Burning Olive Branches
The assassination of Ismail Haniyeh was part of a long pattern of Israel killing Hamas leaders when they offer cease-fires.
Portrait of assassinated Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh. (Ahmad Hmad al-Rubye / AFP via Getty Images)
Since Israel assassinated Hamas’s top leader and negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran on July 31, mediators from the United States, Egypt, and Qatar have attempted to reconstruct a cease-fire agreement that stands a chance of succeeding. Hamas, now led by Yahya Sinwar, has signaled an interest in hearing any serious proposals, but has not participated directly and remains skeptical of Israel’s sincerity. Israel, on the other hand, has pushed an agreement further out of reach by issuing a series of new demands, including sustained control over Gaza’s southern border with Egypt.
That Benjamin Netanyahu is desperate to escalate the conflict was already evident in the pattern of negotiations while Haniyeh was alive. In early February, Hamas proposed a phased drawdown in the fighting, which was itself a slight modification to an earlier plan drafted by officials from Israel, Egypt, and the United States. The plan would have had Hamas trade Israeli hostages who are women or children for Palestinian women and children held in Israeli jails, followed by the return of all remaining hostages alongside a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza. Until last month, some version of this offer remained on the table, but Netanyahu rejected it time and time again.
In every case, Israel has insisted that there must be no permanent cease-fire, and the war will go on “until all its objectives are achieved, including the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities.” As multiple observers have noted, Israel cannot at once be interested in a cease-fire deal yet at the same time insist upon eliminating Hamas in Gaza altogether. Hamas, likewise, cannot be expected to negotiate itself out of existence.
The American press has largely failed to convey this pattern. Rather, headlines breathlessly echoed the State Department’s claims that despite the devastation in Gaza, Hamas has been rejecting Israel’s offers. In fact, Israel never offered more than a very short-term cease-fire, whereas Hamas sought long-term reassurances. In what could have been an important step forward, last month Haniyeh went so far as to accept a temporary deal. But Netanyahu reneged on his own commitment, stating again that Israel would continue fighting until all “objectives of the war have been achieved.” Less than three weeks after this exchange, Haniyeh would be killed.
Even as the press cools somewhat on Netanyahu, a key fact remains absent from the narrative, which is that Haniyeh’s death fits into a long-running pattern of Israel assassinating the very same Hamas leaders with whom it should have been negotiating.
The broader context of this pattern is the politically impossible position that Hamas has inhabited since its founding. On one hand, in order to retain its credibility as a resistance movement, it has been necessary to remain a militant organization. Yet on the other, it has also sought international recognition as a representative of the Palestinian people — which has been denied so long as it sustained its militant tactics and refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist in principle. Indeed, since the signing of the Oslo Accords in the mid-’90s, Israel has vilified Hamas in ways that have precluded the latter’s participation within the Palestinian Authority (PA) and alienated it from the international community. This pattern has been especially evident since Hamas’s victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections, after which they were pushed out of office by Israel and US-backed Fatah militias. Since then, reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah has been obstructed by Israel, which retains control over the PA’s purse strings.
In this context, Israeli assassinations have targeted Hamas’s dovish leaders at least as much as the hawkish ones. It is often claimed that part of the reason for the continual breakdown of peace talks between Hamas and Israel is that the former is unwilling to accept any form of settlement. But on a number of occasions going back as far as 1988, Hamas had offered long-term cease-fires on the condition of a return to pre-1967 borders. In many cases, even unilateral cease-fires by Hamas have been disrupted by Israeli attacks. In others, Hamas leaders who offered cease-fires were themselves assassinated by Israel shortly thereafter.
A Litany of Betrayals and Provocations
The history of cease-fire attempts and failures is extensive, but a few key moments encapsulate the pattern of Israeli sabotage. First, amid the Second Intifada, in July 2002, Hamas leader Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi agreed to a cease-fire proposed by a British emissary. Only hours later, Israel bombed the house of one of Hamas’s leaders in Gaza, Salah Shehada, killing him and more than a dozen others.
In June the following year, al-Rantisi offered another unilateral cease-fire, largely thanks to the urging of Ismail Abu Shanab, one of Hamas’s founding members in Gaza who had consistently advocated for a long-term truce with Israel. Mahmoud Abbas had recently been appointed prime minister of the PA, and the Hamas leadership accepted that ending hostilities was necessary to give him the opportunity to negotiate with Israel.
But Israel ignored the offer, and its soldiers continued to assassinate members of Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza throughout July. On August 19, a member of Hamas perpetrated a suicide bombing in West Jerusalem in violation of leadership’s orders; still, Hamas reluctantly claimed responsibility. Two days later, an Israeli helicopter fired a volley of missiles into Abu Shanab’s car, killing him and two companions. Israel gave no clear rationale for Abu Shanab’s targeting, with one officer saying that it was “because he was the only one available.”
