Netanyahu’s bait: Why Israel might have killed Hamas leaders in Beirut now
Al Jazeera
The assassinations bear the marks of an Israeli operation. But the timing might also be about Israeli domestic politics.
The killing of top Hamas officials in an Israeli missile strike in Beirut on Tuesday resounded across the Middle East. Although many people are being killed every day for nearly three months now, the latest targeted killing sent shockwaves, opening old wounds and setting off fears of an escalation of the conflict.
The victims of the surgical strike included senior Hamas leaders. The most prominent was Saleh al-Arouri, a former leader of the Qassam Brigades and member of the political bureau of Hamas who coordinated the group’s military and political activities outside the Gaza Strip, gathering political and financial support. A native of the West Bank, al-Arouri was reportedly one of the most popular Hamas leaders in the Fatah-led parts of Palestine, and his reputation might have grown after October 7.
High-ranking military commanders Samir Findi and Azzam al-Aqraa were also killed, along with four other operatives.
The assassination bore all signs of classic Israeli long-distance targeted eliminations of high-value human targets. Al-Arouri and his companions were killed by a strike that pinpointed a second-floor apartment in the street flanked on both sides by buildings eight storeys high. The action had striking similarities with the killing of Ahmad Yassin, one of Hamas’s founders and spiritual leader of the group, who was eliminated in a street in Gaza by a modified antitank guided missile.
Times and technology change, and so do Israeli capabilities. To kill Sheikh Yassin in 2004, an armoured antitank AH-64 Apache helicopter needed to get within 2km (1.2 miles). The same task is now performed by quieter, smaller unmanned drones that are harder to hear and see, and a new generation of missiles. The combination used in Beirut, undetected, appears to have been an Israeli-built system – Hermes drone and Nimrod missile.
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