix the ‘optics’ of their Gaza genocide, the Israelis are implementing a partial withdrawal from the ground and reducing the frequency of airstrikes on North Gaza (phase 1) and South Gaza (phase 2). Having failed to rout Hamas from the Gaza Strip – a stated war objective – Tel Aviv’s phase 3 is geared around scoring wins where it can; in this case, the targeted killings of senior officials within the region’s Axis of Resistance.
This new wave of assassinations commenced in Damascus on 25 December, 2023 with the killing of Brigadier General Razi Mousavi, a military advisor to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). It was followed on 2 January with targeted drone strikes on Beirut, murdering Saleh al-Arouri, deputy head of the Hamas political bureau and a founding commander of the resistance group’s military wing.
But while these killings are linked to the war in Gaza, they are also part of a longstanding Israeli policy of assassinations, extending beyond the occupied Palestinian territories to various global cities, from Tunis to Dubai, from London to Athens, Paris, Rome, Brussels, Vienna, Nicosia, among others.
Israel’s covert assassinations legacy
Israel’s history of more than 2,700 such extrajudicial killings, as detailed in Ronen Bergman’s 2018 book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, underscores its reputation as, arguably, the most voracious assassination machine in history. While these acts often violated the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states and were a blatant violation of international law, they were often a product of coordination and collaboration with foreign nations, most notably in Europe.
In some instances, the notorious Israeli intelligence services were assassins for hire: Bergman’s book sheds light on the Mossad’s alleged involvement in helping King Hassan II of Morocco eliminate opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka in 1965.
The startling frequency and nature of Israel’s assassinations of Palestinian resistance leaders in the post-Oslo Accords era, reveals Tel Aviv’s callous disregard for its political and security negotiation partners. The Israeli bypassed any understandings or agreements struck with the Palestinian Authority (PA) to kill perceived, even peaceful foes, opportunistically rather than in response to any immediate threat.
The Gaza Strip, a focal point for Israel’s assassinations in the past few decades, witnessed a relentless pace even before Hamas emerged victorious in the 2006 elections. Four years earlier, in 2002, Al-Qassam Brigades Commander-in-Chief Salah Shehadeh was murdered alongside his family with a one-ton bomb dropped by an F-16 plane on a densely populated neighborhood in Gaza City.
In Gaza, the occupation state has long adopted a strategy of ‘mowing the grass,’ formulated by Ephraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir as “a patient military strategy of attrition with limited goals: to diminish their opponents’ capacity to harm Israel, and to accomplish temporary deterrence.” In essence, the policy is bombarding Gaza just enough, with some measure of frequency, to retard the Gaza Strip’s military and civilian development.
Despite years of ‘mowing the Palestinian grass’, a strategy that spares no distinction between politicians, diplomats, fighters, or intellectuals, Tel Aviv has failed to break the will of the Palestinian resistance. Notably, the number of assassinations against Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in the past two decades surpasses those murdered in Israel’s much longer conflict with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) since the 1960s.
Blowback: Past and present
In short, decades of targeted political killings have resulted in the unprecedented, resistance-led, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood of 7 October, so why would doubling down on its assassination tactics achieve anything of value for Israel?
Before the two recent assassinations in Damascus and Beirut, Shin Bet head Ronen Bar threatened to pursue Hamas leaders “in every location,” including Lebanon, Qatar and Turkiye.
Israel’s open discourse about its ‘hit list’ reflects the occupation state’s longstanding sense of immunity from international law. And it is this lack of global pushback that partially explains why Tel Aviv has kept the unsuccessful policy in play.
The fact is, while able to impose some setbacks to the Palestinian national liberation movement, Israel’s Murder Inc. has utterly failed to extinguish the flames of resistance, which burn stronger than ever before. The proof lies in the pudding: a full 76 years after the Nakba, Al-Aqsa Flood has triggered Israel’s longest, costliest, and most personally devastating war in the state’s history, a testament to the fact that Palestinians will endure their struggle, no matter what.
