اخبار فلسطين – وطن نيوز
فلسطين اليوم – اخبار فلسطين اليوم
W6nnews.com ==== وطن === تاريخ النشر – 2026-05-16 11:30:00
Exclusive to the Palestinian Information Center: From the highest political and military levels in Israel, an announcement was made about the implementation of an assassination operation targeting a Palestinian resistance leader in the Gaza Strip, on Friday, in a step that reflects a qualitative escalation in the policy of assassinations and an expansion of the scope of their use within the management of the ongoing confrontation. The Israeli announcement came alongside the allegation of the assassination of the leader of the Al-Qassam Brigades, Izz al-Din al-Haddad, without confirmation from independent or official Palestinian sources so far, which expresses a noticeable shift in the policy of assassinations and the Israeli pattern of dealing with them. On October 1, 1973, a secret unit assassinated Palestinian leader Mahmoud al-Hamshari in Paris with an explosive device planted in his phone. This was one of dozens of secret operations carried out by the Israeli intelligence services against Palestinian leaders in Europe, Beirut and elsewhere. No one could have imagined at the time that this approach, which was characterized by secrecy and selectivity, would, after half a century, turn into an industrial system based on artificial intelligence and a brutal killing machine, targeting banks of targets containing tens of thousands of names, and authorizing the killing of entire families in their homes. Today, the occupation forces are no longer limited to carrying out field assassinations, but rather are accompanied by direct political and media announcements about them, in an attempt to establish messages of deterrence and reshape the equations of engagement, despite the legal and human rights criticisms this raises related to the legitimacy of extrajudicial assassinations, especially in areas densely populated with civilians. This report traces the path of this historical transformation: How Israeli assassinations moved from limited secret operations to a declared and codified security doctrine, and a tool of genocide. Gurion, the Israeli intelligence apparatus. In June 1948, a few weeks after the announcement of the occupying entity, Ben Gurion described this apparatus as the pillar of survival: to keep the reserve army in its homes, rebuild military strength, and anticipate threats before they occur. From 1948 until today, Israel has used a policy of targeted assassinations to serve its interests, and the volume of these operations has increased in parallel with the intensification of confrontations in the wake of the Munich massacre in 1972 The so-called “Wrath of God” operation sent agents to Europe and the Middle East to assassinate the leaders of the Black September Organization. However, the operations would disappear or decline at times, as happened after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. From secret assassination to codified doctrine after the crystallization of the state of resistance at the end of the first intifada, the occupation forces resorted to a policy of assassinations against what were known at the time as persecuted resistance fighters, and most of the assassinations came within the framework of sieges and clashes with the resistors. The second intifada in 2000 was the decisive turning point. In December of that year, the Israeli occupation assassinated the Palestinian activist Thabet Thabet in Ramallah. The incident ignited a legal and political controversy within Israel, and resulted in an institutional decision: that assassinations be transformed from semi-secret operations into an official declared policy under the term “targeted frustration.” The Israeli Supreme Court in 2006 recognized the legitimacy of this policy in principle, with the requirement of rarely procedural guarantees. It was applied on the ground. “The Israeli doctrine of assassination did not appear as an official, declared, legally codified policy until the beginning of the second intifada during the reign of Ariel Sharon. “Assassinations have become a tool that targets not only direct threats, but also to test weapons and tactics, to influence the internal political and electoral arena, and to confuse the capabilities of the Palestinian national movement.” Journal of Palestine Studies The assassinations of the occupation forces were not limited to military and security personnel, but rather targeted political leaders. They attempted to assassinate Khaled Meshal in Amman in 1997, and assassinated the Secretary-General of the Popular Front, Abu Ali Mustafa, on August 27, 2001, and the founder and leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. On March 22, 2004, and Commander Abdel Aziz Al-Rantisi on April 17, 2004, leading up to the assassination of the head of the Hamas political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran in 2024, preceded and followed by dozens of political and military leaders. The assassinations also targeted dozens of leaders from the axis of resistance, Iranian nuclear scientists, Hezbollah leaders, and officials in the civilian government in Gaza. Target banks expanded during the Gaza war: civilians in the line of fire Israel’s widespread and genocidal aggression against Gaza came after October 7, 2023, revealing an unprecedented shift in the size and scope of target banks. According to investigations published by +972 magazine and Human Rights Watch, Israel developed an artificial intelligence system called “Lavender,” which counted up to 37,000 Palestinians as potential targets. The system was not limited to senior military commanders, but rather extended to include elements of Lower ranks, and even civilian employees in government agencies in Gaza, and mistakes often occurred as a result of this system, and the lives of citizens became subject to estimates and tests by artificial intelligence. The leaked official Israeli figures reveal the picture with horrific clarity: a secret military database leaked in May 2025 showed that only 17% of the 53,000 martyrs in Gaza were combatants, while 83% were civilians. “We were always bombarded with pressure: Give us more Goals, give us more. We ran out of targeting lists very quickly. When they lowered the evaluation threshold in the Lavender system, civil defense and police elements were added to it.” Israeli intelligence officer, +972 Magazine Not entire families were spared from this system; Israeli intelligence officers revealed that the “Where’s Daddy?” (Where is the father?) He would monitor targets even in their homes, and strike them while they were among their children. The same sources acknowledged that military policy permitted the killing of between 15 and 20 civilians in each strike targeting a low-ranking member, and more than 100 civilians in strikes targeting high-ranking leaders. Therefore, the martyrdom of hundreds of civilians was recorded in individual assassination incidents, as happened with the assassination of Commander Muhammad Al-Deif. Journalists, Doctors, and Academics: Expanding Targeting The case of journalists provides a stark example of expanding targeting beyond fighters. The Government Media Office documented the martyrdom of 262 Palestinian journalists at the hands of Israeli forces since the start of the aggression. This is a number that exceeds what any country has killed. In 2025, Israel was responsible for two-thirds of the killings of journalists globally. In more than one documented incident, Israeli strikes targeted