Iran’s Pezeshkian rejects US pressure, praises Russia, China
Iran’s Pezeshkian rejects US pressure, praises Russia, China/node/2548796/middle-east
Iran’s Pezeshkian rejects US pressure, praises Russia, China
In this picture made available by Iranian state-run TV, IRIB, reformist candidate for the presidential election Masoud Pezeshkian speaks during a debate with hard-line candidate Saeed Jalili at the TV studio in Tehran, Iran, Monday, July 1, 2024. (AP)
Iran’s Pezeshkian rejects US pressure, praises Russia, China
Pezeshkian, a 69-year-old heart surgeon, has pledged to promote a pragmatic foreign policy, ease tensions over now-stalled negotiations with major powers to revive a 2015 nuclear pact and improve prospects for social liberalization and political pluralism
Updated 13 July 2024
Reuters
DUBAI: The United States should realize that Iran will not respond to pressure, President-elect Masoud Pezeshkian said in a statement published on Saturday, in which he also highlighted his country’s friendship with China and Russia.
Pezeshkian, a relative moderate who beat a hard-line rival in elections, also reiterated that Iran does not seek nuclear weapons, adding that Tehran would expand ties with neighbors and engage with Europe.
“The United States...needs to recognize the reality and understand, once and for all, that Iran does not — and will not — respond to pressure (and) that Iran’s defense doctrine does not include nuclear weapons,” Pezeshkian said in the statement, titled “My message to the new world” and published in the daily Tehran Times.
Pezeshkian, a 69-year-old heart surgeon, has pledged to promote a pragmatic foreign policy, ease tensions over now-stalled negotiations with major powers to revive a 2015 nuclear pact and improve prospects for social liberalization and political pluralism.
However many Iranians are skeptical about his ability to fulfil his campaign promises as Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, not the president, is the ultimate authority in the Islamic Republic.
“China and Russia have consistently stood by us during challenging times. We deeply value this friendship.
“Russia is a valued strategic ally and neighbor to Iran and my administration will remain committed to expanding and enhancing our cooperation,” Pezeshkian said, adding that Tehran would actively support initiatives aimed at ending the conflict in Ukraine.
“The Iranian people have entrusted me with a strong mandate to vigorously pursue constructive engagement on the international stage while insisting on our rights, our dignity and our deserved role in the region and the world.
“I extend an open invitation to those willing to join us in this historic endeavour,” Pezeshkian said. (
Hezbollah congratulates Sinwar as new Hamas political chief
His appointment comes less than a week after Haniyeh was killed in Tehran, with Iran and Hamas blaming Israel, which has declined to comment
The heavily armed Lebanese movement says it is acting in support of Gazans and Hamas with its attacks, and that only a ceasefire in the Palestinian territory will put an end to its cross-border fire
Updated 16 sec ago
AFP
BEIRUT, Lebanon: Hamas ally Hezbollah on Tuesday congratulated Yahya Sinwar on his selection as the Palestinian militant group’s new political chief following the killing last week of his predecessor Ismail Haniyeh.
Sinwar’s appointment affirms that “the enemy... has failed to achieve its objectives” by killing Hamas leaders and officials, a Hezbollah statement said.
It is also “a strong message” to Israel, the United States and allies that “the Hamas movement is united in its decision, solid in its principles, firm in its important choices, and determined” to continue on the path of resistance, the statement added.
Hezbollah has traded near-daily cross-border fire with Israel since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel that triggered war in the Gaza Strip.
The heavily armed Lebanese movement says it is acting in support of Gazans and Hamas with its attacks, and that only a ceasefire in the Palestinian territory will put an end to its cross-border fire.
Hezbollah is the most prominent member of the “axis of resistance” of Iran-backed regional armed groups opposed to Israel and the United States. The grouping also includes Hamas, Iraqi movements and Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
“The axis of resistance is waging a heroic and historic battle on a number of fronts at a sensitive time on the regional level as part of support and assistance to the oppressed Palestinian people,” the Hezbollah statement said.
Sinwar’s selection “at this important time” increases “the determination to unify efforts and insist on continuing jihad and resistance,” the statement said.