If anything, Israel’s assassinations over the past three decades have yielded deeply counterproductive results.
The 1992 extrajudicial murder of Hezbollah’s former Secretary-General Abbas al-Musawi increased the Lebanese resistance group’s popularity and hardened its resolve to overthrow the Israeli occupation. It achieved exactly that under Musawi’s successor, the uber-charismatic Hassan Nasrallah, who ultimately forced the humiliating withdrawal of Israeli military forces from southern Lebanon, and is possibly the most feared Arab leader among Israelis today.
Similarly, the 1995 assassination of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) Founder Fathi al-Shaqaqi on the island of Malta strengthened the movement, transforming it into one of the most formidable and committed resistance factions in Palestinian history. The 2004 assassination of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin likewise bolstered the resistance group’s reputation among Palestinians, forced Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the territory, and then propelled Hamas to unprecedented political power when it swept the 2006 elections and assumed total control of the Gaza Strip.
The pivotal question now revolves around whether the renewed phase of assassinations will restore the prestige Israel lost, possibly permanently, following the Al-Aqsa Flood.
Reviving a failed policy amid a regional war
Hezbollah’s initial and prompt response to the assassination of Arouri in Beirut’s southern suburb was to bombard Israel’s critical Meron military base with a salvo of 62 rockets, a base that acts as a key control point for Israel’s air force and its main surveillance center for the region.
Tel Aviv’s murder of a top Hamas official, therefore, created an immediate disadvantage for its military flexibility and allowed its biggest adversary to set new deterrence lines. Importantly, it signaled that Hezbollah, although hesitant to initiate war, refuses to fear one. And despite numerous Hezbollah operations in northern occupied Palestine, it also drew attention to Israel’s hesitancy – or inability – to respond in kind.
Amid a domestic political crisis that predates Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist coalition government is exploiting unconditional US support for its Gaza war to chest-thump about escalating its aggression regionally. Simultaneously, it is contracting its war – according to a commitment to the Biden administration – by transitioning the war to a third phase, in which it will seek to rehabilitate its globally damaged image by focusing on stealthier, more targeted special operations, that include assassinations.
The alarming aspect of this new phase is Washington’s multifaceted role as the official sponsor of the genocide in Gaza. Apart from providing political, diplomatic, and military cover (and weapons) for Israel, the US is aggressively ratcheting up its regional intervention. The White House is working overtime to control the Lebanese front, contain Iraqi resistance factions by killing Nujaba Movement Leader Mushtaq Talib al-Saidi, and force new US-Israeli deterrence terms on Yemen in the face of Ansarallah naval operations against Israeli-linked vessels in the Red Sea.
The expanding regional war is therefore already employing new dirty tactics such as assassinations, terrorist attacks in Iran’s Kerman (with Tehran’s requisite assertive response), and the reactivation of US-backed terrorist cells, as exemplified by the resurgence of ISIS attacks in Iraq, Syria, and potentially Lebanon.
Crucially, Ali Shamkhani, political advisor to the Leader of the Islamic Republic Ali Khamenei, highlights that terrorism is Israel’s new tool for waging a gray zone war and achieving deceptive gains, while emphasizing the resistance’s determination to neutralize this tool.
It is worth considering, however, that in the realm of ‘irregular warfare,’ which the US Pentagon has gamed against Iran and its alliance in countless virtual military exercises, the Americans have never won, unless they rig the game or cheat. But we are not in a virtual reality conflict. This war is very real and the rules cannot be changed on a whim when the US team suffers a setback.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
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Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations
New Book exposes targeted assassinations have been used countless times by the Rogue Nation of Israel
- Veterans Today
April 29, 2018
Just finished watching Fareed Zakaria interview author Ronen Bergman about his new book “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations”.
It was a bit weird; disconnected. Instead of being out-raged, Fareed was more giddy; a fan if you will. Instead of outlining this out law behavior as an outlier and egregious, he seemed enamored.
I could be reading that wrong but it just seemed too softballish considering that, we the American taxpayer fund these assassinations! We expect better! We demand better!
