The Pros and Cons of Targeted Killing
By striking Shukur and Haniyeh in the capital cities of Lebanon and Iran respectively, Israel has sent Iran a humiliating and painful message.
Since Hamas attacked southern Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel and its allies have faced a staggering 18,221 individual rocket and drone attacks—from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, from Hezbollah in Lebanon, from the Houthis in Yemen, from militias in Iraq and Syria, and from Iran itself. Over the past fortnight, Israel has launched a number of high-profile strikes on the senior membership of these regional enemies. This is not a new development. Attacking command and control has been a sporadic feature of Israel’s response to the atrocities committed by Hamas last year. But Mohammed Deif, Ismail Haniyeh, and Fouad Shukur are the highest-profile victims of Israel’s policy.
Killing the commanders responsible for terrorist attacks is an Israeli attempt to reestablish the deterrence that failed so dramatically on 7 October. It is also a strategy intended to weaken its enemies, should any of the fronts they face—especially Lebanon—escalate further. In October 2023, Ibrahim Biari, commander of Hamas’s central Jabaliya battalion and all military operations in Northern Gaza, was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza. In December 2023, the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) general Razi Mousavi was killed in an airstrike on his house in Sayyidah Zaynab, Damascus, Syria.
