Steven A. Cook
In his very first statement after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared: The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) “will immediately use all its strength to destroy Hamas’s capabilities. We will destroy them, and we will forcefully avenge this dark day that they have forced on the State of Israel and its citizens.”
It was a statement that spawned a stream of commentary about the impossibility of destroying Hamas. The Israeli leader and his advisors clearly disagree. They proved that on July 13, when Israel struck Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif, under whose name the announcement of the Oct. 7 operation was published, and his deputy in Khan Younis, Rafaa Salameh. (Israeli officials confirmed their deaths this week.)
Then the Israelis apparently turned their sights on Ismail Haniyeh—the leader of Hamas’s Qatar-based political office—killing him on Wednesday with a bomb planted in the building in Tehran where he was staying. In between the killings of the two Hamas leaders, the Israelis laid waste to a portion of the Houthi-controlled port of Hodeida in Yemen and assassinated Fuad Shukr, a military advisor to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Unconfirmed reports indicate that a commander with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was assassinated in Syria not long after Haniyeh’s demise.
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