Belén Fernández
Al-Jazeera / July 31, 2024
By assassinating one of the main negotiators for a ceasefire deal in the Gaza Strip, Israel made its intention to continue and expand the war clear.
Just when you thought the situation in the Middle East couldn’t get any more incendiary, the assassination of Hamas’s political chief Ismail Haniyeh has propelled regional tensions to a whole new level of bad.
Haniyeh was killed in a strike late on Tuesday in Tehran, the capital of Iran, where he had attended the inauguration ceremony of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. The assassination is without doubt the handiwork of – who else? – the state of Israel, although the Israeli government seems to have adopted a “no comment” policy for the moment.
One Israeli official, Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu, apparently couldn’t contain his exuberance, and took to X to proclaim: “This is the right way to clean the world of this filth … Haniyeh’s death makes the world a little better.”
In his social media post, Eliyahu also swore that there would be “no more imaginary peace/surrender agreements”, and that “the iron hand that will strike is the one that will bring peace and a little comfort and strengthen our ability to live in peace with those who desire peace”.
That’s a lot of usage of the word “peace” for folks who fundamentally don’t want, well, peace. To be sure, killing one of the main negotiators for a ceasefire deal in the Gaza Strip is a pretty good way to thwart any prospect of peace for the time being.
And what do you know? As Reuters noted in its obituary for Haniyeh, the man was “seen by many diplomats as a moderate compared with the more hardline members” of Hamas.
Anyway, it has long been Israel’s modus operandi to squelch any opportunities for so-called “moderation” in order to justify its own perennial maniacal behaviour. In a recent Al-Jazeera article titled “Why does Israel step up its attacks when Gaza ceasefire talks advance?”, journalist Justin Salhani reflected on the intensification of Israel’s current genocidal assault in the Gaza Strip even as ceasefire talks were progressing.
Salhani recalled a certain relevant precedent during the second Intifada in 2002, in which the Fatah-allied Tanzim militia was reportedly “set to announce a unilateral ceasefire”. Then Israel dropped a one-ton bomb on a Hamas leader’s Gaza City home, and that was the end of that.
Now, Israel has officially killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza in less than 10 months, though the true death toll is assumed to be astronomically higher. So much for the “ability to live in peace”, to borrow Eliyahu’s words.
Of course, if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu allows the war to end, he will have to live with a lot of things he doesn’t want to live with – like domestic opposition, corruption charges, and other stuff that’s no fun. In May, the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court applied for an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for alleged war crimes committed in Gaza – an eventuality that is clearly best avoided by simply continuing to commit more war crimes.
And just to be absolutely sure that there remains no conceivable possibility of peace in the near term, Israel is doing its best to provoke its enemies into committing bellicose acts that Israel itself can then use as an excuse to keep waging war.
Just yesterday, Israel struck a residential building in the Lebanese capital of Beirut, killing a woman and two children and injuring 74, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Health. The target of the strike was a Hezbollah commander accused by Israel of masterminding the July 27 rocket attack on the town of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights that killed at least 12 children.
Hezbollah, which normally claims responsibility for its actions, has vehemently denied perpetrating the Majdal Shams attack – which, it bears underscoring, took place in a territory that is illegally occupied by Israel. But, hey, it was a good enough reason to bomb Beirut.
The assassination of Haniyeh in Iranian territory, meanwhile, gives Iran no choice but to respond to Israel in some sort of military fashion, which it has already shown it is more than capable of doing. Following the deadly April Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate in the Syrian capital of Damascus, Iran launched hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel.
Granted, this was more of a show of force than an attempt to cause damage. But by assassinating Haniyeh in Tehran, Israel is literally playing with fire.
In order to derail ceasefire prospects and keep up the killing in Gaza, then, it seems Israel is going to end up with a whole lot more regional blood on its hands.
The Cambridge English dictionary defines a “rogue state” as a “nation that is considered very dangerous to other nations” – and there’s no nation more rogue these days than the state of Israel.
Belén Fernández – Al-Jazeera columnist