Hamas’s founder and spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, encountered the same pattern of Israeli belligerence. In 1997, following his release from Israeli prison, Yassin offered Israel a cease-fire in exchange for an end to attacks on civilians, land confiscations, and the release of Palestinian prisoners. Under Yassin’s leadership, Hamas’s militant wing offered a similar truce in 1999, which like the first was ignored. In September 2003, shortly after the EU designated Hamas a terrorist organization, Israel attempted to kill Yassin in an aerial strike on a building he was visiting in Gaza City.
In November of that year, he suggested that unilateral cease-fires were an ineffective strategy with the Israelis, and four months later, in March 2004, he was assassinated in an air strike ordered by Ariel Sharon. The following month, al-Rantisi, Yassin’s successor, was also assassinated.
In February 2005, Hamas offered another cease-fire. Following the death of Yasser Arafat, possibly of poisoning, the Palestinian factions regrouped to organize new elections. Ahead of these elections, Hamas, Fatah, and ten other factions signed the Cairo Declaration, which called for a cessation of hostilities in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders.
The patchiness of this attempted cease-fire would exemplify the structural problems at the heart of Palestinian de-escalation: Israel continued to kill and arrest civilians in the ensuing months and sporadic Palestinian retaliation beyond the control of Fatah or Hamas would be met with unrestrained punishment by Israel. On July 14, militants in Islamic Jihad fired a number of rockets from northern Gaza across the border, killing an Israeli woman in a nearby village. Israel responded with missile strikes that killed seven members of Hamas, and arrested dozens of others. In the brief flare-up that ensued, Hamas militants fired some munitions back at the Israelis, while its leaders pointed out that the Cairo Declaration did not involve the complete renunciation of self-defense.
This flare-up was brief, and the attacks subsided in the subsequent weeks as Israel dismantled its settlements in Gaza and the PA assumed the role of civil administration there. But Israel continued its own acts of aggression, in particular through a campaign of civil detentions. By the time of the election in January 2006, Israel had imprisoned 450 of Hamas’s most politically active members, the majority of whom were never charged with a crime. When Hamas won those elections, taking 76 of 132 seats in what international agencies agreed was a fair vote, many of its candidates were elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) while still in Israeli prisons.
Israel swiftly imposed an economic blockade on the PA by requisitioning the PA’s own tax revenues, generating a fiscal crisis in the West Bank and Gaza that brought major spikes in poverty and unemployment. In March, Haniyeh, now prime minister of the PLC, wrote an op-ed for the Guardian in which he stressed that Hamas had been observing a unilateral truce for over a year without reciprocity from Israel, and that the group’s demands were directly in line with international law.
“No plan will ever work without a guarantee, in exchange for an end to hostilities by both sides, of a total Israeli withdrawal from all the land occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem; the release of all our prisoners; the removal of all settlers from all settlements; and recognition of the right of all refugees to return,” he wrote. “Though we are the victims, we offer our hands in peace, but only a peace that is based on justice.”
These messages again went ignored. In June 2006, Israel arbitrarily bombed a beach in northern Gaza, killing a family picnicking there. In response, Hamas finally ended its cease-fire, conducting a cross-border raid in which they captured Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit. Later that month, Israeli soldiers moved into the West Bank to arrest sixty-four high-ranking members of the party, including eight members of Haniyeh’s cabinet and twenty-four members of the legislative council. Though these officials were moderating forces in the party, the rationale given for their arrests was merely that they were members of a terrorist organization. Coupled with the rising aggression of US-backed Fatah militias, these actions effectively forced Hamas out of the PA, setting the stage for their takeover of Gaza in June 2007.
Israel swiftly implemented a blockade on Gaza, yet by the end of 2007, Hamas and Israel had established an uneasy cease-fire. When the agreement expired in December 2008, Hamas offered to renew it in exchange for an end to the blockade; the same day, Israel sent a clear message of rejection when it killed three militants near the Gaza border. This swiftly erupted into a war that would kill 1,398 Palestinians and nine Israelis.
In the aftermath of the 2008–9 war, Israel and Hamas established another delicate cease-fire, which in Gaza was enforced by the militant leader Ahmed Jabari. Over the next several months, Jabari would negotiate with Israel for the release of Shalit. These discussions, which were mediated by an independent Israeli peace activist named Gershon Baskin, were by far the most successful negotiations ever between the two sides, and culminated in October 2011 with the exchange of Shalit for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners.
In the following year, according to Baskin, Jabari felt more optimistic about the possibility of a negotiated cease-fire with Israel and signaled his interest achieving one. During this period, he reportedly steered Hamas’s militants away from rocket attacks and communicated with Baskin to gauge Israeli interest in de-escalation. In 2012, Baskin delivered Israel’s Ministry of Defense with a draft cease-fire protocol from Jabari. The ministry, at that time under former prime minister Ehud Barak, feigned interest in the proposal, and on November 14 sent Jabari a written response. Yet later that same day, Israel killed Jabari in a targeted air strike, footage of which is still brandished on the Israel Defense Forces’ YouTube channel. This, in turn, kicked off its own brief flare-up of Gazan rocket fire and Israeli aerial attacks.