His appointment comes less than a week after Haniyeh was killed in Tehran, with Iran and Hamas blaming Israel, which has declined to comment.
His death has sent tensions skyrocketing, with fears of a regional war and the Middle East bracing for Iran’s retaliation.
The Israeli military and officials accuse Sinwar of being one of the masterminds of the October 7 attack on Israel, making him one of Israel’s most wanted militants.
Iran, Israel ‘should not escalate this conflict’: Blinken
President Joe Biden has hinted at frustration with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the killing, which came just as ceasefire talks looked to be bearing fruit
Updated 19 min 54 sec ago
AFP
ANNAPOLIS, United States: Both Iran and Israel should avoid escalating conflict in the Middle East, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday, in his most direct wording toward US ally Israel.
“No one should escalate this conflict. We’ve been engaged in intense diplomacy with allies and partners, communicating that message directly to Iran. We communicated that message directly to Israel,” Blinken told reporters.
Iran has vowed a response after Israel killed Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.
President Joe Biden has hinted at frustration with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the killing, which came just as ceasefire talks looked to be bearing fruit.
“Our commitment to Israel’s security is ironclad. We will continue to defend Israel against attacks from terrorist groups or their sponsors, just as we’ll continue to defend our troops,” Blinken said.
“But everyone in the region should understand that further attacks only perpetuate conflict, instability, insecurity for everyone,” he added.
Blinken, speaking after talks with the Australian foreign and defense ministers at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, said the United States was working “intensely to de-escalate tensions in the Middle East and to prevent a spread of conflict.”
“Further attacks only raise the risk of dangerous outcomes that no one can predict and no one can fully control,” Blinken said.
He called on all sides in the region to “understand the risk of miscalculation and make decisions that will calm tensions, not exacerbate them.”
US sends ship-based Navy fighter jets to a base in the Middle East to help protect Israel
Updated 27 min 20 sec ago
AP
WASHINGTON: About a dozen F/A-18 fighter jets from the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier have flown to a military base in the Middle East, as part of the Pentagon’s effort to help defend Israel from possible attacks by Iran and its proxies and to safeguard US troops, according to a US official.
The F/A-18s and a E-2D Hawkeye surveillance aircraft took off from the carrier in the Gulf of Oman and arrived at the undisclosed base on Monday, said the official.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered the increased military presence in the region as officials worry about escalating violence in the Middle East in the wake of the killings last week of a senior Hezbollah commander in Lebanon and Hamas’ top political leader in Iran, in suspected Israeli strikes. Both groups are backed by Iran.
The Navy jets’ land-based deployment is expected to be temporary, because a squadron of Air Force F-22 fighter jets is enroute to the same base from their home station in Alaska. The roughly dozen F-22s are expected to arrive in the Middle East in the coming days, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss troop movements.
It’s not clear how long all of the aircraft will remain together at the base, and that may depend on what — if anything — happens in the next few days.
The troop movements come as US officials released more details about the rocket attack that hit a military base in Iraq on Tuesday, injuring American personnel. Officials said five US service members and two contractors were hurt when two rockets hit the base.
The officials said five of those injured were being treated at the Al-Asad air base and two were evacuated, but all seven are in stable condition. They did not provide details on who was evacuated.
The rocket attack is the latest in what has been an uptick in strikes on US forces by Iranian-backed militias. It comes as tensions across the Middle East are spiking but is not believed to be connected to the Hezbollah and Hamas killings.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military operations.
In recent weeks, Iranian-backed Iraqi militias have resumed launching attacks on bases housing US forces in Iraq and Syria after a lull of several months, following a strike on a base in Jordan in late January that killed three American soldiers and prompted a series of retaliatory US strikes.
Between October and January, an umbrella group calling itself the Islamic Resistance in Iraq had regularly claimed attacks that it said were in retaliation for Washington’s support of Israel in its war against Hamas in Gaza and were aimed at pushing US troops out of the region.
NEW YORK CITY: The UN on Tuesday described the humanitarian situation in Sudan as “an absolute catastrophe.”
It said famine conditions have been officially confirmed in the Zamzam camp for displaced persons close to El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, where one child is dying every two hours from malnutrition. Famine is probably also present in several other camps for displaced people in and around the city.
