Ismail Haniyeh killing: Netanyahu's only goal is to set the region on fire

David Hearst

 Israel's prime minister is trying to drag Iran and Hezbollah into a regional war that his army has no chance of winning

In killing Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’ political bureau in Tehran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sent the clearest message yet to Iran and the resistance movements that he wants a regional war.

In denying any involvement or foreknowledge of the drone strike that killed Haniyeh, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken further damaged Washington’s battered credibility.

US security officials were briefing journalists within an hour of the attack taking place that a senior member of the Axis of Resistance had been killed. They did not specify where or whom, and at first it was thought to be a second strike in Lebanon after the targeting of Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s most senior military commander and right-hand man to leader Hassan Nasrallah. 

But it is certain that US security officials knew about the drone strike on Haniyeh within minutes of it happening. To cast Netanyahu as a leader in the grip of Jewish messianic fascists in ordering this strike, is only half of the story. 

When I met him two decades ago as a political outcast dubbed an extremist by my liberal Zionist hosts, Netanyahu had only one idea to impart: Iran was the mothership. Hamas and Hezbollah were only its aircraft carriers. 

Netanyahu’s lifelong belief that he will lead his nation to victory by crushing the Palestinian national cause and preventing a state from ever seeing the light of day can never be discounted.

Today, he might think he is on the cusp of his ultimate political achievement as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, by dragging the US and Britain into war with Iran.

Negotiations torn up

Netanyahu sent other messages, too, in killing Haniyeh, who had no involvement in the Hamas attack on 7 October, and whose bureau was in charge of negotiations with mediators Qatar and Egypt.

Netanyahu has torn up negotiations and any thought of getting the hostages back alive. This should already have been obvious from the latest round of talks in Rome, where the Israeli side multiplied its conditions around phase one of the deal. 

It was evident, too, from Netanyahu’s last visit to Rafah, where he vowed Israel would retain indefinite control of the Philadelphi corridor. 

Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani has asked how negotiations can proceed when Israel has killed its negotiating counterpart. 

Even without a ceasefire, Haniyeh was worth more to Israel alive than dead

In fact, Haniyeh was one member of a negotiating committee, which will carry on without him. 

Al Thani’s barbed reaction was aimed at Netanyahu, who has done everything in his power to escalate regional tensions and to undermine the US administration’s position on a permanent ceasefire, and its consistent opposition to opening a second front in Lebanon. 

In killing a mild man like Haniyeh, who did not hide underground but lived out in the open, and who dedicated his career to negotiations and engagement with the Islamic world in Qatar, Turkey and Iran, Israel has killed a leader it could one day need to negotiate a hudna, or long-term ceasefire.

Out of the equation

In person, Haniyeh was amiable, mild-mannered, an attentive listener, modest - the complete diplomat. He was never one to speak ill of Fatah or Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. 

If, as now must be obvious even to the Israeli military, it will not be able to defeat or disable Hamas in Gaza, Israel will need people in Hamas to negotiate with. They have just killed one of them.

From a strategic point of view, Israel’s action is madness. This is not my word, but that used by former Israeli General Amiram Levin, who added, with some understatement, that the “security forces should’ve strongly opposed” the move.

Even without a ceasefire, Haniyeh was worth more to Israel alive than dead. 

Israel could have plausibly argued to a western audience that it would not surrender Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant to the International Criminal Court in The Hague while another of those named in the ICC’s application for arrest warrants, Haniyeh, was free to live in Qatar and roam around the region.

Pressure would have inevitably been applied on Qatar to surrender him and expel the political bureau of Hamas.

Now that he is out of the equation, Israel has lost that defence. All this, Israel has achieved in killing Haniyeh.

Hamas strengthened 

What Netanyahu can be sure he has not done is weaken Hamas. 

Quite the contrary. Haniyeh, a modest man who lost 60 members of his family, including sons and grandsons, to Israel in this war, will go down as one of Hamas’ greatest martyrs. 

The moment Haniyeh learned that his sons and grandsons had been killed in cars struck by Israeli forces during Eid, he was visiting a hospital in Doha where injured Palestinians from Gaza were being treated. 

He said only: “May God have mercy on them,” but he refused to interrupt his visit. The clip went viral, because it spoke more than words could have done about his ability to put the Palestinian cause above his personal grief as a father.

Israel has killed countless Hamas leaders and commanders, and the movement has only grown - in recruits, weaponry and political influence. Today, polls show that Hamas would win in the West Bank if free elections were allowed to take place there.

The Hamas that has resisted Israel’s attack on Gaza for 10 months is many times the size and capabilities of the Hamas in the days of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. The quadriplegic founder of Hamas was killed when an Israeli helicopter gunship fired a missile at him as he was being wheeled from Fajr prayers in Gaza. Haniyeh was his chief of staff. That assassination was internationally condemned.

The Israeli military knows the truth: that killing Haniyeh was last thing they should be doing if they want to see any of their hostages back alive

Hamas’ stock has risen, not fallen, in Palestine and the Arab and Muslim world since the 7 October attack. This is the only reason why the 88-year-old Abbas, who has continuously torn up reconciliation agreements, paid homage on Wednesday to his slain rival.

Abbas condemned the killing as “a cowardly act and a dangerous development”, and called on Palestinians to unite. Abbas spoke out of fear and political necessity, not out of any love for Hamas. 

Within days of a reconciliation agreement among Palestinian factions negotiated in Beijing, Abbas’ security forces tried and failed to arrest an injured commander of the Tulkarm Battalion from a hospital in the occupied West Bank. 

So you can be absolutely sure that Abbas has no intention of unifying Fatah with the other Palestinian factions. Fatah’s negotiator in Beijing might have been sincere, but for Abbas, Beijing was for show only. It made no difference on the ground in the occupied West Bank.

