Extrajudicial killing during an undeclared war between two sovereign countries. Israeli forces conducted a “surgical strike” targeting senior Hamas official Saleh al Arouri in southern Beirut. Lebanese Hezbollah (LH) harbors Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) officials in Lebanon and permits them to conduct attacks into Israel.
In 2015, the United States had placed a $5 million bounty on Saleh al-Arouri and designated him as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist.[7]
The killing of Saleh al-Arouri deprives Hamas of one of its most skilled tacticians, who helped route money and weapons to its operatives in Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East and integrated the group more tightly into Iran’s network of forces committed to fighting Israel, according to analysts.
But it was far from clear that his death would be a debilitating blow to the organization, which has rebuilt again and again after assassinations of its leaders, and remained agile enough to plot the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks despite years of Israeli military and intelligence efforts to weaken it.
Still, Mr. al-Arouri’s killing — in a strike in a Beirut suburb on Tuesday that senior officials from Hamas, Lebanon and the United States ascribed to Israel — sets Hamas back at the most vulnerable time in its history, analysts said.
Israel’s overwhelming offensive in Gaza has significantly weakened the group’s military strength there, including its ability to manufacture rockets and other weapons. Mr. al-Arouri’s position, as Hamas’s de facto ambassador to Iran and Hezbollah, meant that he would have had an important role in the group’s efforts to rebuild militarily with help from foreign backers. Israel has not taken responsibility for his killing.
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To make this tactic acceptable to other nations, targeted killings must be justified and accounted for under a set of norms that may not correspond perfectly to either peacetime or wartime paradigms, but is nonetheless respectful of the values and considerations espoused by both. In this chapter we consider the advantages and disadvantages of choosing either paradigm as our starting point, thereafter subjecting the paradigm to necessary modifications for application to the counterterrorism context. We do so by assessing the American and Israeli experience in employing targeted killings and its legal, moral, and strategic implications.
II. The Practice of Targeted Killing
A. The United States
Countries have been in the business of targeted assassinations for centuries. The United States has been a more recent participant. The U.S. Senate Select Committee chaired by Senator Frank Church (the Church Committee) reported in 1975 that it had found evidence of no less than eight plots involving CIA efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro, as well as assassination plots against President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam and General Rene Schneider of Chile. During the Vietnam War, the Phoenix Program planned the assassination of Viet Cong leaders and sympathizers. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan ordered Operation El Dorado Canyon, which included an air raid on the residence of Libyan ruler Muammar Qaddafi. Qaddafi remained unscathed, but his daughter was killed.
Assassination plots by both the United States and other countries were not publicly acknowledged, justified, or accounted for. Rather, they were taken to be an element of that part of foreign relations that always remains in the dark, outside official protocol or lawful interaction, unspoken of, but understood to be “part of the international game.” Many of the plots never became public knowledge; few, if any, enjoyed enduring public acceptance.
The political fallout of the Church Committee’s criticism of the covert assassination program during the Cold War brought President Gerald Ford to promulgate an executive order banning assassinations, a prohibition that was later incorporated into Executive Order 12333 (1981) signed by President Ronald Reagan and that remains in effect today. The executive order was part of the reason that those responsible for planning military actions prior to 1998 took great care to avoid any appearance of targeting specific individuals.
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