Hostage delegation to head to Cairo, IDF kills five terrorists close to Sinwar

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah's new approach is that an agreement in Gaza will not prevent Hezbollah from responding to Fuad Shukr's elimination, even if it leads to a separate war between Israel and Lebanon, Israeli state broadcaster KAN reported on Friday morning.

US President Joe Biden said on Thursday that the "basis" for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas War in Gaza was on the table but that the killing of Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of the Palestinian Islamist terror group Hamas, has "not helped."

Biden noted that he had a "very direct" conversation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier on Thursday.

He made the comments at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, where a plane carrying detainees released by Russia landed late on Thursday.

IDF forces were reportedly operating in three locations in the West Bank on Friday morning: the Balata refugee camp in Nablus, Bethlehem, and Jenin, where there was said to be an exchange of fire with terrorists.

At the same time, the air force struck a building in the eastern part of Gaza City.

US President Joe Biden discussed new US military deployments to counter threats of Iranian direct attack against the Jewish state when he spoke with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday night.

“The President discussed efforts to support Israel’s defense against threats, including against ballistic missiles and drones, to include new defensive US military deployments,” the White House said after the call. 

Vice President Kamala Harris, who earlier in the week had stated that Israel had a right to self-defense, participated in the phone call.

The White House said that the “President reaffirmed his commitment to Israel's security against all threats from Iran, including its proxy terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.”

“Together with this commitment to Israel’s defense, the President stressed the importance of ongoing efforts to de-escalate broader tensions in the region,” the White House stated.

PRIME MINISTER Benjamin Netanyahu and US Vice President Kamala Harris meet in Washington, last week. (credit: REUTERS/Nathan Howard)

Iranian threats

Iran had threatened a direct strike against Israel from its territory together with a coordinated attack by Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and other groups located in Syria and Iraq, which makes up what it has termed its axis of resistance.

In April, it had launched some 300 drones and missiles against the Jewish states, most of which were shot out of the sky by a coalition of five armies. This included the US, Israel, Jordan, the United Kingdom and France.

The two men as Israel’s three-front battle against Iranian proxy groups — Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen — threatened to break out into a regional war.

The stakes were raised after a Hezbollah rocket landed Saturday in the village of Majdal Shams, killing 12 Druze children.

On Tuesday night, Israel assassinated Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr, who was behind the attack. On Wednesday morning, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran.

Israel has not taken formal responsibility for the attack but is widely believed to be behind the hit. Haniyeh is one of the masterminds behinds the Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7 in which over 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage.

The Israeli hacker group, "We Red Evils Original", took responsibility for reported WiFi outages in Iran, according to Israeli media on Thursday night.

Shortly before reports in Iran, the group posted a message on their Telegram saying, 'In the coming minutes, we will attack internet systems and providers in Iran. A severe blow is on the way.'

The Post found many comments in Iran from users saying they had heard the internet was down in parts of the country and that there were internet blackouts in certain parts of Tehran.

WeRedEvils has been operating in a non-official capacity since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war.

This is not the first time the group has reportedly hacked foreign countries. In October 2023, the group claimed to have hacked into the main project management system for oil infrastructure in Iran.

Illustrative image of a hacker. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

"We managed to get our hands on vital and sensitive software that we will not go into detail about here, we are sure that Iran already understands the extent of the damage it currently has. As we know and have seen in the past such rigs and reactors in certain cases can cause mass destruction in the event of internal leaks or overheating," the group wrote on its Telegram channel.

Other claims of success

In November, the hackers claimed to have successfully blocked all of the Hadid family members from their WhatsApp accounts, providing screenshots and contact details as proof, they announced on their Telegram.

According to X reports, they claimed to have cut off the internet in Yemen in early November in retaliation for Houthi missile launches. The Internet Observatory Netblocks corroborated it at the time.

For years, Israel and Iran have been preparing for the moment when the two adversaries will enter a direct conflict. Sworn enemies, the armies of both countries have trained for such a scenario. The twin assassinations of two prominent anti-Israeli terrorist leaders just hours apart earlier this week have brought this scenario the closest it has ever been before.

Both leaders, Fuad Shukur of the Lebanese-based Hezbollah and Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, were killed less than 12 hours apart. Israel took responsibility for Shukur’s death in Beirut and has not done so for Haniyeh but is likely believed to be behind the killing which took place on Iranian soil.

Iran’s leadership immediately vowed to take revenge.

Tensions have been mounting since. Hours after the assassination, airlines began canceling their flights to both Israel and Lebanon. Foreign governments are urging their citizens to leave the region immediately.

