2 Terrorist Leaders Assassinated in 24 Hours

In less than 24 hours, two prominent terrorist leaders in the Middle East met separate, violent, and sudden ends. Senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr died Tuesday in an Israeli air strike in Beirut, Lebanon. Around 2 a.m. on Wednesday, Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, died in Tehran, Iran from an explosive device planted in his safehouse months earlier. Israel has not claimed credit for the second strike, but it could be interpreted as a strategy to bring the Gaza war to a conclusion by eliminating the terrorist leadership.

The strikes came three days after a rocket fired by Hezbollah struck a soccer field in northern Israel, killing 12 children in a Druze community. Netanyahu had not yet concluded his trip to the U.S., but when the news broke he rushed back to Israel “and had been ensconced with his cabinet basically since he landed,” described Israeli security expert Caroline Glick on “Washington Watch.”

Fuad Shukr

The first strike came against Shukr, “the Hezbollah chief of staff of their terror forces in Lebanon,” said Glick. “He was responsible for all their precision guided missiles and for all of their missile strikes against Israel,” including the deadly soccer strike.

Shukr has also been wanted by the United States for four decades for his role in the 1983 bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. service members. “He’s been a known terrorist for decades,” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on Wednesday’s “Washington Watch,” with a “$5 million bounty on his head by the United States.”

“That has to be a setback for Hezbollah in their work against Israel,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins noted on “Washington Watch.” “He’s an operational leader. This is quite significant. This is going toward the head of the snake.”

Ismail Haniyeh

That night, 900 miles away, a bomb exploded in a safehouse of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), where Hamas’s political leader Haniyeh was staying in Tehran for the inauguration of Iran’s new president. The bomb was apparently planted months beforehand, remained undetected, and was remotely detonated. “When you go to Tehran … Iran is the head of the snake,” Perkins added.

“Israel is not taking credit for the Haniyeh strike,” Glick observed. “It is taking credit for the Hezbollah strike. But that’s a distinction that may or may not make that much of a difference, because obviously it’s being attributed to Israel.” Indeed, Perkins acknowledged that “the Iranians have responded that it is their duty to take revenge against Israel for this hit.”

Reuters and several other media outlets described Haniyeh as “the more moderate face of Hamas” in a poorly concealed jab at Israel for their suspected role in his death. However, after scorching criticism, Reuters quietly amended its original headline, although the article still calls Haniyeh “moderate” and “relatively pragmatic.”

Haniyeh joined Hamas at the terrorist group’s founding in 1987, became prime minister in Gaza in 2006, where Glick noted “he served for many years as the terror master on the ground,” including through the group’s bloody coup in 2007, and became chief of the group’s politburo in 2017. In 2019, he relocated from Gaza to Qatar to minimize his own personal danger.

Haniyeh endorsed donations to Gaza as “financial jihad,” led chants calling for “Death to Israel,” and celebrated the October 7 massacres as they occurred on video. In January, he proclaimed, “We should hold on to the victory that took place on October 7 and build upon it.” “You’ll never convince me he didn’t have anything to do with October the 7th,” Graham declared. “He was … in Iran … paying homage to the new Iranian president … and during the swearing in, they were chanting, ‘Death to Israel, death to America.’” Such is the so-called “moderate” face of Hamas.

Haniyeh’s assassination was “humiliating for the Iranian regime,” wrote the National Review editors, “as it means they allowed a leader of one of their proxy groups to be killed right under their noses when he was supposed to be under their protection.”

Assuming the assassination was carried out by Israel, it “sends a strong message to Tehran that no one is going to be under your shelter that we [can’t] eliminate,” suggested Perkins. “The Israeli intelligence is remarkable and able to track these individuals.”

“This shows that Israel can basically take out anybody any time it wants to in Iran. So it’s not only intelligence capability, it’s also operational capability on the ground in Iran,” Glick agreed. “He wasn’t in a major hotel. He was being hidden, effectively. And he was assassinated while under the protection of the IRGC.” As a result, “now they’re more under the gun to stand down against Israel and to accept our demands.”

Resolved to Win

“What we saw on Tuesday in Beirut and in Tehran, again, is going to act to stabilize the political situation and Israel still further, perhaps expand the governing coalition,” predicted Glick. “Over two-thirds of Israelis say that the only important thing is victory. It’s more important than national unity. It’s more important than anything. We need to win this war.”

