Some reflections, written urgently in response to the urgency of the moment, on the assassination early Tuesday of Ismail Haniyeh. The 62–year-old chairman of Hamas’ Politburo, murdered during an official visit to Iran, was the organization’s chief negotiator in talks intended to produce a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas and Palestinian prisoners held in Israel’s jails.
These talks may now be definitively dead. This is news but not news: It has been apparent for some time that the Netanyahu regime — and the U.S., by obvious extension — has never been serious about an accord to bring the Israel Occupation Force’s genocide in Gaza to an end. This is now beyond all question, the Biden regime’s mealy-mouthed drivel to the contrary notwithstanding.
Important as this conclusion is, one must view Haniyeh’s murder in its larger context. From this perspective we can come to some useful understandings. A few scales may now fall from the eyes of the determinedly illusioned.
Terrorist Israel has not acknowledged responsibility for this vastly consequential act, but it has often remained silent in its long history of assassinations of this kind, notably when these operations breach another nation’s sovereignty. This is not important. Anyone who thinks the Israelis did not kill Haniyeh at this, a moment of heightened political and diplomatic significance, is either compulsively naïve or compulsively blind to the bottomlessly pernicious character of the Zionist regime.
Haniyeh had traveled to Tehran to attend the inauguration of Masoud Pezeshkian, a reformist recently elected Iran’s president, and was bivouacked at a residence for army veterans in North Tehran, the fashionable quarter of the capital. IRNA, the Islamic Republic’s state-run news agency, reported that a precision-guided missile killed Haniyeh and his bodyguard at the residence at 2 a.m. Tuesday.
In a story published later in the day, Military Watch, the independent online magazine, said if the attack was confirmed to be an air strike, it was likely an F–35 fighter jet, an aircraft capable of evading Iran’s air-defense systems, that carried it out. The F–35 is a stealth fighter the U.S. has so far sold to 16 countries, including Israel, which, in 2018, became the first country to deploy the jet in combat.
The Israelis may have relied on U.S. intelligence and targeting assistance to execute an operation of this extraordinary exactitude, although this is not now confirmed. It nonetheless requires equal naïvete to assume the Biden regime, from the White House to the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, had no foreknowledge of the Israelis’ assassination plot.
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