Iranians hold posters of assassinated Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh during his funeral procession, in Tehran, Iran, August 1, 2024. (credit: MAJID ASGARIPOUR/WANA (WEST ASIA NEWS AGENCY) VIA REUTERS)

Israel has been fighting a war against Hamas for almost 10 months, since the group carried out a surprise attack against the Jewish state on October 7. Immediately after, Iran’s other proxies join the offensive on Israel. It has since been under attack from Hezbollah on its border with Lebanon, Houthi rebels in Yemen, Iranian-backed Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria together growing unrest in the Palestinian-controlled territories of the West Bank. All of these are instigated by Iran which has been funding and training these groups for decades, grooming them for the day Tehran will launch an all-out attack on Israel.

“Since the beginning of the war, I have made it clear that we are in a fight against Iran's axis of evil. This is an existential war against a stranglehold of terrorist armies and missiles that Iran would like to tighten around our neck,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a briefing held Wednesday from the military headquarters in Tel Aviv. “Challenging days are before us. Since the attack in Beirut, we have heard threats from all sides. We are prepared for any scenario, and we will stand united and determined against any threat. Israel will exact a very heavy price for aggression against us from whatever quarter.”

The army Home Front Command, in charge of outlining defense directives for civilians, has yet to change its guidelines encouraging Israelis to maintain their routines.

“Iran has a wide range of options for their retaliation,” said Brig. Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, from Misgav Institute for National Security and former head of the Research Division in Israeli military intelligence. “All the sides understand that the chances of this conflict to deteriorate into a full-scale regional war are not small, despite everyone saying they have no interest in this.”

Israel and Iran have been engaged in a shadow war against each other. Israel’s military is believed to be behind hundreds of airstrikes against Iranian targets in the Middle East, in addition to cyberattacks against major infrastructure in the Islamic Republic. Iran is believed to be behind attacks against Israeli-operated oil tankers, attempts to abduct and kill Israelis in countries like Cyprus and Turkey in recent months and the steady supply of weapons to its proxies.

The shadow war transformed earlier this year in April, when Iran launched an unprecedented direct attack on Israel. Firing more than 300 missiles and suicide drones at the country, it was a departure from its doctrine of indirectly attacking Israel through its many proxies situated on the borders of the Jewish state. Iran’s assault was in retaliation for an Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate in Syria. It was the closest the two countries have been to a direct confrontation after decades of tensions and accusations.

“This marked a new phase in the conflict between Israel and Iran with the direct attack on Israel from Iranian soil,” Dr. Raz Zimmt, an expert on Iran, from the Alliance Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University told The Media Line. “From the minute this option was added to the toolbox of responses, it is much easier to use again.”

Bracing for an Iranian attack

Israelis are now bracing themselves for an Iranian attack which could then result in a larger regional conflict.

According to Zimmt, the chance of Iran not responding with an attack is slim.

“The big question is what the ramifications of such an attack will be and if, similar to April, it will be contained in a minor way,” he added. “If Israel will be dragged into a wider conflict, the more substantive threat is from Hezbollah, but a multi-front confrontation is definitely on the agenda.”

Iran’s spring attack on Israel was largely thwarted by the Israeli military, together with a regional coalition including American and British forces. Iran has the ability to strike again and will likely do so, aiming to yield a better result than the previous attempt.

“This time we might see a joint attack from Iran with other proxies,” said Zimmt. “Iran will likely use UAVs and cruise missiles but will likely do so from a wider geographic area than it did in April when Iran launched its attack from the same area.”

“If Israel is attacked, we certainly will help defend Israel,” US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Wednesday. “You saw us do that in April, you can expect to see us do that again.”

Israel’s ability to thwart the previous Iranian attack was also due to the fact that it was an isolated Iranian attack that did not involve any other actors, allowing Israel to focus on one threat.

Adding to the threats are the Houthi rebels, who have yet to retaliate for Israel’s strike against its main lifeline, the port of Hodeida, last month.

While Iran is considered Israel’s archenemy, Hezbollah is viewed by Israel as its most formidable and immediate threat. After months of contained exchanges of fire between Israel and Hezbollah, this could be the tipping point.

Defense analysts estimate Hezbollah has accumulated around 150,000 rockets, all with Iranian assistance. The terrorist organization is also believed to have improved its precision missile abilities and has thousands of highly trained operatives ready to attack Israel.

The multilayered Israeli air defense systems, considered to be highly sophisticated, will likely have difficulty fending off barrages of thousands of rockets every day in the event of a war with Hezbollah.

“Israel has invested years in developing abilities in systems that are meant to deal with such a reality,” Kuperwasser told The Media Line. “No country is ever prepared for every single extreme scenario.”

