Israel Plans to Kill Hamas Leaders Around the World After War

Nation’s spy agencies have long history of targeted assassinations

By Dion Nissenbaum - WSJ

Tel Aviv — Israel’s intelligence services are preparing to kill Hamas Leaders around the world when the nation’s war in the Gaza Strip winds down, setting the stage for a yearslong campaign to hunt down militants responsible for the Oct. 7 massacres, Israeli officials said.

With orders from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s top spy agencies are working on plans to track down Hamas leaders living in Lebanon, Turkey and Qatar, the small Gulf nation that has allowed the group to run a political office in Doha for a decade, the officials said.

The assassination campaign would be an extension of Israel's decades long clandestine operations that have become the subject of both Hollywood legend and worldwide condemnation. Israeli assassins have hunted Palestinian militants in Beirut while dressed as women, and killed a Hamas leader in Dubai while disguised as tourists. Israel has used a car bomb to assassinate a Hezbollah leader in Syria and a remote controlled rifle to kill a nuclear scientist in Iran, according to former Israeli officials. For years, countries such as Qatar, Lebanon, Iran, Russia and Turkey have provided Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, with a measure of protection. And Israël has at times refrained from targeting the Palestinian militants to avoid creating diplomatic crises.

The new plans would mark a second chance for Netanyahu, who ordered a botched 1997 attempt to poison Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Jordan. The well-documented attempt instead led to the release of Hamas’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.

To the consternation of some Israeli officials who want the latest plans to remain a mystery, Netanyahu telegraphed his intentions in a nationwide address on Nov. 22.

“I have instructed the Mossad to act against the heads of Hamas wherever they are,” he said, referring to Israel’s foreign-intelligence service.

In the same address, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Hamas leaders are living on “borrowed time.”

“They are marked for death,” he said.

While Israel typically tries to keep such efforts secret, the nation’s leaders have shown few reservations about revealing their intentions to hunt down everyone responsible for the Oct. 7 attack, just like they did to those responsible for the Palestinian terrorist attack that killed 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972.

Israel is already working to kill or capture Hamas leaders inside Gaza, the officials said, but agreed Thursday to extend a temporary truce in the enclave for an eighth day to secure the release of more hostages. The question now for Israel isn’t whether to try to kill Hamas leaders elsewhere in the world, but where—and how, the officials said.

The evolving plans are an extension of Israel’s war in Gaza and a reflection of its intentions to ensure that Hamas can never again pose a serious threat to Israel—just as the U.S. led a global coalition against Islamic State militants who set up a self-proclaimed caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria. As part of the effort, Israel is also looking at whether it could forcibly expel thousands of low-level Hamas fighters from Gaza as a way to shorten the war.

Targeted killings abroad can violate international law and run the risk of blowback from nations in which assassins operate without their permission. In practice, however, Israel and others have pursued targeted killings and weathered the repercussions.

Israel’s plans to target Hamas leaders began to take shape shortly after Oct. 7, when Hamas militants carried out a brazen cross-border attack that Israel said killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians. More than 200 others, including U.S. citizens and Europeans holding dual Israeli citizenship, were abducted and taken to Gaza.

Some Israeli officials wanted to launch an immediate campaign to kill Meshaal and other Hamas leaders living abroad, the officials said. The officials were especially incensed by a video of Meshaal, and other Hamas leaders, including its top political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, celebrating while watching live news coverage of the Oct. 7 attack.

Israel isn’t known to have carried out any targeted-killing operations in Qatar, and doing so after Oct. 7 could have torpedoed continuing efforts to negotiate the release of the hostages, the officials said. Those concerns helped temper efforts to immediately embark on the assassination campaign, but the planning continues, they said.

Qatar has become the central hub for the hostage talks. Doha has helped to secure the release of dozens of Israeli hostages held by Gaza militants in return for the release of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

Netanyahu’s vow to hunt down Hamas leaders around the world has sparked a debate among former intelligence officials.

Efraim Halevy, a former Mossad director, called it illadvised. Killing Hamas leaders won’t eliminate the threat, he said. It has the potential to instead inflame the group’s followers and accelerate creation of even worse threats.

Amos Yadlin, a retired Israeli general who once led the military’s intelligence agency, said the campaign “is what justice demands.”

Perhaps no other nation has Israel’s experience in carrying out worldwide assassination campaigns. Since World War II, Israel has conducted more than 2,700 such operations, according to the book “Rise and Kill First,” by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman.

Even before Israel was founded in 1948, Jewish militants killed European diplomats who were involved in the British administration of Mandatory Palestine.

The campaigns have sometimes backfired.

In 1997, Netanyahu, then serving his first term as prime minister, ordered Israeli spies to kill Meshaal, a Hamas founder who was then living in Jordan. The Israeli team entered Jordan posing as Canadian tourists and attacked Meshaal outside the Hamas political office in Amman. One Israeli assassin sprayed a toxin into Meshaal’s ear but he was captured along with another member of the team.

Meshaal fell into a coma, and Jordan threatened to terminate its peace treaty with Israel. Then-President Bill Clinton pressed Netanyahu to end the crisis by sending his Mossad chief to Amman with the antidote that saved Meshaal’s life. Israel then secured the freedom of its operatives in Jordan by agreeing to release Yassin, the Hamas spiritual leader, and 70 other Palestinian prisoners.

Meshaal later described the failed assassination attempt as a “turning point" that helped empower Hamas.

It was the deadly Palestinian militant attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics that cemented the nation’s embrace of covert assassinations as a tool of government policy.

Palestinian gunmen with a group known as Black September took a group of Israeli athletes and coaches hostage in the Olympic Village. All 11 Israeli hostages were killed.

Then-Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered Israeli spies to hunt down and kill all Palestinian militants involved in the attack. The covert campaign was dubbed Operation Wrath of God and became the subject of an Oscar-nominated 2005 Steven Spielberg movie.

Israeli assassins spent 20 years hunting those linked to the Munich attack. Among those to take part in the yearslong effort was Ehud Barak, then a young Israeli commando who went on to become prime minister. In 1973, Barak, dressed as a woman, was part of a team that sneaked into Beirut to kill three Palestinian militants linked to the Munich attack. They killed all three in a matter of minutes.