Israel kills Hamas leader in Tehran and Hezbollah leader in Beirut

The assassination of Ismail Haniyeh will have massive and horrific consequences for the region.

Jul 31, 2024

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In one day, Israel took out any hope of diplomacy in the near term to end the genocide in Gaza and bring hostages and prisoners on both sides back home.

Assassinations of Hezbollah leader Fuad Shukr in Beirut and Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran do nothing to harm those organizations’ ability to fight Israel, but they do accomplish other key Israeli goals. More than anything else, they bring the entire Middle East much closer to a devastating regional war.

Israel has taken responsibility for the Beirut attack but has remained silent about the attack in Tehran. The reason for the difference is not that Israel is responsible for one and not the other. If there was any doubt that Israel was behind Haniyeh’s assassination, it was dispelled when U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was asked about the incident and, rather than casting any doubt on Israel’s responsibility, he simply distanced the United States from the killing.

Israel is not admitting they killed Haniyeh only because they want to avoid an explicit declaration of an act of war on Iranian soil. It would make it harder for them to paint Iran as the aggressor in a potential escalation if they did. They also might not want to confirm for Washington that they just killed the lead Hamas figure supporting and negotiating for a ceasefire and hostage release.

The motives here require some teasing out, as each killing is driven by its own rationale.

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Killing Shukr

The targeting of Shukr is connected to the missile strike on Majdal Shams last weekend. Shukr has been a prominent Hezbollah leader since he was a young man, having been involved in the attack on American soldiers in 1983 that many see as marking the birth of the organization. He was, as a result, a wanted man by the United States, so killing him was going to put smiles on the faces of many in Washington.

Shukr is a prominent enough target that, regardless of the circumstances around the Majdal Shams killings (where many questions remain open), his killing will play very well among a broad swath of the Israeli public. That the attack also killed an innocent woman, and two children will, like the deaths of many thousands of Palestinian children, be a non-issue for most in Israel, the U.S., and Europe.

What his assassination won’t do is help Israel in its war with Hezbollah. Assassinations of key figures have never impacted those efforts. They fire up a bloodthirsty public, and enhance leaders’ image of macho toughness, but they accomplish nothing against any group that has even a semblance of organization. The murdered leader is replaced, and the group goes on, as we’ve seen repeatedly over decades with Israel’s targeted assassinations.

But the killing of Shukr, who was as close to Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah as anyone, will clearly harden Hezbollah’s approach to Israel. By itself, it may not have significantly escalated the fighting between the two, although the subsequent killing of Haniyeh might well change that calculus.

But killing Shukr only magnified the hostility toward Israel from not only Hezbollah, but from the broader public in the region that supports the group. It didn’t help Israel militarily, but politically, it is one more element in escalating the tension in the region, a condition this Israeli government clearly desires.

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Killing Haniyeh

The assassination of Ismail Haniyeh has more implications, both subtle and direct.

To begin, the site of the killing is of enormous importance. Haniyeh spent most of his time in recent years in Qatar. He lived in exile from Gaza, but not in hiding because he was a political leader, not a military one.

Haniyeh functioned as Hamas’ lead diplomat in the region, making frequent trips to Türkiye, the UAE, and Iran. The latter was the only country that was not a Western ally, and so it was an easier call to conduct a criminal act on Iranian soil. Carrying out assassinations on foreign soil is considered a violation of that country’s sovereignty. Netanyahu paid the steepest price of his political career when Israel tried to kill Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Jordan in 1997.

But the choice of conducting the killing in Iran was based on a great deal more than avoiding problems with U.S. allies.

Iran was deeply embarrassed by this action. Like the attack on the Iranian consulate in Syria back in April, this is not an action they can ignore. Even if Iran shows the kind of restraint in their response that they did in April—when they warned the U.S. about the missiles they were launching, giving the Americans, Israelis, and their allies more than enough opportunity to intercept them—they will have to retaliate in a significant way.

But it’s unlikely the Iranian response will be as restrained as the one in April. The warning from Tehran after the April exchange of fire was that they would react more harshly in the future. Killing Haniyeh was not merely an attack on a site in Damascus that is technically Iranian sovereign territory. This was a brazen killing in the Iranian capital of a foreign leader attending the swearing-in ceremony of Iran’s new president. That is a much bigger deal.

Already, there is a loud cry for retaliation in Iran and around the region, and it’s not at all confined to “hardliners.” This is widely and rightly seen as an outrage.

