Most people probably don’t know this, but Wikipedia has a page called “List of Israeli assassinations.” It begins in July 1956 and spans 68 years to the present. The majority of the people on the list are Palestinians; among them are famous Palestinian leaders, including Ghassan Kanafani of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Khalil Ibrahim al-Wazir of Fatah, also known as Abu Jihad; Sheikh Ahmed Yassin of Hamas; and Fathi Shaqaqi of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Looking at the long list, it is impossible not to notice that the number of assassinations and attempted assassinations carried out by Israel over the years has increased exponentially: from 14 in the 1970s to over 150 in the first decade of the new millennium and to 24 since January 2020.
That list came to mind when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a press conference on July 13 to celebrate Israel’s attempt to assassinate Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif in Gaza. Israeli fighter jets and drones had just bombed the al-Mawasi camp, now home to about 80,000 displaced Palestinians living in densely packed tents.
In just a few minutes, the pilots slaughtered at least 90 Palestinians, including dozens of women and children, and injured 300 others. All of this happened in an area that Israel had previously designated as a “safe zone.” As gruesome images of charred and torn corpses flooded social media, reports surfaced that Israel had used several half-ton guided bombs made in the United States.
At his press conference at the Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv, just hours after the bloodbath, Netanyahu admitted that he was “not absolutely certain” that Deif had been killed, but said that “the mere attempt to assassinate Hamas commanders sends a message to the world, a message that Hamas’s days are numbered.”
Yet a simple reading of the “Israeli Assassination List” makes it clear that Netanyahu has been a bit of a swindler. He knows full well that Israel’s assassinations of Hamas political leaders Sheikh Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, or military leaders Yahya Ayyash and Salah Shehade, have not weakened the movement and may even have increased its following.
Years of Israeli assassinations demonstrate that Israeli leaders use them primarily to flatter and rally their voters. Netanyahu’s recent press conference is no exception.
But as gruesome as Wikipedia’s list is, the names it contains tell only part of the story. Indeed, it does not mention the number of civilians killed in each assassination attempt, whether successful or not.
For example, the July 13 attack was the eighth known attempt on Deif, and it is difficult to calculate the total number of civilians killed by Israel in its drive to assassinate him. Wikipedia’s list fails to account for how the increase in assassinations led to an exponential increase in civilian deaths.
This becomes evident when comparing Israel’s current assassination policy to that which it followed during the second Palestinian Intifada. In 2002, when Israel assassinated the leader of Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades, Salah Shehade, 15 people were killed, including Shehade, his wife, his 15-year-old daughter and eight other children.
After the attack, the Israeli public protested the loss of civilian life. Twenty-seven Israeli pilots signed a letter refusing to fly assassination missions over Gaza. Nearly a decade later, an Israeli commission of inquiry concluded that due to a “failure in intelligence gathering,” commanders had not known that civilians were present in adjacent buildings at the time of the strikes. Had they known, they would have called off the attack.
The commission’s findings are consistent with the laws of armed conflict, which permit, or at least tolerate, the killing of civilians not taking direct part in hostilities, provided that such killings are not “excessive” in relation to the “concrete and direct” military advantage that the belligerent hopes to gain from the attack.
This rule, known as the principle of proportionality, aims to ensure that the ends of a military operation justify the means by balancing the anticipated military advantage against the expected civilian harm.
Today, however, we are light years away from the commission’s conclusions, both in terms of the repertoires of violence adopted by Israel and the legal justifications it now invokes.
First, Israel’s methods of war have changed radically since 2002. According to the Israeli organization Breaking the Silence, composed of military veterans, two doctrines have guided Israeli attacks on Gaza since 2008. The first is the “no casualties doctrine,” which states that, in order to protect Israeli soldiers, Palestinian civilians can be killed with impunity; the second doctrine recommends intentionally attacking civilian sites in order to deter Hamas.
These doctrines have unsurprisingly led to massive attacks that, under the laws of armed conflict, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity. As a result, Israeli military jurists have had to change their interpretation of the laws of armed conflict to align them with the new war strategies.
If, twenty years ago, the Israeli commission of inquiry had deemed the killing of 14 civilians in the assassination of a Hamas leader to be disproportionate and therefore a war crime, in the first weeks after October 7, the army decided that for each low-ranking Hamas member, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians. If the target was a senior Hamas official, the army “authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.”
This may sound outrageous, but an officer in the Israeli army’s international law department spoke very frankly about these changes in a 2009 interview with the Haaretz newspaper: “Our goal as an army is not to hinder the army, but to give it the tools to win legally.”
Former department head Col. Daniel Reisner also publicly stated that this strategy was being pursued through “a review of international law.”
“If you do something long enough, the world will accept it,” he said. “The whole of international law is now based on the idea that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if it is carried out by enough countries.”
In other words, how we calculate proportionality is not determined by any a priori moral edict, but rather by the norms and customs created by armies as they adopt new, often more deadly, forms of warfare.
Netanyahu knows this very well. He said he personally approved the al-Mawasi strike after receiving satisfactory information about the potential “collateral damage” and the type of munitions that would be used.
What is clear is that by decimating Gaza and killing tens of thousands of people, Israel is also attempting to recreate the norms of war and significantly transform interpretations of the laws of armed conflict.
If Netanyahu and his government can make Israel’s version of proportionality acceptable to other state actors, then the laws governing armed conflict will end up justifying genocidal violence rather than preventing it. In fact, the very architecture of the entire international legal order is now at stake.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
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