In recent years, Israel’s air force is believed to be behind hundreds of strikes that have targeted Hezbollah’s weapons. Yet success appears to be limited and the huge arsenal of rockets is also widely intact as demonstrated in the last 10 months. This effort has been part of an Israeli-Iranian shadow war that has been going on in the past two decades. In addition to Israeli airstrike, the Jewish state is believed to be behind cyberattacks against major infrastructure in the Islamic Republic. Iran is believed to be behind attacks against Israeli-operated oil tankers, attempts to abduct and kill Israelis in countries like Cyprus and Turkey in recent months and the steady supply of weapons to its proxies.

In the more distant past, Iran has exacted its retribution on Israeli targets abroad. Its proxies have perpetrated attacks against Israeli embassies and Jewish targets abroad, killing many. Those proxies have also targeted American soldiers around the world.

Israel has not acknowledged its role in the death of Haniyeh, distancing itself from the operation it is widely believed to be behind. Iran, which holds Israel responsible, will have a tough time swallowing its pride in light of such an attack in its capital on the day of the swearing in of its new president.

“The Iranian willingness to take risks, at the price of an escalation, is higher than before. Not only because of the latest events but because of the feeling of increased confidence and identification of Israeli weakness and therefore things that in the past seemed impossible have now become more and more of an option.”

After 10 months of war, Israel is on edge. The military stretched out to its maximum capabilities, the negotiations on the release of the hostages being held by Hamas endless, and the fighting in Gaza still ongoing.

“The current tensions should not divert Israel’s attention from its main effort to subdue Hamas and create the conditions to release the hostages in a way that will provide a response to Israel’s security and not destabilize it,” Kuperwasser summarized. “Afterward, Hezbollah and Iran should be taken care of.”

This is not just in Israel’s control and the coming hours and days will determine whether Israel can operate in that order or not.

For decades, Israel’s leaders have sent a message to their enemies, loud and clear: Hit us, and you will die.

It was true when Israel went after the terrorists who directed and carried out the attack that killed 11 Israelis at the 1972 Munich Olympics. And it is now true of the Hamas terrorists who directed and carried out the Oct. 7 massacre.

Just 10 days after Hamas’ invasion, Mark Regev, then a government spokesman, made it explicit.

“Our position is anyone in the Hamas command structure who was responsible for the Oct. 7 massacre will pay a price,” Regev said at a Tel Aviv press conference. “We will reach them, and justice will be done.”

Early Wednesday morning, Israel reached Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, in Tehran — the most senior Hamas official killed in the war. Israel has not claimed responsibility for the hit, but Hamas and Iran have blamed Israel. Earlier in July, Israel killed another top Hamas official: the commander of its military wing, Mohammed Deif.

An Iranian woman holds a poster of senior Iranian military commander General Qassem Soleimani during a rally marking Quds Day and the funeral of members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who were killed in a suspected Israeli airstrike on the Iranian embassy complex in the Syrian capital Dam (credit: MAJID ASGARIPOUR/WANA (WEST ASIA NEWS AGENCY) VIA REUTERS)

The United States has also carried out targeted assassinations — notably of Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden in 2011 and top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in 2020 — but for Israel, they have become a commonplace tool. It has killed at least 13 enemy officials outside the borders of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank in the last year, and dozens over the decades.

Exactly what such killings — which Israel’s top court ruled in 2006 are legal — accomplish isn’t clear cut, analysts say.

Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think tank, said that sometimes, the assassinations kill someone whose knowledge is essential to a group’s operations — setting their cause back in a concrete way, as Israel did by killing weapons scientists in Egypt, Iraq and Iran over the decades.

But other times, the victim is quickly replaced.

“I believe very strongly that some targeted assassinations make more sense and some make no sense at all,”  he said.

He cited the example of Fuad Shukr, the Hezbollah military commander whom Israel acknowledged killing in Beirut the day before Haniyeh was killed. Shukr is believed to be behind the missile strike last weekend on the Golan Heights town of Majdal Shams, which killed 12 youths.

“[The assassination of] Shukr will be effective because it upsets their whole operational structure, because it affects the command and might inhibit further attacks in that sense in the longer term,” Levitt said. “They’ve taken out someone who just played a very central role in a lot of different things. And he was the boss for a lot of sensitive things.”

Haniyeh’s killing, by contrast, is “just supposed to say we’re holding people accountable for those who are involved in Oct. 7,” he said.

An analysis of assassinations

Most scholarly assessments of targeted killings or government-directed assassinations have focused on their legality and morality. The handful that have focused on efficacy are inconclusive. A 2017 analysis by an Indiana University professor concluded that US targeted killings had “negligible effects on countering jihadist terrorism.”

