As my good friend Robert Stacy McCain has noted, Israel has neither confirmed nor denied that it was responsible for the extermination — I refuse to call it an assassination, as one does not assassinate cockroaches — of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, though most people have concluded that they did. Personally, I hope that Israel is responsible! Arash Azizi certainly believes it!

A Wake-Up Call for Iran

Israel can pretty much do what it wants on Iranian soil.

By Arash Azizi | Wednesday, July 31, 2024 | 11:20 AM EDT

Ismail Haniyeh should have known that Tehran wasn’t a safe place for him to be. What has Israel ever wanted to do on Iranian territory that it hasn’t been able to accomplish? In 2018, it stole the country’s entire nuclear archive. In 2020, it killed Iran’s top nuclear-weapons official. In 2022 and 2023, it reportedly abducted, interrogated, and then released security officials who were planning actions against Israeli tourists in the region—and it did this entirely on Iranian soil. Such extensive operations show that Mossad has deeply penetrated Iran’s security architecture, much as it has in the hit Israeli TV show Tehran.

That’s all you get to read at The Atlantic, because the rest falls behind the paywall. But, not to worry, msn.com reproduced it for free! As much as I’m shelling out for subscriptions, free is still my favorite price!

Details are still emerging about the strike on Haniyeh, Hamas’s highest-ranking political leader, who was killed in Tehran in the early hours today. The assassination comes at an incredibly tense moment, less than 24 hours after Israel used an air strike to take out Fuad Shukr, a top Hezbollah official, in Beirut. Hezbollah has not confirmed Shukr dead, and Israel has not taken responsibility for the attack on Haniyeh. But fingers will naturally point to the country with both the capacity and the motive to go after the Hamas leader.

Israel has a history of targeting militant leaders behind the killing of its citizens. Palestinian militants massacred Israeli Olympic athletes in 1972, and Israel responded with Operation Wrath of God, a string of assassinations of militant leaders all over the world that ended only in 1988. Israel was always going to find and kill Haniyeh, a leader of the group that perpetrated October 7, the most lethal terror attack in the country’s history.

“Operation Wrath of God”? Yeah, I like that name!

We are told, of course, just how wrong, wrong, wrong! targeted assassinations are, but let’s tell the truth here: if the United Kingdom had had the ability to take out Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring in 1940, the way Israel supposedly exterminated Mr Haniyeh, does anyone doubt that Prime Minister Winston Churchill would have ordered it done? Does anyone doubt that the world would be a better place today if that had happened?

This supposed capability is hardly surprising. I’m old enough to remember when there was talk in the 1980s, perhaps a bit overblown, that the guidance system for American cruise missiles was so good that we could send it through the men’s room window in the Kremlin. With the ever-increasing capabilities of global positioning satellites, that Israel could put a weapon on any particular building it wished is not really surprising. The more surprising part is that Israel — if it was Israel! — not only knew that Mr Haniyeh was in Tehran, but knew exactly where he was staying. I expect to hear about crackdowns in Iran, as their security apparatus tries to find out how Israel got that information, in time for it to have been actionable. It will not pay to be one of the Usual Suspects in Iran right now!

Oh, who am I kidding? The Usual Suspects have already been in jail in Iran. The Islamic Republic will be scrutinizing anyone who had the information, scouring their computers to see if they can find a Mossad intrusion, interrogating journalists, and putting everyone in the neighborhood to the question. The Ayatollah might want to strike at Israel, but the real strike will be against Iranians themselves.

Ayatollah Ali Khameini has to be worried about something else. If Israel, or whomever, could target and kill Mr Haniyeh in his Tehran safe house, then the mad mullahs could just as easily be killed in their homes. It’s good that he’s worried.