GAZA, (PIC)
From the highest political and military levels in Israel, an announcement was issued regarding the execution of an assassination operation targeting one of the Palestinian resistance leaders in the Gaza Strip on Friday in a step that reflects a qualitative escalation in the policy of assassinations and the expansion of its scope of use within the management of the ongoing confrontation.
The Israeli announcement was accompanied by the claim of assassinating the commander of the Al-Qassam Brigades, Izz al-Din al-Haddad, without any confirmation issued by independent or official Palestinian sources so far, which expresses a noticeable transformation in the policy of assassinations and the pattern of Israeli engagement with it.
On October 1, 1973, a secret unit assassinated the Palestinian leader Mahmoud al-Hamshari in Paris with an explosive device planted in his phone. That was one of dozens of secret operations carried out by Israeli intelligence agencies 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 turn half a century later into an industrial system that relies on artificial intelligence, and a savage killing machine, targeting banks of targets that include tens of thousands of names, and authorizing the killing of entire families in their homes.
Today, the matter is no longer limited to the occupation forces carrying out field assassination operations, but it has rather become accompanied by a direct political and media announcement about them, in an attempt to establish deterrence messages and reshape the equations of engagement, despite the legal and human rights criticism this raises regarding the legitimacy of assassinations outside the judicial framework, especially in areas crowded with civilian populations.
This report tracks the path of this historical transformation: how Israeli assassinations shifted from limited secret operations to an announced and regulated security doctrine, and a tool among the tools of genocide.
From secret operations to the announced doctrine of assassination
The roots of the Israeli assassination policy extend back to before the establishment of the Israeli occupation entity, when armed Zionist organizations, such as the Haganah and the Irgun, relied on retaliatory operations and physical liquidation in confronting opponents.
However, the actual establishment of the institutional assassination system came when David Ben-Gurion created the Israeli intelligence apparatus in June 1948, a few weeks after the announcement of the occupation entity.
Ben-Gurion described this apparatus as the pillar of survival: to keep the reserve army in their homes, rebuild military power, and foresee threats before they occur.
From 1948 until today, Israel has used the policy of targeted assassinations to serve its interests, and the volume of these operations rose in parallel with the intensification of confrontations.
Following the Munich attack in 1972, Israel launched the so-called Operation “Wrath of God”, and sent agents to Europe and the Middle East to assassinate leaders of the Black September Organization, but the operations used to disappear or decline at times, as happened following the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993.
From secret assassination to regulated doctrine
After the state of resistance crystallized at the end of the first Intifada, the occupation forces resorted to the policy of assassinations against those who were known at the time as chased resistance fighters, and most of the assassinations came within the framework of clashes with the resistance fighters.
The second Intifada in 2000 formed the decisive turning point, as in December of that year, the Israeli occupation assassinated the Palestinian activist Thabit Thabit in Ramallah, so the incident ignited a legal and political debate inside Israel, and resulted in an institutional decision: that assassinations shift from semi-secret operations to an official announced policy under the term “targeted frustration”.
The Israeli Supreme Court approved in 2006 the legitimacy of this policy in principle, with the requirement of procedural guarantees that were rarely applied on the ground.
The occupation forces’ assassinations were not limited to military and security personnel, but targeted political leaders, as they attempted to assassinate Khaled Mishaal 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 the Hamas leader Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi on April 17, 2004, leading to the assassination of the head of the political bureau of Hamas, Ismail Haneyya, in Tehran in 2024, preceded and followed by dozens of political and military leaders, likewise the assassination operations affected dozens of leaders from the axis of resistance, Iranian nuclear scientists, Hezbollah leaders, and officials in the civil government in Gaza.
Expansion of target banks during the Gaza war: Civilians in the line of fire
Israel’s extensive and genocidal aggression on Gaza after October 7, 2023, came to reveal an unprecedented transformation in the volume of the bank of targets. According to investigations published by +972 Magazine and Human Rights Watch, Israel developed an artificial intelligence system named “Lavender”, which counted up to 37,000 Palestinians as potential targets.
The system was not limited to senior military commanders, but extended to include lower-ranking elements, and even civil employees in government apparatuses in Gaza, and errors frequently occurred as a result of this system, and the lives of citizens became subject to the assessments and tests of artificial intelligence.
Leaked official Israeli figures reveal the picture with shocking clarity: a secret military database leaked in May 2025 showed that only 17% of 53,000 martyrs in Gaza were fighters, while 83% were civilians.
Entire families were not spared from this system; as Israeli intelligence officers revealed that the “Where’s Daddy?” system was tracking targets even in their homes, to direct strikes at them while they were among their children. The same sources admitted that military policy authorized the killing of between 15 and 20 civilians in each strike targeting a low-ranking element, 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 Mohammed Deif.
