The killing of Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut is the first strike in a campaign of assassinations overseas promised by Israeli officials for several months.
The target was carefully chosen – one of the most senior Hamas leaders and the organisation’s main link to Iran and the Lebanon-based militia Hezbollah. Arouri was also influential in the occupied West Bank, where he was born and where violence has soared in recent months.
Some Israeli officials also believe that the 57-year-old may have known in advance about the plan to launch bloody attacks into Israel before the assault on 7 October, which killed more than 1,200 Israelis, mainly civilians.
Arouri became involved in Islamist activism when a student at Hebron university in the mid-1980s, a time when such ideologies were surging across the Middle East. He joined Hamas soon after its foundation in the immediate aftermath of the first intifada and helped create Hamas’s military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassem brigades.
Jailed by Israel in 1992, Arouri spent almost all the next 18 years in prison. In 2010, he helped negotiate the release by Israel of more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in return for a single kidnapped Israeli soldier.
Based first in Syria, then in Qatar and finally in Lebanon, Arouri built a reputation as an astute operator with contacts throughout the Middle East but particularly with Iran. He also extended Hamas networks and influence in the West Bank and negotiated with Fatah, the veteran secular party that dominates the Palestinian Authority.
Political promotion followed. Already a member of Hamas’s powerful “politburo”, Arouri was elected deputy to Ismail Haniyeh, the organisation’s leader, in 2017. Since then, he has been a high-profile emissary for the group, involved in almost all major political decisions, and a key spokesperson.
But Arouri also maintained his hardline credentials. In 2015, the US Treasury accused Arouri of funding and directing Hamas’s military operations in the West Bank and linked him to several terrorist attacks, hijackings and kidnappings. The US designated Arouri a global terrorist, offering up to $5m for information leading to his arrest.
Shortly after the 7 October attacks, Arouri met Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, to discuss strategies for achieving “real victory in their war with Israel”. Publicity photographs of the two men showed them talking under portraits of the first supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, and the current incumbent, Ali Khamenei.
Most recently, Arouri played a role in talks brokered by Qatar, which led to the release of some of the 240 hostages taken by Hamas. Experts in Israel said that the veteran negotiator was responsible for drawing up lists of those to be released by either side. Arouri’s role was said to be “indispensable”.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has repeatedly signalled in recent months that Hamas leaders were targets. In November, Netanyahu told a press conference that he had instructed the Mossad, Israel’s overseas intelligence service, to “assassinate all the leaders of Hamas wherever they are”.
In early December a leaked recording revealed Ronen Bar, the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, telling Israeli parliamentarians that Hamas leaders would be killed “in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, in Turkey, in Qatar, everywhere”.
There have been explicit comparisons to the campaign of assassinations after the 1972 attack by an armed Palestinian faction on the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics.
Like that effort, this too may well reassure Israelis and bolster support for a government under immense pressure after a very serious intelligence failure.
But there are concerns that such a strategy may backfire. Former targets of assassination by Israel have told the Guardian that they had not been deterred but made more determined. And others suggest that any harm done to extremist and terrorist organisations is temporary.
Analysts also say the consequences of assassinations are often very unpredictable. The death of one leader might force a group to switch strategy, or even relinquish violence, but might equally lead to the rise of another who is more intransigent.
Finally the strategic fallout could be very significant. Nasrallah is due to make a speech on Wednesday and has already pledged that “any assassination on Lebanese soil against a Lebanese Syrian, Iranian or Palestinian will be met with a decisive response”.
The killing of Arouri on Tuesday could lead to Israel fighting a two-front war, a scenario it had previously sought to avoid.
