Eurasia Press & News
Washington now sees Hamas the same way as Isis and could offer help killing senior leaders
The US will support Israeli plans for targeted assassinations of senior Hamas officials, a former CIA analyst specialising in the Middle East has told i.
Israel has a long record of using assassinations against enemy groups, including leaders of Palestinian Islamic Jihad earlier this year, and has vowed to target Hamas leaders after the deadly raids that killed more than 800 Israelis and took many more captive.
Israel Defence Force (IDF) spokesperson Daniel Hagari threatened the group’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, on Sunday. “Yahya Sinwar is the commander of the campaign, and he is a dead man,” he said.
The IDF announced that it had killed Hamas finance minister Jawad Abu Shmala in a targeted operation on Monday.
Ken Katzman, a former CIA analyst for the Middle East now at The Soufan Group, said Israel’s killing plans would go far beyond that.
“They are going to be tracking down people involved in the attack,” he said. “I expect that Mohammed Deif (commander of Hamas’ military wing) will be target number one.”
This process could take several years, Mr Katzman added, drawing parallels to Mossad’s long running operation to hunt down the perpetrators of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Israel will also be hunting Hamas leadership abroad, the analyst said, such as overall leader Yahia Sinwar, who is based in Qatar with his predecessor Khaled Meshaal, subject of a previous Israeli assassination attempt.
A foreign operation is more complicated and would require coordination with the US, which is likely to assist assassination plans, Mr Katzman said.
“I suspect that the US is going to not so politely tell Qatar to kick these guys out before the trouble starts,” he said.
“(Hamas) has killed Americans and taken Americans hostage. If I was advising the Biden adminstration I would say ‘let’s put Mohammed Deif on the same list that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was on,” he said, referring to a former Isis leader killed by US forces in 2019.
The analyst noted an uptick in US officials comparing Hamas to Isis and al-Qaeda – a break from prior convention – as well the arrival of the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier to the eastern Mediterranean in a show of force.
“From there it’s not a leap to say these guys should get the same treatment as Isis,” he said.
While Israel has previously taken out enemy leaders in the early stages of military campaigns, no senior Hamas figures are known to have been assassinated over three days of Israel’s assault on Gaza.
Hamas leaders know they are targets and are taking precautions by staying underground in an extensive network of tunnels, said Yoni Ben Menachem, an Israeli security analyst.
“If they are 100 metres below ground you cannot do anything you have to wait for them to come out,” he told i, adding that “the entire military and political leadership of Hamas is on the list.”
The success or failure of assassination plots is likely to depend on intelligence provided by assets inside Gaza, he said.