This assassination stuff is NOT cool by any means! I am NOT naive and live in the real world but in our newly connected 21st century, we cannot go on being so un-evolved and stuck in 20th James Bond dogma!
Pretending Israel has rights to murder other leaders with impunity because it is what? What right does it have? And to get tacit support from a main stream media talking head that so many politicos watch.. well, that’s so not cool. Come on Fareed!
Anyway, this new book, according to the NEW YORK TIMES, is the The first definitive history of the Mossad, Shin Bet, and the IDF’s targeted killing programs. They hail it as “an exceptional work, a humane book about an incendiary subject.”
The Talmud says:
“If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.”
This instinct to take every measure, even the most aggressive, to defend the Jewish people is hardwired into Israel’s DNA.
From the very beginning of its colonial stolen statehood in 1948, protecting the rogue nation from harm has been the responsibility of its intelligence community and armed services (paid for by US taxpayers), and there is one weapon in their vast arsenal that they have relied upon to insure stolen lands can go on without rebuke;
Targeted assassinations have been used countless times, on enemies large and small, sometimes in response to attacks against the Israeli people and sometimes preemptively.
In this page-turning, eye-opening book, journalist and military analyst Ronen Bergman—praised by David Remnick as “arguably [Israel’s] best investigative reporter”—offers a riveting inside account of the targeted killing programs: their successes, their failures, and the moral and political price exacted on the men and women who approved and carried out the missions.
Bergman has gained the exceedingly rare cooperation of many current and former members of the Israeli government, including Prime Ministers Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as high-level figures in the country’s military and intelligence services: the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), the Mossad (the world’s most feared intelligence agency), Caesarea (a “Mossad within the Mossad” that carries out attacks on the highest-value targets), and the Shin Bet (an internal security service that implemented the largest targeted assassination campaign ever, in order to stop what had once appeared to be unstoppable: suicide terrorism).
Including never-before-reported, behind-the-curtain accounts of key operations, and based on hundreds of on-the-record interviews and thousands of files to which Bergman has gotten exclusive access over his decades of reporting, Rise and Kill First brings us deep into the heart of Israel’s most secret activities.
Bergman traces, from stolen statehood to the present, the gripping events and thorny ethical questions underlying Israel’s targeted killing campaign, which has shaped the Israeli rogue nation, the Middle East, and the entire world.
“A remarkable feat of fearless and responsible reporting . . . important, timely, and informative.”—John le Carré
Johnny Punish founded VT in 2004. After 20 years at the helm, he “retired” from the daily operations in late 2023 passing the ball over to the new owner of VT, Chief Justin Time. He now writes for VT as “Writer Emeritus”. He is also a global citizen eco-activist, visionary, musician, artist, entertainer, businessman, investor, life coach, podcast host, and syndicated columnist.
Punish is an ethnically cleansed Palestinian-American whose maternal family was evicted from their home in Haifa, Palestine in 1948 by Irgun; a Euro-Zionist Settler Terrorist Group. The family became part of the over 1,000,000 Palestinians who are Al-Nakba refugees (The Catastrophe). The family fled to Beirut Lebanon for 13 years eventually emigrating to the USA in 1961 via a Brasilian passport obtained by his Palestinian Brasilian-born grandmother (In the early 1900s, the family was sent to Sao Paolo Brasil as guest workers in the mining industry. Punish’s father is Italian-American from New York City. Punish’s paternal great-grandparents emigrated to the USA from Naples Italy and Marineo in Sicily in the 1890s. Punish was born in the Bronx, New York in 1963.
Punish was educated at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (1980-81) and California State University Fullerton (1981-1984) with studies in accounting and business. Before the “internets” had been invented, he owned and ran (5) national newspapers in the United States of America from 1987-1998. From 2004 to 2023, he owned and managed VT Foreign Policy retiring at the end of 2023.
