Hunt for Hamas leaders: killed with rockets, poisoned and blown up with a telephone receiver

Israel is targeting Hamas political and military leaders in Gaza as it seeks to crush the Palestinian group, which carried out a brutal attack on civilians on October 7, army spokesman Lt. Col. Richard Hecht said.

Saturday’s surprise attack was led by Hamas’ elite Nukhba forces, and the Israeli military is focused on striking the group’s command centers in Gaza, Hecht told reporters.

According to Lieutenant Colonel Hecht, the Nukhba forces are “personally selected by the Hamas leadership to carry out the most brutal work – raids, ambushes, infiltrations and kidnappings. You can’t take them away from management.”

“We will get every one of them,” added the Israeli army spokesman, referring to those leaders of the Palestinian Islamist group who remain in Gaza. According to him, Hamas military leaders Mustafa Shaheen and Mohammad Abu Shamla (he was the commander of the radical naval forces) have already been killed as a result of Israeli strikes.

The head of the military wing of this Islamist Palestinian group, Mohammed Deif, is called the “architect” of a complex super-secret operation for the invasion of Hamas militants into Israeli territory.

It is difficult to imagine that the Israeli security forces will calm down until they eliminate this Hamas leader, who heads the so-called Al-Qassem Brigades.

Despite the fact that Deif has been considered Israel’s “most wanted” man since 1995 for organizing the murders of Israeli soldiers and civilians, he has managed to survive seven assassination attempts over the past two decades.

It is believed that he lost an eye during the first attempt on his life, and part of an arm during the second. Deif’s wife, seven-month-old son and three-year-old daughter were killed in an Israeli airstrike in 2014. The most recent Israeli attempt to kill Deif was made – twice – during Operation Wall Guard in May 2021. Military sources said that both times he managed to escape at the last minute.

But the “elusive,” as he is called in the press, Mohammed Deif is not the only target of the Israeli intelligence services’ hunt.

***

The author of these lines had the opportunity to personally observe the prayer performed in the mosque by one of the political leaders of Hamas, Khaled Mashaal (it is reported that he is now based in Qatar). He looked quite healthy then.

But at one time his star rose under unusual circumstances after he survived an assassination attempt by the Israeli Mossad. Before this, the media note, he was relatively unknown in the Islamist Palestinian movement that emerged at the height of the first Palestinian intifada.

Khaled Meshal led the movement during turbulent historical times. Apparently, it was under his leadership that Hamas, along with resistance to the Israeli occupation, turned its strategic views to politics. In 2005 and 2006, Meshaal oversaw the strategic decision to end Hamas’s campaign of suicide attacks on Israel as ordinary Palestinians bore a disproportionate brunt of Israel’s retaliatory wrath.

There is reason to believe that Mashaal was trying to bring Hamas from the “terrorist underground” to the mainstream – and indeed, the Islamic Resistance Movement won a stunning victory in Gaza in 2005-2006, first in municipal and then in parliamentary elections in Palestine.

But let’s return to the assassination attempt that Khaled Meshal survived. At the end of September 1997, Israeli Mossad agents injected poison into his ear on one of the streets of the Jordanian capital Amman, but were captured by Meshaal’s guards.

“Khaled Meshaal lay dying in his hospital bed as the poison entered his bloodstream, slowly shutting down his respiratory system,” Time wrote. “With the help of a machine pumping air into his lungs, he only had a few days to live at best.” Antidote could save Hamas leader’s life. But the only person who could do it was the very man who tried to kill him: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”

Most likely, Khaled Meshaal would have died, but King Hussein of Jordan intervened. At the request of the Jordanian authorities, Israel provided an antidote and released Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Yassin from prison along with other 19 Palestinian prisoners. The price for fulfilling these demands was the release of Israeli agents who entered Jordanian territory using fake Canadian passports.

The fact is that King Hussein promised to bring the arrested Israelis to justice if Meshaal died. The agents likely faced execution if found guilty. Desperate to prevent an international crisis that would derail his efforts to broker peace deals between Israel and its Arab enemies, US President Bill Clinton intervened, insisting that Netanyahu provide an antidote. The Israeli leader reluctantly complied and even went to Amman to make a personal apology to the king.

It is not surprising that Khaled Meshal, who miraculously survived, was afraid to make public the names of Hamas leaders, especially since in 2004, after the murder of another prominent Hamas member, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon repeated the words he said after the liquidation of the movement’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin: “The destruction of terrorist leaders will continue.”

Note that only a couple of years passed after the miraculous rescue of Khaled Meshaal by the Jordanian king, and under the new monarch, Abdullah II, the activities of the Hamas movement in Jordan were banned, and Meshaal himself was expelled from the Hashemite Kingdom in August 1999.