Journalists, doctors, and academics: Expanding the targeting
The case of journalists presents a stark example of the expansion of targeting outside the scope of fighters. The Government Media Office documented the martyrdom of 262 Palestinian journalists at the hands of Israeli forces since the start of the aggression; a number that exceeds what any country has killed. In 2025, Israel was responsible for two-thirds of the incidents of killing journalists globally.
In more than one documented incident, Israeli strikes targeted journalists wearing press vests or working in sites known to the occupation army.
The Israeli forces admitted to assassinating a number of journalists deliberately, including Ismail al-Ghoul, Anas al-Sharif, Houssam Shabat, Hassan Aslih, and Mohammed Wishah, under the pretext of their affiliation with the Hamas Movement, which was categorically denied by their professional bodies and media channels.
Assassinations between security discourse and crimes of international law
International humanitarian law makes a strict distinction between what is considered legitimate operations in the state of war and what is considered extrajudicial killing.
Customary international law has determined that legitimate attacks only target those who actually participate in hostilities, and that they be proportionate to the desired military objective. The Geneva Conventions also require directing serious investigations into allegations of committing war crimes, and respecting the immunity of journalists, doctors, and humanitarian workers.
As for what relates to “extrajudicial targeting”, UN Special Rapporteurs described it as arbitrary killing, meaning 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 Six of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Limits of the argument of self-defense
Israel has consistently invoked Article 51 of the UN Charter and the principle of self-defense to justify its military operations, but this legal framework faced a set of fundamental objections raised by international law experts:
First, the principle of necessity: no military operation gains its legitimacy unless it is the only available means, and that the danger is imminent and looming. As for assassinations that target suspected persons in their homes in the middle of their families, they strip away this characteristic.
Second, the principle of proportionality: even in cases of legitimate war, a strike is prohibited if the collateral damage to civilians is disproportionate to the desired military advantage. Israeli sources explicitly admit that the policy authorized the death of twenty civilians for the sake of liquidating a low-ranking gunman.
Third, the principle of distinction: international law requires precise distinction between fighters and civilians. However, the artificial intelligence system operates with an error rate admitted by the Israeli army itself, as its percentage reaches ten percent, while officers sufficed with “20 seconds” to verify the correctness of the targeting before executing it.
Above all that, human rights experts confirm that the principle of self-defense is not correct in the case of Israel, because it is basically an occupying aggressing state, and there is no right of self-defense for the aggressor.
Artificial intelligence and the accountability crisis
The use of artificial intelligence in generating lists of targets forms a real crisis before the international legal accountability system.
Legal researchers track the phenomenon of what is called the “responsibility gap”: when military officials invoke the impossibility of human oversight over the algorithm’s decisions, so determining the one responsible for each killed person becomes a difficult matter in subsequent accountability stages.
However, this position faces a definitive rejection by international law experts, who confirm that using the artificial intelligence system and determining its work mechanisms and decision-making powers remains a human decision par excellence, and that responsibility ensues from these decisions inevitably.
The matter increases in danger when investigations reveal that Israeli officers were not employing artificial intelligence as an assisting tool in some decisions, but almost as a sole reference that they pass in a routine format and its recommendations.
In this context, Ben Saul, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights, said that if the reports received about Israel’s use of artificial intelligence are correct, then many of the Israeli strikes in Gaza amount to the level of a war crime.
The digital technology rights organization Access Now confirms that Israel’s use of artificial intelligence in Gaza embodies the peak of tracked patterns of monitoring facial data and predictive policing tools. These systems reduce humans to statistical points and data. In Gaza, the consequences of that 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, for decades, patterns of targeting that lacks legal guarantees. The pace of international investigations escalated with the outbreak of the genocide on Gaza.
In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued two arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Army Minister Yoav Gallant. The International Court of Justice had issued in January 2024 provisional measures binding Israel to stop any procedure that may amount to the level of genocide.
Experts warn that Israel’s impunity, thanks to the political support of some of its allies, involves repercussions that extend far beyond the Palestinian case. Tom Dannenbaum, professor of international law at Stanford University, says that international institutions face an existential crisis: if they abandon compliance guarantees under the weight of political pressures, they lose the legitimacy from which they derive their moral and legal authority.
Accountability between right and disruption
Israeli assassinations started with limited secret operations subject to denial, and quickly turned into an announced security doctrine, then jumped to an industrial system that adopts artificial intelligence and produces tens of thousands of killing orders in record time.
In each of these stages, the Israeli security discourse maintained its vocabulary and justificatory equations, while the operations expanded and their scope widened to reach civilians who have no connection to any armed activity.
International law experts and UN rapporteurs agree that the systematic targeting of civilians, and employing mechanisms that produce killing rates with this level of structural imbalance, cannot be justified by any security pretext.
The data that has become available poses the most dangerous question: has assassination shifted from a tool for conflict management to a pillar in a system of total 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 possess the necessary legal tools to look into these files, but what disrupts the path is not the law, but the political will of some parties of the international community that employ their influence as a shield to protect impunity, turning international law from a guarantee to protect civilians into a negotiation card in the hand of the powerful.