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Israeli newspaper: Israeli army ordered the killing of Israeli civilians and soldiers Oct 7
CONTACT@IFAMERICANSKNEW.ORG JANUARY 11, 2024 HAMAS, HANNIBAL DIRECTIVE, NOVA FESTIVAL
Yedioth Ahronoth article [English translation] The order: prevent terrorists from returning to Gaza “at all costs”, even if they have hostages with them (screen shot)
An investigation from Israel’s leading newspaper indicates Israel deliberately killed many of its own civilians and soldiers during Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood to prevent them being taken captive back to Gaza
Reposted from The Cradle
The Israeli military implemented the “Hannibal Directive” during Hamas’ attack on 7 October, killing some of its own civilians and soldiers to prevent Hamas from taking them as captives back to Gaza, according to an investigation by Israel’s leading newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, which will be published in full on 12 January.
The Hebrew edition of the paper wrote on 11 January that “one of the revelations revealed in the investigation is that at midnight on October 7, the IDF [Israeli army] ordered all of its combat units in practice to use the ‘Hannibal Procedure’ although without clearly mentioning this explicitly by name.”
The order was to stop “at all costs any attempt by Hamas terrorists to return to Gaza, that is, despite the fear that some of them have abductees,” the paper wrote.
The Times of Israel described how the Hannibal procedure, or directive, “allows soldiers to use potentially massive amounts of force to prevent a soldier from falling into the hands of the enemy. This includes the possibility of endangering the life of the soldier in question in order to prevent his capture.”
A previous Haaretz investigation of the directive concluded that “from the point of view of the army, a dead soldier is better than a captive soldier who himself suffers and forces the state to release thousands of captives in order to obtain his release.”
During the 7 October attack, Hamas and other Palestinians successfully took some 240 Israeli soldiers and civilians from the settlements (also known as kibbutzim) and military bases back to Gaza as captives.
Hamas hoped to exchange them for the thousands of Palestinians, including women and children, held in Israeli prisons.
Hamas used the Toyota pick-up trucks and motorcycles with which they entered Israel, as well as cars stolen from the settlements, to take Israeli captives back to Gaza. Some were also taken to Gaza on foot and even in carts pulled by tractors by other Palestinians who crossed into Israel after the Hamas fighters breached the border fence.
According to Yediot Ahronoth, about a thousand “terrorists and infiltrators” were killed in the area between the settlements and the Gaza Strip.
But the paper added it is not clear at this time how many of the Israeli abductees were killed due to the activation of the Hannibal directive:
“In the week after the attack, soldiers of elite units checked about 70 vehicles that were left in the area between the settlements and the Gaza Strip. These are vehicles that did not reach Gaza, because on the way they were shot by a combat helicopter, an anti-tank missile or a tank, and at least in some cases everyone in the vehicle was killed.”
As journalist Dan Cohen reported, the Israeli military killed Efrat Katz, age 68, as she was being taken from Kibbutz Nir Oz to Gaza on a cart pulled by a tractor on 7 October. Her daughter, Doron Katz-Asher, and two granddaughters, Raz, age 2, and Aviv, age 4, were also in the cart.
Doron Katz-Asher later told Israel’s Channel 12 that the Israeli army opened fire on the tractor, injuring her two daughters and killing her mother, Efrat.
As previously reported by The Cradle, Israeli Air Force (reserve) Col. Nof Erez described Israel’s actions on 7 October as a “mass Hannibal” event“ in response to the use of Apache helicopters and tanks. “What we saw here was a mass Hannibal. There were many openings in the fence, thousands of people in many different vehicles with hostages and without,” he told Haaretz.
The revelation that the Israeli military informally issued the Hannibal Directive raises questions about the deaths of many Israeli civilians who were initially presumed taken captive by Hamas on 7 October but whose bodies were later discovered near the Gaza border fence.
For example, 80-year-old Carmela Dan and her 12-year-old autistic granddaughter Noya both vanished on the morning of 7 October. The family assumed both were taken captive by Hamas. But two weeks later, Israeli authorities announced their bodies “were found near the border fence,” Foreign Policy reported.
On 19 October, Carmela’s niece told NBC News, “There was an operation by the Israeli army some days ago at this point to retrieve bodies, and we believe that it took them time to run what we know to be three DNA tests and to identify that it was both of them.”