The Israeli intelligence services more than compensated for their failure to kill Khaled Mashaal by killing two other Hamas leaders.

The spiritual leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement, who stood at the origins of the organization, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was killed on March 22, 2004 in the Gaza Strip, after a practically blind 67-year-old man in a wheelchair left a mosque. Sheikh Yassin always followed the same direction every morning to go to the same mosque in the Sabra area, which is 100 meters from his home.

Before the attack, Israeli F-16 fighter jets flew overhead to drown out the noise of the approaching helicopters.

Hellfire missiles fired from an Israeli Apache helicopter killed him and several other people (including ordinary passers-by), plus a dozen were injured.

The operation to destroy Sheikh Yassin was personally supervised by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who congratulated the security forces on their success.

A little later, on April 17, 2004, in a similar way – a missile strike from an Israeli Apache helicopter – the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, was killed. In addition to him, his eldest son and bodyguard were killed. Previously, in the summer of 2003, Rantisi survived an Israeli helicopter attack on the car he was riding in. The head of Hamas himself was slightly wounded, and his bodyguard was killed. However, the next attempt turned out to be fatal for the leader of the radicals.

By the way, he was once asked if he was afraid of death. To this Rantisi replied: “We are all waiting for the last day of our lives. Nothing will change. If it comes from “Apache” or from cardiac arrest, I prefer to die from “Apache”….

Of course, one should not think that “innocent lambs” were the targets of assassination attempts carried out by Israeli security forces. By the way, the same Sheikh Ahmed Yassin called for resistance against Russia during the Chechen war. That did not stop Moscow from speaking at the UN with regret that the call of Arab countries to condemn the murder of the sheikh did not receive the approval of the Security Council due to the veto imposed by the Americans.

A few years before Sheikh Yassin and Rantisi, another well-known Hamas figure, Yahya Ayash, known under the nickname “Engineer”, became a victim of an Israeli assassination attempt – he specialized in making improvised explosive devices from improvised means, which were used in terrorist attacks that resulted in the death of dozens of people. In a cruel twist of fate, the Israelis eliminated him using a booby-trapped mobile phone given to him by someone he trusted. The “Engineer” was decapitated by a cell phone explosion in the apartment of his childhood friend Osama Hamada while he was answering a call from his father.

An Israeli plane spotted their conversation and transmitted it to the command post. When it was confirmed that Ayyash was on the phone, the Shin Bet intelligence agency remotely detonated it, killing the Hamas man instantly.

Osama’s uncle, Kamal Hamad, is said to have sold his son’s friend for $1 million, a fake passport and a US visa…

***

The United States will support Israel’s plans for targeted killings of senior Hamas officials, said former CIA analyst Ken Katzman, who specializes in the Middle East.

With a long history of assassinating enemy faction leaders, Israel will no doubt target senior Hamas figures following the deadly raids on Saturday afternoon.

IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari, the very next day after the militant invasion, threatened the group’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar: “Yahya Sinwar is the commander of the campaign, and he is a dead man.”

And on Monday, Hamas Finance Minister Javad Abu Shmala was killed in a targeted operation.

According to Katzman, Israel’s plans to destroy the leaders of the Islamic Resistance Movement will extend very far: “They will hunt down the people involved in the attack. I expect Mohammed Deif (commander of Hamas’s military wing) to be the number one target.”

The process could take several years, says Ken Katzman, drawing parallels with the long-running Mossad operation to track down those responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Let us recall that Operation “Wrath of God” to destroy terrorists from the Palestinian organization “Black September”, involved in the terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics, as well as members of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), who, according to the Mossad, were responsible for taking hostages, lasted 20 years. The latest target was the head of PLO intelligence, Atef Bseiso, who was shot at point-blank range in Paris in 1992.

According to the analyst, Israel will also hunt Hamas leaders abroad. A foreign operation would be more complex and would require coordination with the United States, which would likely aid the assassination plans, Ken Katzman said.

“I suspect the US is going to not-so-politely ask Qatar to kick these guys out before trouble starts,” the analyst said, referring to Hamas leaders living in the emirate.

“Hamas killed Americans and took Americans hostage. If I were advising the Biden administration, I would say: “Let’s put Mohammed Deif on the same list that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was on,” Katzman said, mentioning the name of the former leader of ISIS (Islamic State). group), killed by American troops in 2019.

Hamas leaders know they are targets and take precautions by staying underground in a vast network of tunnels, said Israeli security analyst Yoni Ben Menachem.

“If they are 100 meters underground, you can’t 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 for elimination.

The success or failure of assassination plots will likely depend on intelligence provided by agents inside Gaza, he said.