Fire in the region, fire at home

Nor is it a coincidence that Haniyeh’s assassination was ordered within a day of Israeli fascists and far-right members of the Knesset breaking into a detention facility in an attempt to prevent soldiers from being arrested for raping a Palestinian prisoner.

Setting fire to the region is Netanyahu’s only response to the bushfire that is breaking out at home and on his doorstep.

Hundreds of detainees have emerged with harrowing accounts of the notorious Sde Teiman detention centre. Middle East Eye first reported on how iron bars, electric shocks, dogs and cigarette burns were used in torturing Palestinian detainees at Israeli detention centres. 

Omar Mahmoud Abdel Qader Samoud, who was detained for more than 42 days, said one of the rooms in the facility was known as the “disco”.

 “A soldier dragged me on the floor, naked and handcuffed, and placed me on a piece of rug,” Samoud told MEE. “The soldiers sprayed freezing cold water on me and placed a fan in front of me. They would leave me for a few days, without food or water or the possibility to get up and go to the bathroom. I urinated on myself and pleaded for mercy but they didn’t care.

“The soldiers would kick me on all parts of my body,” he added. “Imagine yourself naked, handcuffed on the floor with five or six soldiers kicking you with their boots, hitting you with weapons and bats. Then they asked me to sit up. How could I possibly sit up? When I couldn’t follow their orders they would beat me even harder. They completely smashed me. I thought this nightmare would never end.”

A month later, an anonymous doctor working at the same centre said limbs were amputated because of handcuff injuries, noting: “We are all complicit in breaking the law.”

No one was detained; nothing was investigated. But as pressure mounted from the ICC about war crimes in Gaza, alongside the ongoing genocide case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Israeli military prosecutors felt obliged to act.

Israel could not argue that a domestic judicial process existed to examine such allegations of torture during detention, if the state did not use it. So nine soldiers accused of sexual abuse against a detainee, which led to him being hospitalised with serious injuries to his rectum, were arrested.

Breakdown of the state

What happened next was a complete breakdown of the state, similar to the 2021 assault on Congress by Trump supporters. 

The arrests were met by angry demonstrations at the gates of Sde Teiman, with several protesters temporarily breaching the gates. Among the protesters were reservist soldiers, as well as two far-right parliamentarians: Zvi Sukkot, a member of the Religious Zionist movement, and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu of the Jewish Power party.

Police took three hours to arrive. Herzi Halevi, the army’s chief of general staff, had to break off a defence meeting on Israel’s response to the recent attack on the Golan Heights to deal with the crisis. The army and police each blamed each other for the breakdown in law and order.

For a time, the accused soldiers barricaded themselves into Sde Teiman and used pepper spray to defend themselves against arrest, before eventually being taken into custody.

When Hezbollah threatens to close Ben Gurion Airport, or knock out the Israeli electrical grid, these are not empty threats

It is a mistake often made by those who style themselves as friends of Israel to cast such scenes as a fight between moderates and the extreme messianic right. This is wholly illusory, for the “moderates” are fully on board with continuing the murderous Gaza campaign. The “moderates” voted for the recent Knesset bill that rejects the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Where they differ is means, rather than ends.

Israelis who cling to their western identity are past masters of seizing Palestinian land in salami slices - subtly, quietly, without great fuss; but patiently, one property, one street, one high court case at a time. They care about their image, about being called global pariahs, and about the label of apartheid or war crimes being pinned on them personally. 

The religious Zionist right, on the other hand, don’t give a tinker’s cuss about world opinion or international courts. They want annexation of the West Bank now. The sooner it happens, the better. 

Call it two-speed Zionism, but the goal is the same: a one-state solution in which the modern state of Israel dominates, if not overlays, the biblical Land of Israel, the land from the river to the sea.

Deepening fractures

But it is a mistake, too, to underplay the ever-deepening fractures within Israel, which are occurring in the middle of a major war.

Israel portrays itself to the outside world as the one functioning state in a neighbourhood of failed ones. You don’t have to build a state in Israel, Netanyahu once bragged to US politicians in one of his many appearances before Congress: “We’re already built.”

But that state is showing distinct signs of failing, too. 

Napoleon and Hitler were at the height of their powers, and their respective armies had tamed Europe under their jackboots, when each dictator thought it would be a good idea to attack Russia. 

So, too, is Netanyahu endangering everything Israel has achieved in establishing a strong state by openly creating the conditions for a regional war. 

The Israeli military knows the truth: that killing Haniyeh was the last thing they should be doing if they want to see any of their hostages back alive. They know they are not ready to attack southern Lebanon, because they don’t have enough tanks or ammunition. 

They know how well-armed Hezbollah, the Houthis and other resistance groups are, and how effective their rockets are. They know about geography and distances, and the vulnerability of Israel’s population and economy to war on five fronts simultaneously. When Hezbollah threatens to close Ben Gurion Airport, or knock out the Israeli electrical grid, these are not empty threats. 

Israeli security establishments also know they are in danger of losing command and control over their troops, and if they give the order to withdraw, many units may not obey.

Israel under Netanyahu’s leadership is making the classic mistake of all colonial powers. It is overreaching in the messianic belief that the Jews really are God’s chosen people; that the Bible ordained all of what is happening now, and that Israel can achieve its goal of complete military victory. 

It is precisely at this moment that it is at its most vulnerable, and that the project could collapse. 

In the final years of apartheid, the South African regime went into hyperdrive. It decided to overthrow the government of Angola, install a puppet regime in Namibia, and attack Zimbabwe, Botswana and Zambia - all fruitless projects that could not stave off regime collapse. Netanyahu’s Israel is treading the same path.

For nothing other than self-preservation, those who understand this should act before Netanyahu involves them in a war they could not possibly stop, still less win.