“This announcement should stop all of us cold because when famine happens, it means we are too late,” Edem Wosornu, director of operations and advocacy at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said during a meeting of the Security Council to discuss the humanitarian situation in Sudan.
“It means we did not do enough. It means that we, the international community, have failed. This is an entirely man-made crisis and a shameful stain on our collective conscience.”
More than 26 million people in Sudan now face acute hunger, she said, adding: “That’s the equivalent of New York City times three, full of starving families and malnourished children.”
War has been raging in the country for more than a year between rival factions of its military government: the Sudanese Armed Forces, under Gen. Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, led by Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, commonly known as Hemedti. More than 19,000 people have been killed since the conflict began in April 2023.
James Kariuki, the UK’s deputy permanent representative to the UN, told fellow council members: “There is famine in Sudan and that famine is entirely man-made.”
He accused the Sudanese Armed Forces of obstructing the delivery of aid to Darfur through actions such as the closing the Adre crossing on the border between Chad and Sudan, which is the most direct route for delivering humanitarian assistance at scale. And he said attacks by the Rapid Support Forces in the region have created the conditions for starvation to spread.
Kariuki called on the warring factions to participate in peace talks in Geneva and engage “in good faith to agree steps to a durable ceasefire, full humanitarian access and the protection of civilians.”
Wosornu said that “hunger is not the only threat people are facing.” The war has displaced more than 10 million people inside Sudan, and more than 2 million have fled to neighboring countries as refugees, making it the largest displacement crisis in the world.
In the past six weeks alone, about 726,000 people have been displaced within and from Sennar State in the southeast of the country as the result of an advance by the Rapid Support Forces into the area.
Sudan’s healthcare system has collapsed, Wosornu added, with two-thirds of the population unable to get to a hospital or see a doctor.
In addition, heavy rains in recent weeks have caused flooding in residential neighbourhoods and camps for displaced people, including in Kassala and North Darfur, increasing the risk of cholera and other waterborne diseases, OCHA said.
“Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, once the beating heart of the country, is in ruins,” Wosornu said, as she voiced grave concerns about war crimes being committed in the city.
She said Sudanese women, and girls as young as nine years old are exposed to “horrific levels” of sexual violence, with “suicide rates among survivors increasing” and “the number of children born out of rape surging.”
Aid workers in Sudan continue to face harassment, attacks and even death. Food, medicine and fuel convoys have been looted. Three trucks have been blocked by the Rapid Support Forces in Kabkabiya, west of El-Fasher, for more a month, OCHA said, depriving malnourished children in the Zamzam camp of the aid they so desperately need to survive.
Humanitarian access continues to be obstructed, said Wosornu, with a recent escalation of fighting in Sennar causing further blocking of the southern route that used to be the UN’s main cross-lines option for the delivery of humanitarian aid from Port Sudan to Kordofan and Darfur.
“Life-saving supplies in Port Sudan are ready to be loaded and dispatched to Zamzam, including essential medicines, nutritional supplies, water-purification tablets and soap,” said Wosornu. “It is crucial that the approvals and security assurances needed are not delayed.”
She told council members that it is still possible “to stop this freight train of suffering that is charging through Sudan. But only if we respond with the urgency that this moment demands.”
She called for an immediate ceasefire and for the warring factions to allow the rapid, safe and unimpeded delivery of humanitarian assistance across the country, using all possible routes.
In the absence of a ceasefire, Wosornu said all involved in the conflict must uphold their obligations under international humanitarian law, adding: “Those who commit serious violations, including sexual violence, must be held accountable.”
She also stressed that more resources are needed to tackle the humanitarian crisis “and we need them now. If we do not receive adequate funding for the aid operation, the response will grind to a halt.”
What kind of future awaits Hamas after the killing of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran?
Experts discuss whether the Palestinian group can retain its influence and rebuild after the killing of its political bureau chief
The killing of Hamas leaders may represent a tactical victory for Israel, but seems to have limited strategic value, says analyst
Updated 06 August 2024
Jonathan Gornall
LONDON: It has been 14 years since Israeli agents carried out one of Mossad’s most audacious, controversial and, perhaps, pointless assassinations.