While Yedioth Ahronoth reports that the Hannibal Directive was informally issued at midnight on 7 October, there are indications it was issued much earlier.
An Israeli brigadier general, Barak Hiram, acknowledged to the New York Times that he gave an order on 7 October for a tank commander to open fire on a home in Kibbutz Be’eri to kill Hamas fighters, even though 14 Israeli captives were barricaded inside the home as well.
At roughly sundown, Hiram told the tank commander: “The negotiations are over. Break in, even at the cost of civilian casualties.”
The Hamas fighters and all but one of the captives were killed, including 12-year-old twins Liel and Yanai Hetzroni. Their bodies were so severely damaged and burned that it took weeks to identify them.
In an interview with Channel 12 on 26 October, before Hiram had publicly acknowledged giving the order to fire on the home in Be’eri, the general alluded to his logic on 7 October. He stated, “I am very afraid that if we return to Sorana [Israeli military headquarters in Tel Aviv] and try to hold all kinds of negotiations, we may fall into a trap that will tie our hands and not allow us to do what is required, which is to go in, manipulate, and kill them [Hamas] …”
In another case in Be’eri, an elderly couple, Mati and Amir Weiss, were allegedly killed by Hamas fighters who entered their home on the morning of 7 October. Mati sent a message to their son Yuval that the fighters had entered the house and that Amir had been shot.
Yuval, who was a member of the kibbutz security team, provided their location to commanders in the army, telling them Hamas fighters were inside the home.
To explain the elderly couple’s death, Haaretz writes, “Mati and Amir Weiss were attacked by terrorists who blew up one of the walls of their safe room and shot them.”
But the picture of the Weiss home published by Haaretz shows a massive hole in the wall of the home and significant damage to the roof, suggesting a tank shell or helicopter strike had hit it.
The Hannibal Directive was also evident on 7 October at the Nova music festival, where Hamas allegedly massacred 364 Israeli partygoers.
Though Israeli army ground units did not respond to the Hamas attack on 7 October for many hours, the Southern District Commander of the Israeli Police, Maj. Gen. Amir Cohen gave the order, code-named “Philistine Horseman,” at 6:42 am to dispatch Border Police units to various sites to confront the Hamas attack.
These units included elite counter-terror units, known as Yamam, who were dispatched by helicopter, according to Israeli officials speaking with the New York Times.
These units apparently opened fire on partygoers as Hamas was taking people captive.
Germany’s Bild reported the testimony of Maya P., who survived the festival. Bild writes, “The terrorists who set up the road blockades came disguised as police officers and soldiers.”
“People ran into them hoping to be rescued, and then they were executed,” Maya said, crying.
Another survivor, Yuval Tahupi, stated to CNN, “A police lady told us most of the terrorists are dressing like soldiers, as cops, as security guards, so don’t trust anyone.”
Both Maya and Yuval could not imagine that Israeli forces had fired on them, so they assumed Hamas fighters must have been disguised as soldiers and police.
Israeli attack helicopters also were deployed to the Nova site, opening fire on partygoers as well.
Haaretz reported that “According to a police source, an investigation into the incident also revealed that an IDF combat helicopter that arrived at the scene from the Ramat David base fired at the terrorists and apparently also hit some of the revelers who were there.”
The BBC documented an apparent instance of the Hannibal Directive by helicopter fire. The British state broadcaster writes that car dash cam footage its journalists reviewed shows “a group of men appear. Only one is armed – they appear to be there to loot … Two people, a man and a woman, who were hiding in a car are discovered and led away.”
“The woman who was taken suddenly reappears two minutes later. She jumps and waves her arms in the air. She must think help is at hand – by this time, the Israeli Defence Forces had began [sic] their efforts to repel the incursion. But seconds later, she slumps to the floor as bullets bounce around her. We don’t know if she survived.”
The Cradle is a journalist-driven media platform that provides in depth coverage and analysis of West Asian geopolitics from within the region.
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