Uniting Israelis behind a victorious strategy is important to Netanyahu’s government because “a very restive leftist minority has been trying to undermine the stability of the government for the year-and-a-half before October 7th,” Glick explained. “And then, with a short respite of about three or four months at the beginning of the war, they went back to trying to overthrow the government.”

What is holding Israelis together right now is their common sense of purpose, driven by the fact that they are at war along seven fronts. “This idea that there’s this tit-for-tat going on and that we’re not already at war … is part of a word game that is being led really by the United States under the Biden-Harris administration to try to portray this as some sort of … secret assault on Israel by Iran and its proxies,” complained Glick. “We’re at war.”

“Israel has been under continuous attack for the past nine months from Hezbollah and Lebanon, and obviously from Hamas, and from the Houthis, and from Iran, and from Iran’s militias in Iraq and in Syria, and in Judea and Samaria, and so on and so forth,” she continued. So, it’s “remarkable that … the United States keeps saying, ‘Well, we don’t want [certain responses] if Israel is attacked this way or that.”

Glick compared the situation to America’s own “total war” experience in the previous century. “Nobody ever asked, after any [discrete] battle in Europe in World War II — or in the Pacific, or in any battle in any war — ‘Okay, so now they attacked you. Are you going to do something?’ We’re at war. Of course we’re going to do something. We haven’t won yet!” she said. “There’s this whole effort to try to deny reality when it relates to the fact that Israel is in an ongoing regional war against Iran and all of its regional proxies.”

The targeted assassinations suggest a new phase in Israel’s war against Iran and its proxies, one that may evade harassment by the Biden administration. “We’ve been at war,” Glick repeated. “It’s important to be on offense. It’s important to restore Israel’s position.” With sudden, targeted strikes against terrorist leaders, Israel can regain the initiative, avoid American badgering about “red lines,” and keep their enemies on the back foot.

“Israel has a policy,” said Graham. “We will hunt you down — no matter what you do, no matter how long it takes — we’re coming after you if you try to kill Israelis.” Israel seems increasingly eager to fulfill that promise sooner rather than later.

Only three weeks earlier, Israel successfully eliminated Mohammed Deif, Hamas’s chief of staff in Gaza, striking one more name off the shrinking cast of characters around Hamas’s military leader, Yahya Sinwar. “Were Israel to eliminate Sinwar, coupled with the killings of Haniyeh and Deif, it would be easier for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to claim that Israel has effectively decapitated Hamas, making it more plausible to declare victory and exit Gaza to focus on the threat from Hezbollah and Iran itself,” proposed the National Review.

Israel inching closer to victory does not mean the threat is reduced — quite the opposite. “I would have to imagine there’s an anticipation of a retaliatory strike by Iran, or at least through one of their proxies,” imagined Perkins. “Israel has always been the most threatened country,” Glick responded. “Certainly, over the past 10 months, Israeli embassies, consulates throughout the world have been subjected to threats and to attacks, whether by radical leftists or Islamists, on the streets, and in London, and in other places.”

One particular vulnerability is “Israel’s athletes now in the Olympics,” she added, who “have already been under [threat] since the very outset of the games last week.” Israel recently augmented their “unprecedented amount of security” by “giving a personal bodyguard to every Israeli athlete.” There is a historical precedent for a heightened threat environment at the Olympics. In 1972, Palestinian militants killed 11 Israeli athletes in a terror attack at the Olympic games in Munich. The threat to Israeli athletes will continue beyond the Olympics into the Paralympics, “where Israel tends to win a lot of gold medals because we have so many wounded [military] veterans,” said Glick.

Despite the ongoing threats, Israel has demonstrated the proper — and successful — way to counter the violent hostility of Iran’s anti-Israel, anti-Western regime and its terrorist proxies. Israel has targeted those responsible for murdering its citizens. It has not been deterred by the porous international boundaries or nice distinctions between entities, which its enemies ignore. It identified the head of the snake and cut it off, sending a signal that it has the means, motive, and opportunity to do more. If America wants to deter Iranian aggression and Islamist terror in the Middle East (and elsewhere in the world), its leaders should take note.