On Jan. 19, 2010, Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, the man responsible for procuring weapons for Hamas, was murdered in a hotel bedroom in Dubai.
It was a big operation, with many moving parts, involving almost 30 Mossad operatives who entered Dubai on false passports.
It ended with Al-Mabhouh being overpowered in his room at the Al-Bustan Rotana and given a fatal dose of suxamethonium chloride, a drug used in anesthetic cocktails.
People take part in a march called by Palestinian and Lebanese youth organizations in the southern Lebanese city of Saida, on August 5, 2024, to protest against the assassination of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh. (AFP)
To avoid leaving a tell-tale needle mark, the drug was administered with a device that used ultrasound to deliver it through the skin. The drug causes paralysis and, still conscious but with his lungs unable to function, Al-Mabhouh asphyxiated to death.
The assassins put him to bed and left, using a Mossad-developed device for putting hotel-door security chains in place from the outside of the room, hoping that Al-Mabhouh’s death would be attributed to natural causes.
It might have been, but for the vigilance of Dubai’s police chief. He suspected foul play and, by having the comings and goings through Dubai airport before and after the hit analyzed, and days of hotel security-camera footage examined in detail, put together a damning portfolio of evidence.
At the time, the killing was big news. Images of two Mossad agents posing as tennis players, emerging from an elevator behind Al-Mabhouh, appeared on televisions and newspapers around the world.
Today, however, for few outside Hamas or Mossad will the name Al-Mabhouh have any resonance. Certainly, his killing failed to have any appreciable impact on the flow of arms to the group.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (R) meeting with Palestinian Hamas movement leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on July 30, 2024. (AFP)
This week, the killing of Ismail Haniyeh, chairman of the Hamas political bureau, is also big news — as was the killing on July 13 of Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif.
But soon, says Ahron Bregman, a former officer in the Israeli army and a senior teaching fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, the disruption caused by their deaths to the activities and ambitions of Hamas will disappear, as the ripples caused by a small pebble thrown into a large lake quickly vanish.
“The killing of Ismail Haniyeh will not change much as far as Hamas is concerned,” said Bregman, author of “The Fifty Years War: Israel and the Arabs” and the memoir “The Spy Who Fell to Earth,” an account of his part in the exposure of an Egyptian alleged double agent.
“Hamas is more than rifles, rockets and even leaders. Hamas is an idea.
“If Israel wants to defeat it, it must offer the Palestinians a better idea — say, a Palestinian state.
“If such an idea is not put forward, then Hamas will remain in place and rebuild itself for future battles with Israel.”
KEY HAMAS FIGURES
Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ Gaza leader, has just been named Ismail Haniyeh’s successor.
Khaled Meshaal, a founding member, has mostly operated from the relative safety of exile.
Khalil Al-Hayya, Doha-based deputy leader of Hamas, is said to have the backing of Iran.
Musa Abu Marzouk lived for 14 years in the US before becoming deputy chairman of Hamas’ political bureau.
Hamas is an Islamist militant group that spun off from the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in the late 1980s. It took over the Gaza Strip after defeating its rival political party, Fatah, in elections in 2006.
The sheer number of killings of key Hamas figures carried out by Israel over the past quarter-century, and the negligible impact of these killings on the organization’s capabilities or objectives, speaks of a policy being carried out despite a lack of success — or, perhaps, in accordance with a less obvious, and probably domestically focused agenda.
Killing high-profile Hamas targets, and perpetuating the war in the process, makes it harder for Israelis inclined toward peace to criticize or plot to remove their wartime Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Certainly, it is not difficult for Netanyahu’s critics to see the killing of Haniyeh as a deliberate tactic to derail peace talks.
Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani put it succinctly on X, writing: “How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?”
A woman walks near a billboard displaying portraits of Hamas leader Mohammed Deif (R) and Ismail Haniyeh with the slogan “assassinated” reading in Hebrew, in Tel Aviv, on August 2, 2024. (AFP)
Israel’s list of assassinations and attempted assassinations of Hamas leaders is a long one, and the killings have not always been as subtly carried out as the necessarily low-key Mossad hit on Al-Mabhouh in Dubai.
