Days ago, the Al Qassam Brigades announced the martyrdom of a group of its most prominent leaders, foremost among them Mohammed Sinwar, Chief of Staff, Mohammed Shabana, commander of the Rafah Brigade, Raed Saad, head of the Manufacturing Department and former head of Operations, and Hakam Issa, head of the Weapons and Combat Services Department. This was in addition to the military spokesperson Hudhayfah al Kahlout, long known under the name Abu Ubaydah.
At the same time, Al Qassam revealed the appointment of a new military spokesperson who retained the same nom de guerre, a notable signal of the continuity of the movement’s media function.
The announcement of the occupation’s assassination of this elite group of Al Qassam leaders in separate operations is not the first of its kind since the start of the war on Gaza in October 2023. Similar announcements preceded it, most notably during the truce period, when the martyrdom of several senior leaders was declared, foremost among them the historic commander of the Al Qassam Brigades, Mohammed Deif.
The scope of assassinations also expanded beyond Palestine, beginning with the killing of Saleh al Arouri, deputy head of the political bureau of the Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas, along with several of his companions in the southern suburb of Beirut at the start of 2024. This was followed by the assassination of the movement’s leader Ismail Haniyeh inside a compound designated for senior guests affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in Tehran in mid 2024, then the killing of his successor Yahya Sinwar in Rafah, and finally the bombing of a meeting of the movement’s leaders in Doha in 2025 while they were discussing a US proposal to halt the war.
This sequence of targeted killings came within a systematic Israeli policy aimed at undermining the leadership and organisational structure of Hamas through assassinations that extended beyond the first rank to include mid-level leaders and organisational cadres at various levels.
This approach was accompanied by extensive destruction of the social base in the Gaza Strip, manifested in mass killings that resulted in more than seventy thousand martyrs and around ten thousand missing, in addition to far larger numbers of wounded. This occurred alongside the destruction of the Strip’s infrastructure, within a framework premised on the idea that destroying the supporting environment would automatically be reflected in Hamas’s ability to continue and regenerate.
In light of this, there is a need for a precise assessment of the impact of this unprecedented wave of assassinations on Hamas’s capacity to sustain its military, organisational, and political activity, and on its potential implications for the movement’s orientations and choices. This is particularly pressing as the moment approaches to select a new leader, amid the repercussions of the Al Aqsa Flood war, which extended beyond Gaza to affect the movement’s network of allies and its regional environment.
An American Reference Framework
The analysis presented here draws on methodological literature developed within Western security decision-making institutions, foremost among them a classified study prepared by the US Central Intelligence Agency on what are known as high-value targeting programs, later published through WikiLeaks disclosures.
This study addresses assassinations as focused operations targeting individuals or networks assumed to produce tangible erosion in the effectiveness of armed groups once neutralised. It stresses that the outcomes of such operations are not fixed, but vary according to the nature of the targeted organisation, its degree of centralisation, its leadership structure, and the strategic objective sought by the executing party.
The document, classified as Secret and Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals and intended for internal use, was not prepared for public release. It relied on classified reports from US embassies and intelligence agencies, as well as reports from allied intelligence services.
The study evaluated experiences of targeting armed groups across multiple arenas, from Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, and occupied Palestine, to Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, Chechnya, Libya, Pakistan, Thailand, and Peru, during the period from 1983 to 2009. The use of this study here comes as an analytical framework to understand the limits of leader assassination approaches, their conditions for success, and their factors of failure when applied to the case of Hamas in the current context.
CIA literature shows that assassinations are treated as a functional tool whose impact depends on the context in which they are used. The effectiveness of targeting leaders is linked to the extent to which these operations are integrated into a broader strategy against armed groups, the executing party’s ability to define the desired outcome in advance, its understanding of the internal structure of the targeted organisation, and its coordinated use of military and non-military pressure tools.
Applying this approach to Hamas reveals that Israeli assassination policy seeks to achieve a combination of organisational and psychological objectives. These include weakening the movement’s effectiveness, reducing its mobilisation capacity, pushing it to modify its operational patterns, while simultaneously attempting to project initiative and bolster morale within Israeli society.
Within this framework, targeting operations may produce a degree of disruption when they strike leaders who are difficult to replace or cadres possessing specialised expertise in sensitive fields such as finance or logistics. They also push the organisation to tighten security precautions, reduce communication channels, and adopt more dispersed leadership patterns, which limits operational efficiency.
These studies indicate that the killing of leaders may, in some contexts, lead to a decline in local or external support, as supporters reassess prospects of success, especially when strikes coincide with battlefield or political losses.
This methodological conclusion gains practical meaning when compared with assessments emerging from within the Israeli security establishment itself. Meir Ben Shabbat, former Israeli national security adviser, noted days before the attack on Doha that the liquidation of Hamas’s field leadership in the Gaza Strip did not end the movement’s effectiveness. Rather, it contributed to shifting the centre of gravity to leadership operating abroad, which came to perform functions akin to a political and organisational general staff, managing discourse, mobilising resources, and maintaining regional networks. This explains Israel’s insistence on targeting Hamas leaders outside Palestine.