But for hardliners who were pressing for a much stronger Iranian response to Israel’s brazen attack on the consulate in Damascus in April, this action provided strong support for their view that Iran’s restraint would only embolden Israel to take more and greater action. And it’s difficult to argue that Israel has not proven them correct.

Iran is far from the only concern here. As noted, Ismail Haniyeh, unlike Hamas military leaders like Yahiya Sinwar, moved around in public quite openly. Israel could have killed him at any time it chose. So why now?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington last week only raised pressure on him to stop obstructing a ceasefire deal that could bring the Israelis held captive in Gaza home. The spectacle of families of hostages protesting Netanyahu in the U.S., even being expelled from or boycotting his speech, participating in competing events, and helping to protest his appearance highlighted the growing anger at him in Israel.

American rhetoric has increasingly moved away from hiding Netanyahu’s rejectionism. Biden administration officials have stopped embarrassing themselves by continuing to insist that it was Hamas that was rejecting the ceasefire, despite Netanyahu repeatedly and openly declaring that he would not agree to it.

Kamala Harris’ slightly more critical tone elicited hysteria from Netanyahu’s team, while that most loyal of pro-Israel mouthpieces, Antony Blinken, was talking, however disingenuously, about a ceasefire agreement being within immediate reach.

Haniyeh’s murder puts paid to any hope of a ceasefire deal in the near term. Haniyeh was the lead negotiator for Hamas in these talks, and he was perhaps the most open to compromise, on the hostages and on the ongoing questions of apartheid and occupation in Hamas.

Moreover, the inevitable response from Iran, Hezbollah, or another party (Hamas is already doing all they can to fight Israel militarily) will give Netanyahu all the rhetorical ammunition he needs to stall the talks for months. That’s why he chose this moment to take this action.

There were other considerations regarding the United States.

The new Iranian President, Masoud Pezeshkian, is known to favor dialogue with the West, including the United States. While Pezeshkian is less enthusiastic about diplomacy with the U.S. and Europe than previous reformers Hassan Rouhani and Mohammed Khatami—especially given the bad faith the United States has repeatedly shown under both Republican and Democratic administrations, especially the Trump and Biden ones—he represents a significant departure from his predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi and is far from other Iranian hardliners.

Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran pushes any notions of pressing for a wider opening to the West out of the picture for Pezeshkian, at least in the near term. It is simply not politically viable, and he will need to focus more on domestic and regional economic issues.

In Washington, this killing will change the context. While the Americans will still talk about a ceasefire deal, just as they continue to talk about a two-state solution that hasn’t been viable or even remotely possible for years, Haniyeh’s killing will limit their maneuverability.

Washington certainly cannot publicly object to the killing of one of Hamas’ most prominent and famous leaders. That they immediately distanced themselves from the action could well indicate that they really didn’t know about it. Israel has become much less open with its American ally in recent years, so it is entirely possible that the Biden administration was kept in the dark about this, especially since they probably would not have approved of it.

But when, not if, Iran responds, we can count on Biden and Blinken throwing their full support behind Israel. What, then, will Harris do? She may be running for president, but she is still Biden’s vice president. That not only carries certain duties and obligations to support the sitting president, but any significant split on Israel, especially regarding its “right to defend itself,” will play badly with the right wing and donor sectors of the Democratic party.

Yet if Harris throws in fully behind Israel, especially if that means supporting an escalation in Gaza or a significant rise in the killing of civilians in Lebanon, let alone a wider regional escalation, she is jeopardizing some of the support she just won back from the key sectors of youth, Arab-, and Muslim-Americans.

It’s hard to see Harris not throwing her full support behind Israel if there is an escalation, though. If she does, and the situation escalates regionally, she is going to lose the goodwill with those communities that could make the difference between winning and losing in November. It would please pro-Israel forces, but that won’t change the preference of much of that community for Trump.

In any case, Haniyeh’s assassination increases the likelihood of regional escalation and pushes any hope for a ceasefire even farther from possibility. Netanyahu has reinforced the stark reality that has faced Washington and the world from the start: Israel will never agree to a ceasefire, regardless of the consequences to its own citizens both in captivity and in Israel, unless it is forced to do so by the threat of a cutoff of American weaponry.

If suspending arms shipments to Israel is off the table, a ceasefire is too. And if there was any doubt of that, Israel just showed it is willing to take bold steps to remove such doubt and to bring about the regional war its leaders, though not most of its citizens, so badly desire.

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Israel kills Hamas leader in Tehran and Hezbollah leader in Beirut

The assassination of Ismail Haniyeh will have massive and horrific consequences for the region.

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