One of the first high-profile targets to be killed was Salah Shehadeh, the leader of Hamas’ military wing, who was targeted in Gaza on July 23, 2002, by an Israeli F-16 that dropped a massive bomb on his home.
Such was the cost in collateral damage — 14 others died, including Shehadeh’s wife and nine children — that 27 Israeli Air Force pilots had a fit of conscience, denouncing such attacks as “illegal and immoral” and “a direct result of the ongoing occupation which is corrupting all of Israeli society.”
The soul-searching did not last long, however. The toll of senior Hamas leaders has continued more or less unabated ever since.
Those who have been killed include Ahmed Yassin, who founded Hamas in 1987. He died 20 years ago, on March 22, 2004, in a hail of missiles fired from Israeli helicopters as he returned home from morning prayers in Gaza.
He was succeeded by Abdel Aziz Al-Rantisi, who died in similar fashion just 26 days later.
Iranians take part in a funeral procession for late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, on August 1, 2024. (AFP)
Ahmed Al-Jabari, second-in-command of Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades, was targeted unsuccessfully five times before succumbing in Gaza City in November 2012 to a missile fired from a drone.
This year, unsurprisingly, has been a particularly busy one in terms of Hamas assassinations carried out by Israel. Hamas deputy and Haniyeh’s right-hand man Salah Al-Arouri was killed on Jan. 7 in an airstrike in Lebanon that also claimed the lives of several other senior Hamas commanders.
On March 11, Marwan Issa, deputy commander of Al-Qassam Brigades and Hamas No. 3, died in an airstrike in Gaza.
But none of these deaths — individually or taken together — has managed to turn Hamas from its path or hamper its ability to continue doggedly pursuing its aims militarily.
Haniyeh’s death is likely to have no greater immediate impact on Hamas’ capabilities than the assassinations that have gone before, said John Jenkins, former UK ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Iraq and a Middle East expert with the Centre for Geopolitics at Cambridge University.
But it might signal a change of strategy that bodes ill for any hopes of an immediate end to conflict.
Smoke billows from burning tires behind an Israeli army vehicle in Hebron on July 31, 2024, following a demonstration by Palestinians denouncing the killing of Haniyeh. (AFP)
“In the past, decapitation hasn’t worked — not with Hamas, nor with Hezbollah, nor Iran,” he said. “Or, at least, it has disrupted rather than interrupted.”
Israel, he added, “undoubtedly knows that. But it’s also thought for two decades that ‘mowing the grass’ is the best way to manage the conflict.”
That policy of simply keeping a lid on the problem “is now over — it collapsed on Oct. 7, 2023.
“So, the game now is destruction — of Hamas’ offensive capabilities and its ability to function as a significant political actor within the occupied Palestinian territories.
“That doesn’t mean killing the idea; that’s not possible. It means killing the capability. That’s why a ceasefire is a long way off.
“Spectacular assassinations are now part of a wider strategy of dismantling tunnels, command and control functions, logistics, and so on. That’s the only context in which they make sense.”
It is, however, a very dangerous game, with the killings of Haniyeh and Deif in Tehran and Beirut condemned by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres last week as “a dangerous escalation.”
Yemenis wave flags and lift placards of Hezbollah senior commander Fuad Shukr and Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh during a rally in the Houthi-controlled capital Sanaa on August 2, 2024. (AFP)
Instead of Israel rampaging around the region on a killing spree — let alone assassinating Hamas’ Qatar-based negotiators, such as Haniyeh — “all efforts should instead be leading to a ceasefire in Gaza, the release of all Israeli hostages, a massive increase of humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza and a return to calm in Lebanon and across the Blue Line,” said Guterres.
“This endless cycle,” he added, “needs to stop.”
In an interview with a British newspaper over the weekend, Amjad Iraqi, an associate fellow with Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa program, warned that Israel’s increasingly audacious killings were indeed edging the region dangerously close to a regional war.
“People are not understanding the gravity of what this is,” he told the Independent.
“There is a kind of egotistical, unstable dance that all these actors are making with missiles and with people’s lives, while trying to explain it as calibrated responses.”
Only a ceasefire could cool things down, but as things stand, “we are at a very, very dangerous point.”