Israel’s history of killing high-level Hamas operatives did not prevent the terror group from being able to carry out the Oct. 7 attack. And some of its past targeted killings are understood to have likely strengthened the group, such as the 2004 assassination of Sheikh Yassin in Gaza, which is seen as having removed an obstacle to Hamas’ alliance with Iran.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the outset of the current war that its main aim was the dismantling of Hamas. That includes the violent removal of Hamas’s leaders, said Michael Makovsky, CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, a conservative think tank. By killing Haniyeh and Deif, Israel is making good on that threat.

“They said they would go ahead and kill Hamas leaders. That was clear,” Makovsky said. “You know they were going to kill these guys. So they had an opportunity.”

An added plus, Makovsky said, is that by breaching Iran’s vaunted security apparatus, Israel dealt a blow to Iran’s deterrence.

“They embarrassed the Iranians and there’s no downside, because it’s not as if it’s going to hurt their relations with the Iranians,” he said.

Levitt, who previously worked in US intelligence, noted that Shukr and Haniyeh were key interlocutors between their organizations and Iran. Removing them would at least for a time inhibit Iran’s closeness to its proxies.

“Iran has now lost two of its key personnel,” he said. “It was comfortable working with Shukr and Ismail Haniyeh.”

But while the killings of Haniyeh and Shukr may hinder attacks for now, they won’t dent Israel’s conflicts with the terror groups in the long run, said Levitt, whose think tank has close relationships with Israeli and other Middle Eastern officials.

“Long term, even short term, neither of them is going to undermine Hezbollah, or Hamas,” Levitt said about the assassinations. Though for Israel, he added, “They’re trying to change something in the moment.”

Human rights groups have raised objections to targeted killings, saying they are gross violations of due process and endanger civilians. Agnes Callamard, now secretary general of Amnesty International, noted such concerns in 2020 after the killing of an Iranian nuclear scientist that was attributed to Israel.

“State[s] engaged in acts of aggression resulting in deprivation of life violate ipso facto their treaty obligations,” she tweeted. “States that fail to take reasonable measures to settle their int’l disputes by peaceful mean[s] fail to comply with their positive obligation to ensure the right to life.”

US governments routinely criticized Israel for targeted killings until the mid-2000s.

“This heavy-handed action does not contribute to peace,” Ari Fleischer, President George W. Bush’s spokesperson, said in 2002 after the targeted assassination of a Hamas commander in Gaza. “This message will be conveyed to Israeli authorities, and the United States regrets the loss of life.”

Later, the Bush administration adopted the practice — and it has been continued by subsequent US governments.

Some assassinations of obscure figures are meant to achieve a goal rather than make a point, said Harel Chorev, a senior researcher at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University. He pointed to the 2010 assassination in the United Arab Emirates of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, an otherwise unknown Hamas operative responsible for smuggling weapons into the Gaza Strip. Israel did not publicly acknowledge a role in the killing.

“He was a nobody,” he said. ”But then we found out that he was a major pipeline to Iran: He was channeling the money and a major player in the connection between Iran and Hamas.”

Chorev likened the people ordering assassinations to snipers, who are habituated to taking out the most senior officers in their sightline, under the logic that eliminating the person giving orders is the most effective way of hobbling the enemy on the battlefield.

“Nobody will ask, ‘Hey, why did you do this?’” of snipers in battle, he said. “It would be obvious that these are the right targets that snipers should search for.”

Another salutary effect of the Haniyah killing, analysts say, is on an Israeli population devastated by 10 months of war, and the massive governmental, military and intelligence failure that took place on Oct. 7.

“It’s a huge morale boost for Israelis and reasserts confidence in Israeli intelligence and military capabilities,” said David Halperin, the CEO of the Israel Policy Forum, a group that favors the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Shira Efron, IPF’s senior director of policy research, said the assassinations send a message — but one that has an expiration date.

“They sent a message, that we have intelligence, that we have operational capabilities, that your lives are broken, that you’re very permeable,” she said.

“But in the long term, and I’m sorry to say this, it may take more time or less time, but we eventually see that leaders or commanders in those organizations seem to be quite fungible. They’re always replaced,” Efron added. “They don’t say, ‘Oh, you know what, we got it. We’re going to lay our arms down.’ The next person, the next guy — it’s always a guy — is going to be on the same page as the last guy.”

 An Australian government review into the death of World Central Kitchen aid workers found Israeli Defence Force strikes on their vehicles were the result of serious failures to follow procedures, foreign minister Penny Wong said on Friday.