Before Yasser Arafat was evacuated from besieged Beirut on 30 August 1982, an Israeli sniper had him in his sights but was refused permission to kill him. Arafat was by then a recognized political leader, and thus enjoyed something much stronger than diplomatic immunity: the tacit but absolute rule under which no Arab government has ever tried to assassinate any Israeli political leader and vice versa.

But things were different with Hamas. The group could never accept the legitimacy of Jewish rule over any part of Israel and its chiefs, and so it could never graduate from terrorists to political leaders. Now one of its leaders — Ismail Haniyeh, head of the group’s political bureau and the closest thing it had to a prime minister — has discovered the pitfalls of this approach. As he returned to an official guest house in Tehran, having attended Tuesday’s swearing-in ceremony for Iran’s new president Masoud Pezeshkian, a very small missile was fired through the window of his suite, destroying it and him, along with a bodyguard.

Exiled in Qatar, Haniyeh could live very safely and in great luxury. That sheikhdom has housed a Mossad office for decades and has steadfastly cooperated with Israel in all manner of ways, just as it paid for Al Jazeera‘s global anti-American propaganda while hosting by far the most active US military base in the entire region. Similarly, he would have felt untroubled in Tehran, capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran no less, whose leaders consider themselves more as the successors to the Persian emperors.

With Arab militias fighting for him from Lebanon to distant Yemen, as well as in Syria and Iraq, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei really is the successor of the emperor Cyrus — even though Cyrus restored the Jewish rule over Jerusalem which Khamenei wants to end. This evening, Iran’s Supreme Leader ordered a retaliatory strike against the country he blames for Haniyeh’s assassination. Israel, in his words, has ‘prepared the ground for a harsh punishment for itself’; it is the ‘duty’ of the Islamic Republic to take revenge.

But perhaps Iran’s high command — and its allies — have not considered the threat they still face. These days even schoolboys can operate drones, and the 1,400-kilometer distance from Israel is no big deal, but the killing of Haniyeh required something else. To carry out the assassination, there had to be exact knowledge of which room he would be in some eight hours before the drone was sent. This could only have come from people watching the Hamas leader very closely during his visit, ending with a good view of his room from across the street.

There is a warning in this for Hassan Nasrallah. Just like Arafat, the leader of Hezbollah — the group blamed for an attack over the weekend on the Golan Heights which killed a dozen children — is a rejectionist who denies the legitimacy of Jewish rule. Having witnessed the ease with which Haniyeh was dispatched, Nasrallah would be wise to tread carefully, even on the soil of his allies.

---

Professor Edward Luttwak is a strategist and historian known for his works on grand strategy, geoeconomics, military history, and international relations.

ELuttwak

---