Precluding Palestinian Unity
From Hamas’s perspective, achieving a long-term cease-fire would be one key step out of their enforced isolation; the other would be reunification with the PA. Neither of these on their own would amount to the political gains they seek.
Since 2006, Israel has stymied any Palestinian coalition efforts, and has been especially hostile toward the reunification of Hamas and Fatah. In 2011, the two groups announced their intentions to reunite within the PA. In response, Netanyahu repeated the 2006 strategy by withholding the PA’s tax and customs revenues, insisting that the “PA must choose either peace with Israel or peace with Hamas. There is no possibility for peace with both.” Similar events would occur in 2014 and again in 2017, though in the latter instance the deal also collapsed because Fatah had adopted Israel’s long-standing demand for Hamas’s demilitarization. These actions have been integral to Netanyahu’s strategy of enforcing division between the factions, so that he can claim Israel has no partner for peace.
Since October 7, Hamas’s efforts toward both a cease-fire and reconciliation with the other Palestinian factions have been preludes to Israel’s two most provocative assassinations. The first of these was the assassination of Salah al-Arouri, Hamas’s deputy chairman, who was killed in a targeted missile strike in South Beirut on January 2. In the days prior, Egypt and Qatar had proposed a poorly formulated de-escalation strategy, which was rejected by both Hamas and Israel.
Hamas’s leaders in Beirut then met with four other Palestinian factions and jointly released a statement reaffirming their demands for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, the resumption of humanitarian aid, their rejection of a Western-imposed government in Gaza, and their commitment to a national unity government. It can hardly be viewed as coincidental that al-Arouri, Hamas’s highest ranking official in Beirut, was targeted for assassination only five days later.
The second major assassination of course was Haniyeh. The general view that has been offered to explain the timing of his killing is that he was in Iran rather than Qatar, and Israel felt it needed to seize the opportunity. But two other factors cannot be overlooked. The first is that Haniyeh had just signaled his willingness to accept even Israel’s contradictory terms for a temporary cease-fire. As Netanyahu ran out of excuses for avoiding a cease-fire, his position with international mediators, including the United States, was becoming increasingly untenable. (Joe Biden, for what it’s worth, has privately been calling Netanyahu an “asshole” for undermining cease-fire talks.) In that regard, Netanyahu likely ordered Haniyeh’s killing to destroy Hamas’s willingness to negotiate, at least for a time.
The second key development in the days leading up to Haniyeh’s assassination came when diplomats from Hamas and Fatah signed an agreement establishing the basis for an “interim national reconciliation government” in Beijing — a deal that may now be imperiled with Haniyeh’s death and the transfer of leadership to Sinwar, who remains underground in Gaza and lacks Haniyeh’s deep relationships in Ramallah.
An Impossible Position
The Israeli government is not interested in either a two-state solution or a single binational state; it seeks Jewish control over the whole area of Mandate Palestine. This is stated plainly in the Likud party’s foundational platform and was reaffirmed as a tenet of Netanyahu’s coalition government.
In pursuit of this goal, Israel has trampled Palestinians’ human rights for decades and put their political leaders in an impossible position. The Fatah establishment’s renunciation of militancy and adherence to Oslo — a “Palestinian Versailles,” as Edward Said described it — has largely led to its neutralization and co-optation by Israel. Israel has stringently punished nonviolent resistance as well. In this respect, imprisonment has been an essential tactic against the Palestinian leaders with whom Israel could have fostered dialogue — not just the moderate members of Hamas arrested amid the 2006 election but dozens of others, notably the popular Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti.
Israel has also systematically created spiraling cycles of violence by preventing Palestinian unification, thus rendering it impossible for either the PA or Hamas to enforce cease-fires across all factions. Meanwhile, the Israeli military commits daily acts of aggression, and responds to attacks by any rogue Palestinians with provocative assaults on Hamas targets. In this context, unilateral cease-fires have often been unproductive from the Palestinian perspective.
This history reveals another plain fact: that virtually every olive branch offered by Hamas has been burnt by Israel. It is true, of course, that Israel has assassinated many Hamas leaders as acts of retribution for the latter’s attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians. Nonetheless, in light of the pattern we have seen in the targeted killings of Shehada, Abu Shanab, Yassin, al-Rantisi, Jabari, and Haniyeh, it may be fair to say that the most statistically dangerous thing for a Hamas leader to do is offer a cease-fire deal to Israel.
None of the above suggests that Hamas is beyond reproach. If international law applies to the conflict, and I believe it must, then no one who wishes for a just solution should be afraid to confront the fact that Hamas has committed serious crimes since its founding. But any honest application of the law must also recognize the material context in which Israel has punished nonviolence and de-escalation just as much as militancy.