journalists wearing press vests or working in locations known to the occupation army. The Israeli forces admitted to intentionally assassinating a number of journalists, including Ismail Al-Ghoul, Anas Al-Sharif, Hussam Shabat, Hassan Islih, and Muhammad Wishah, under the pretext of their affiliation to the Hamas movement, which their professional bodies and media channels denied completely. “The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented cases in which prominent journalists were targeted because of their coverage of Israeli war crimes, such as starvation incidents and attacks on hospitals. Their liquidation combines a violation of international law with the silencing of witnesses to the same crimes.” Committee to Protect Journalists – 2025 Report Assassinations between security discourse and crimes under international law International humanitarian law makes a strict distinction between what are considered legitimate operations in a state of war and what is considered extrajudicial killing. Customary international law has established that lawful attacks only target those actively participating in hostilities, and are proportionate to the military objective pursued. The Geneva Conventions also require serious investigations into allegations of war crimes, and respect for the immunity of journalists, doctors and humanitarian personnel. As for “extrajudicial targeting,” the United Nations Special Rapporteurs described it as arbitrary killing, that is, killing that takes place without a judicial ruling, procedural guarantees, or the possibility of appeal and verification, which is prohibited in all circumstances under Article VI of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The limits of the self-defense argument. Israel has often invoked Article 51 of the United Nations Charter and the principle of self-defense to justify its military operations. However, this legal framework faced a number of fundamental objections raised by international law experts: First, the principle of necessity: No military operation gains its legitimacy unless it is the only means available, and the danger is present and imminent. As for assassinations that target suspected persons in their homes and among their families, this characteristic is stripped of them. Secondly, the principle of proportionality: even in conditions of legitimate war, a strike is prohibited if the incidental harm to civilians is not proportional to the desired military advantage. Israeli sources openly acknowledge that the policy permitted the killing of twenty civilians in order to eliminate a low-ranking gunman. Third, the principle of distinction: International law requires a strict distinction between combatants and civilians. However, the artificial intelligence system operates with an error rate that the Israeli army acknowledges itself, which is ten percent, while the officers were satisfied with “20 seconds” to verify the accuracy of the targeting before implementing it. Above all, human rights experts confirm that the principle of self-defense fails against Israel, because it is essentially an occupying and aggressor state, and there is no right to self-defense for the aggressor. Artificial Intelligence and the Accountability Crisis The use of artificial intelligence to generate target lists constitutes a real crisis for the international legal accountability system. Legal researchers monitor the phenomenon of what is called the “responsibility gap”: when military officials claim that it is impossible to monitor the decisions of the algorithm, it becomes difficult to determine who is responsible for each dead person in the subsequent stages of accountability. However, this position faces categorical rejection by international law experts, who stress that using the artificial intelligence system and determining its working mechanisms and decision-making powers remains a purely human decision, and that responsibility inevitably ensue from these decisions. The matter becomes more dangerous when investigations reveal that the Israeli officers were not using artificial intelligence as an auxiliary tool in some decisions, but rather as almost a single reference that they used to formulate the routine and its recommendations. In this context, Ben Saul, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, says: If the reports received about Israel’s use of artificial intelligence are correct, then many of the Israeli strikes in Gaza amount to the war crime of launching disproportionate attacks. Digital technology rights organization Access Now asserts that Israel’s use of artificial intelligence in Gaza embodies the culmination of observed patterns of facial data surveillance and predictive policing tools. These systems reduce humans to statistical and data points. In Gaza, the consequences are inevitably fatal. Documentation of human rights organizations and international procedures. Palestinian and international human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have documented patterns of targeting that lack legal guarantees for decades. The pace of international investigations escalated with the outbreak of genocide in Gaza. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued two arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Galant. In January 2024, the International Court of Justice issued temporary decisions obligating Israel to stop any action that might amount to genocide. “Political and judicial actors must consider the sum of these acts against all protected civilians; They are not military objectives under international law, and actions to destroy them in whole or in part constitute genocide.” UN Independent Experts, December 2024 Experts warn that Israel’s impunity thanks to political support for some of its allies has repercussions that extend far beyond the Palestinian case. International institutions face an existential crisis, says Tom Dannenbaum, a professor of international law at Stanford University: If they abandon guarantees of compliance under the weight of political pressure, they lose the legitimacy they derive. Including its moral and legal authority. Accountability between right and obstruction. Israeli assassinations began with limited secret operations subject to denial, and quickly turned into a declared security doctrine, then jumped into an industrial system that relies on artificial intelligence and produces tens of thousands of killing orders in record time. At each of these stages, the Israeli security discourse maintained its vocabulary and justification equations, while the operations expanded and expanded to include civilians who had no connection to any armed activity However, the systematic targeting of civilians and the use of mechanisms that produce killing rates at this level of structural dysfunction cannot be justified by any security pretext, and the current facts raise the most dangerous question: Has assassination turned from a tool for managing the conflict into a pillar in a system of comprehensive destruction? As for the broader issue, it is the issue of accountability and the will to activate it. The International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice have the necessary legal tools to look into these files, but what is hindering the process is not the law, but rather the political will of some parties in the international community. It uses its influence as a shield to protect impunity, transforming international law from a guarantee for the protection of civilians into a negotiating card in the hands of the powerful.