Muslims pray during the final prayers for Ismail Haniyeh at his funeral in the Qatari capital Doha on August 2, 2024. (AFP)
The reality of imminent escalation, said Burcu Ozcelik, senior research fellow for Middle East security at the Royal United Services Institute, “means that the ‘day after’ and the path to statehood seems even farther away now, with all sides focusing on the military outcome of the here and now, at the expense of immense civilian suffering and a viable political solution.”
For its part, Hamas, “to project resilience and the resolve of its leadership despite the assassination of Haniyeh, is trying to pivot quickly to appoint a new political bureau chief.”
A consultative process is under way “and, until a decision is made, such as the appointment of Khaled Mashal, for example, ceasefire negotiations cannot realistically recommence.”
As it has done many times before, in other words, Hamas will quickly grow a new limb to replace one that has been amputated.
But “a more urgent obstacle to restarting talks is that Hamas cannot be authorized to re-enter a diplomatic phase until Iran declares that the regime and its proxies have sufficiently retaliated against Israel for the series of high-profile assassinations, with much speculation around when that might happen.”
Mourners offer their condolences to senior Hamas official Khaled Mashaal (L) during the funeral of Ismail Haniyeh, in the Qatari capital Doha on August 2, 2024. (AFP)
The killing of Haniyeh has, she believes, “cornered Hamas into a dilemma that will determine how the organization evolves over time.
“On the one hand, the loss of a recognizable political leader will trigger radicalization among some Hamas supporters and embolden hardliners among the military faction such as Yahya Sinwar, his brother and their inner circle.
“On the other, with Hamas fighters suffering losses inside Gaza and its military infrastructure downgraded, Hamas will be looking for a lull in the fighting to recoup and plan ahead.
“But for Hamas, this is a long game, and it is far from over — key figures inside and outside Gaza will continue to struggle to consolidate Hamas and its victory narrative and position it for a role in post-war Gaza.”
An Indonesian protester holds up a placard with the image of Ismail Haniyeh during a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Surabaya on August 6, 2024. (AFP)
Ahron Bregman agrees that the killing of Haniyeh “might lead to a regional war in which Iran and Hezbollah could become involved. If the latter happens, it will play straight into the hands of Hamas’ leader, Yahya Sinwar, whose dream has always been that his Oct. 7 attack on Israel triggers a regional war.”
The assassination will also “put on ice any hostage deal, as both leaders, Netanyahu and Sinwar, are not interested in such a deal at the moment.
“For Netanyahu, a deal could spell the end of his coalition government. As for Sinwar, he will wait to see if the assassination at the heart of Tehran, which humiliated Iran, could lead to a regional war.”
Yahia Sinwar addresses supporters during a rally in Gaza City, on April 14, 2023. (AFP)
It is true, Bregman added, that “in recent months, Israel has managed to assassinate many of the Hamas leaders. Sinwar is quite on his own now, and I’m sure he’s got very few of the old guard to consult with.
“But Hamas is bigger and larger than any leader or leaders. When this war is over, there will still be Hamas — battered, leaner, but still standing and able to send rockets into Israel.
“The assassinations are tactical victories for Israel, but there is nothing strategic in it, not even in the possible killing of Sinwar himself.”
Members of the Palestinian Joint Action Committee sit during a symbolic funeral for Ismail Haniyeh, in Beirut, on August 2, 2024. (AFP)
Ultimately, the cost of Israel’s campaign of assassinations could be borne by Israelis and Palestinians alike.
The details of the operation to kill Al-Mabhouh in Dubai in 2010 emerged in the book “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” published by Israeli historian and investigative journalist Ronen Bergman in 2018.
Bergman concluded that, because Israel’s intelligence community had always “provided Israel’s leaders sooner or later with operational responses to every focused problem they were asked to solve,” that very success had “fostered the illusion among most of the nation’s leaders that covert operations could be a strategic and not just a tactical tool — that they could be used in place of real diplomacy to end the geographic, ethnic, religious, and national disputes in which Israel is mired.”
As a result, Israel’s leaders “have elevated and sanctified the tactical method of combating terror and existential threats at the expense of the true vision, statesmanship, and genuine desire to reach a political solution that is necessary for peace to be attained.”