Ben Shabbat’s assessment directly intersects with the conclusions of reviews of high-value targeting programs, which confirm that assassinations tend to alter the shape of the targeted organisation and redistribute roles more than they dismantle it, especially in cases where decentralised structures, succession planning, and political and social depth exist that allow shocks to be absorbed.
The Effects of Assassinations
The impact of assassinating leaders is formed through a complex interaction between the characteristics of the targeted organisation on one hand and the executing party’s ability to manage targeting within a broader approach on the other. This framework explains the wide variation in assassination outcomes across different cases and provides a necessary entry point for understanding the limits of their effect on Hamas in the current context.
The leadership structure occupies a decisive position in determining the degree of impact. Groups with centralised, personally led structures show greater susceptibility to disruption when leaders are lost, as the absence of the head directly affects decision-making and guidance. The loss of a charismatic leader may open space for internal conflict, competition over legitimacy, fragmentation of decision-making centres, or a reordering of alliances within the organisation.
By contrast, organisations with decentralised structures demonstrate a greater capacity to adapt and reproduce themselves after strikes. In this context, American literature places movements such as Hamas within this category, as decision-making is distributed across multiple levels and tasks are managed through organisational networks that reduce the impact of individual losses.
This was clearly evident after the assassination of Hamas leaders Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz al Rantisi three weeks apart in 2004, when the movement’s disciplined structure showed a clear ability to reorganise rather than retreat or disintegrate.
The type of targeted leaders plays an additional role in shaping impact. Some leaders combine initiative, charisma, strategic vision, and communication skills, making their loss more costly in qualitative terms.
However, this cost declines when the organisation possesses clear succession mechanisms, a wide pool of alternatives, and an internal promotion system that allows new leaders to rise according to stable organisational criteria. In Hamas’s case throughout its history, the breadth of the leadership base and internal discipline contributed to limiting the vacuum resulting from the assassination of central figures.
This organisational adaptation is inseparable from the environment in which the movement operates. The large-scale targeting of the social base, through mass killing and systematic destruction of residential and service infrastructure, imposes a compounded effect on Hamas. It exhausts the popular base upon which the movement relies for recruitment, support, and shelter, and eradicates social strata in which it invested religiously and educationally over decades. This pattern creates future difficulties in restoring the religious and service-oriented momentum that constituted one of the pillars of Hamas’s presence within society.
From another angle, the level of public visibility represents a psychological and organisational factor of influence. Organisations that perform state-like functions, such as managing social affairs or providing services, impose a public presence on their leadership. This makes the loss of these figures more impactful at the level of public perception. Hamas falls within this model, as its leadership role is not confined to clandestine work but extends into social and political spheres, giving assassinations dimensions that exceed immediate organisational loss.
The stage of organisational development also factors into calculations of impact. Movements still in formation or undergoing severe decline are more fragile and reliant on a limited number of individuals. By contrast, organisations that have reached a level of institutional maturity, as in Hamas’s case, show a greater capacity to absorb losses, even when they affect first-rank leaders. This is reinforced by the presence of a unifying cause, deeply rooted social ties, and a broad support base, ensuring continued flows of recruits and resources and limiting the disintegrative effect of leadership loss.
However, the escalation of targeting and its transformation into continuous pressure that leaves insufficient time for internal repair poses a different challenge. It exhausts the leadership structure and forces it to operate under constant attrition, narrowing room for manoeuvre, accelerating shifts in leadership and communication styles, and potentially influencing overall orientations due to the rapid turnover of individuals occupying leadership positions over short periods.
Added to this is the factor of safe havens as a determinant of recovery capacity after strikes. The existence of such spaces allows for repositioning, easing direct pressure, and reorganising resources. This explains, in Hamas’s case, the increasing Israeli pressure to disarm Hezbollah and Palestinian factions within Lebanese camps, alongside efforts to strip southern Syria of heavy weaponry.
This coincides with parallel pressure on Iran aimed at reducing its funding for the movement and restricting the ceiling of its missile capabilities, as well as efforts by the US administration to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation in an attempt to sever Hamas from support networks that constituted a source of its resilience. This pattern of pressure exerts a cumulative effect on the leadership structure and forces it to operate in a narrow, high cost environment, slowing recovery and complicating manoeuvre.
Hamas and Assassinations
Hamas’s history shows that it emerged and developed in an environment saturated with leadership targeting, where the liquidation of senior leaders or cadres possessing specialised skills difficult to replace formed a primary tool in the Israeli approach against Palestinian resistance movements. During the Al Aqsa Intifada alone, Israel carried out a total of 134 assassination operations between October 2000 and July 2007, resulting in the killing of 367 people, according to a study by Simon Pratt titled The Evolution of the Logic of Israeli Assassination Policy During the Al Aqsa Intifada.
Earlier than that, the assassination of Yahya Ayyash in early 1996, followed by the liquidation of prominent movement figures such as Ibrahim al Maqadma, Salah Shehadeh, Ismail Abu Shanab, Saeed Siyam, and Ahmed al Jabari, constituted formative milestones in entrenching assassination as an Israeli tool in the course of the conflict.
This recurring pattern of targeting influenced the evolution of Hamas’s organisational structure, the distribution of authority within it, and the nature of leadership. Decision-making centralisation was dismantled in favour of a multi-level leadership structure, and organisational legitimacy and administrative positions were tied to institutions rather than individuals. This reduced the movement’s susceptibility to collapse when leaders were lost.
The emergence of figures with political and popular visibility did not eliminate the networked nature of the internal system. The leader, regardless of stature, performs a function within a broader system and operates within internal balances that regulate authority and define its boundaries. This pattern contributed to limiting the repercussions of leader assassinations.
Each time a leadership head was targeted, the resulting vacuum was filled through institutional mechanisms, either by appointing a direct replacement or by temporarily resorting to collective leadership until succession procedures were completed. The assassination of Ismail Haniyeh was addressed by appointing Sinwar, and Sinwar’s killing was temporarily addressed through collective leadership until a new leader is chosen.
In this context, succession planning emerged as a core organisational mechanism. The existence of layered leadership tiers and a broad base of military and political cadres reduced the vacuum resulting from assassinations and ensured continuity of basic functions, even with variations in experience and competence among successive leaders. The relative separation between political and military wings also provided an additional layer of protection, as targeting military leadership does not automatically paralyse political activity, nor does targeting political leadership necessarily disable military capacity.
Israeli Announcements and Hamas Confirmation
The impact of assassinations extends to the moment of their announcement and how they are politically and morally utilised. In the Israeli case, early announcements, often issued by Prime Minister Netanyahu or the army chief of staff, serve primarily an internal function linked to managing morale within a society bearing the cost of a prolonged war. The killing of resistance leaders is presented as an indicator of regained initiative, a marketing of security achievements for political consumption, and an attempt to compensate for the psychological impact of failures exposed by the 7 October attacks.
In parallel, announcements are used as a tool of social pressure by transforming the assassination into a message that extends beyond the targeted cadre or leader to their social surroundings, in an attempt to raise the cost of engagement in resistance. This appeared in the targeting of families and close circles of leaders, including the killing of dozens of family members of the Al Qassam Brigades’ military spokesperson during his assassination.
By contrast, Hamas approaches announcements through a different logic. Recently, it has tended to delay confirmation of assassination successes and then formulate them collectively after a period of time, aiming to absorb the shock, prevent the assassination from becoming a moment of moral collapse, and preserve internal front cohesion until succession arrangements are completed and replacements appointed.
This difference in announcement timing reflects a parallel struggle over narrative. Israel seeks to cement an image of achievement and deterrence immediately, while Hamas relies on the passage of time to reduce psychological impact, extinguish initial repercussions, and obscure the Israeli side.
The Chronic Israeli Dilemma
Examining the Israeli assassination approach shows that it tends to privilege rapid tactical gains at the expense of long-term outcomes, often leading to results opposite to declared objectives. The assassination of hundreds of leaders from Fatah, foremost among them Khalil al-Wazir Abu Jihad, the second man after Yasser Arafat, contributed to weakening Fatah’s structure. At the same time, it opened the door to the rise of Islamic movements, foremost among them Hamas and Islamic Jihad, during the 1980s.
This pattern was repeated during the second Intifada, when a series of assassinations targeting Hamas leaders and founders, foremost among them Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, over a short period, reinforced the movement’s image as an organisation whose leaders are killed without breaking its will or pushing it toward settlement.
This trajectory was later reflected in Hamas’s victory in the 2006 legislative elections, a result that directly contradicted Israeli leadership calculations aimed at dismantling the movement or politically neutralising it.
This contradiction was summarised by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman in his book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, where he noted that assassinations succeeded in removing specific and temporary threats but failed to produce a long-term solution to Israel’s national security dilemma, demonstrating their limitations as a substitute for comprehensive political settlements.
In this context, experience shows that the existence of a cause enjoying societal legitimacy and a popular base committed to its rights transforms assassinated leaders into unifying symbols and drives the renewal of leadership elites rather than the dissolution of the targeted organisation. Thus, assassination policy does not end the conflict so much as reproduce it in new forms and trajectories.
Moreover, the continuation of confrontations across multiple fronts, expanding temporally and geographically, keeps the Israeli sense of insecurity alive and renewed. Neither military superiority nor tactical achievement succeeds in producing a more stable environment. This chronic dilemma reveals that assassinations, regardless of their intensity, remain a tool for managing conflict rather than resolving it.
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