What kind of future awaits Hamas after the killing of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran?

Analysis What kind of future awaits Hamas after the killing of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran?
Mourners gather during a funeral procession for Ismail Haniyeh, political leader of Hamas, who was killed during a visit to Tehran, on July 31. (AFP/Getty Image)
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Updated 07 August 2024
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What kind of future awaits Hamas after the killing of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran?

What kind of future awaits Hamas after the killing of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran?
  • Experts discuss whether the Palestinian group can retain its influence and rebuild after the killing of its political bureau chief
  • The killing of Hamas leaders may represent a tactical victory for Israel, but seems to have limited strategic value, says analyst

LONDON: It has been 14 years since Israeli agents carried out one of Mossad’s most audacious, controversial and, perhaps, pointless assassinations.

On Jan. 19, 2010, Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, the man responsible for procuring weapons for Hamas, was murdered in a hotel bedroom in Dubai.

It was a big operation, with many moving parts, involving almost 30 Mossad operatives who entered Dubai on false passports.

It ended with Al-Mabhouh being overpowered in his room at the Al-Bustan Rotana and given a fatal dose of suxamethonium chloride, a drug used in anesthetic cocktails.




People take part in a march called by Palestinian and Lebanese youth organizations in the southern Lebanese city of Saida, on August 5, 2024, to protest against the assassination of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh. (AFP)

To avoid leaving a tell-tale needle mark, the drug was administered with a device that used ultrasound to deliver it through the skin. The drug causes paralysis and, still conscious but with his lungs unable to function, Al-Mabhouh asphyxiated to death.

The assassins put him to bed and left, using a Mossad-developed device for putting hotel-door security chains in place from the outside of the room, hoping that Al-Mabhouh’s death would be attributed to natural causes.

It might have been, but for the vigilance of Dubai’s police chief. He suspected foul play and, by having the comings and goings through Dubai airport before and after the hit analyzed, and days of hotel security-camera footage examined in detail, put together a damning portfolio of evidence.

At the time, the killing was big news. Images of two Mossad agents posing as tennis players, emerging from an elevator behind Al-Mabhouh, appeared on televisions and newspapers around the world.

Today, however, for few outside Hamas or Mossad will the name Al-Mabhouh have any resonance. Certainly, his killing failed to have any appreciable impact on the flow of arms to the group.




Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (R) meeting with Palestinian Hamas movement leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on July 30, 2024. (AFP)

This week, the killing of Ismail Haniyeh, chairman of the Hamas political bureau, is also big news — as was the killing on July 13 of Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif.

But soon, says Ahron Bregman, a former officer in the Israeli army and a senior teaching fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, the disruption caused by their deaths to the activities and ambitions of Hamas will disappear, as the ripples caused by a small pebble thrown into a large lake quickly vanish.

“The killing of Ismail Haniyeh will not change much as far as Hamas is concerned,” said Bregman, author of “The Fifty Years War: Israel and the Arabs” and the memoir “The Spy Who Fell to Earth,” an account of his part in the exposure of an Egyptian alleged double agent.

“Hamas is more than rifles, rockets and even leaders. Hamas is an idea.

“If Israel wants to defeat it, it must offer the Palestinians a better idea — say, a Palestinian state.

“If such an idea is not put forward, then Hamas will remain in place and rebuild itself for future battles with Israel.”

KEY HAMAS FIGURES

  • Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ Gaza leader, has just been named Ismail Haniyeh’s successor.
  • Khaled Meshaal, a founding member, has mostly operated from the relative safety of exile.
  • Khalil Al-Hayya, Doha-based deputy leader of Hamas, is said to have the backing of Iran.
  • Musa Abu Marzouk lived for 14 years in the US before becoming deputy chairman of Hamas’ political bureau.

Hamas is an Islamist militant group that spun off from the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in the late 1980s. It took over the Gaza Strip after defeating its rival political party, Fatah, in elections in 2006.

The sheer number of killings of key Hamas figures carried out by Israel over the past quarter-century, and the negligible impact of these killings on the organization’s capabilities or objectives, speaks of a policy being carried out despite a lack of success — or, perhaps, in accordance with a less obvious, and probably domestically focused agenda.

Killing high-profile Hamas targets, and perpetuating the war in the process, makes it harder for Israelis inclined toward peace to criticize or plot to remove their wartime Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Certainly, it is not difficult for Netanyahu’s critics to see the killing of Haniyeh as a deliberate tactic to derail peace talks.

Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani put it succinctly on X, writing: “How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?”




A woman walks near a billboard displaying portraits of Hamas leader Mohammed Deif (R) and Ismail Haniyeh with the slogan “assassinated” reading in Hebrew, in Tel Aviv, on August 2, 2024. (AFP)

Israel’s list of assassinations and attempted assassinations of Hamas leaders is a long one, and the killings have not always been as subtly carried out as the necessarily low-key Mossad hit on Al-Mabhouh in Dubai.

One of the first high-profile targets to be killed was Salah Shehadeh, the leader of Hamas’ military wing, who was targeted in Gaza on July 23, 2002, by an Israeli F-16 that dropped a massive bomb on his home.

Such was the cost in collateral damage — 14 others died, including Shehadeh’s wife and nine children — that 27 Israeli Air Force pilots had a fit of conscience, denouncing such attacks as “illegal and immoral” and “a direct result of the ongoing occupation which is corrupting all of Israeli society.”

The soul-searching did not last long, however. The toll of senior Hamas leaders has continued more or less unabated ever since.

Those who have been killed include Ahmed Yassin, who founded Hamas in 1987. He died 20 years ago, on March 22, 2004, in a hail of missiles fired from Israeli helicopters as he returned home from morning prayers in Gaza.

He was succeeded by Abdel Aziz Al-Rantisi, who died in similar fashion just 26 days later.




Iranians take part in a funeral procession for late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, on August 1, 2024. (AFP)

Ahmed Al-Jabari, second-in-command of Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades, was targeted unsuccessfully five times before succumbing in Gaza City in November 2012 to a missile fired from a drone.

This year, unsurprisingly, has been a particularly busy one in terms of Hamas assassinations carried out by Israel. Hamas deputy and Haniyeh’s right-hand man Salah Al-Arouri was killed on Jan. 7 in an airstrike in Lebanon that also claimed the lives of several other senior Hamas commanders.

On March 11, Marwan Issa, deputy commander of Al-Qassam Brigades and Hamas No. 3, died in an airstrike in Gaza.

But none of these deaths — individually or taken together — has managed to turn Hamas from its path or hamper its ability to continue doggedly pursuing its aims militarily.

Haniyeh’s death is likely to have no greater immediate impact on Hamas’ capabilities than the assassinations that have gone before, said John Jenkins, former UK ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Iraq and a Middle East expert with the Centre for Geopolitics at Cambridge University.

But it might signal a change of strategy that bodes ill for any hopes of an immediate end to conflict.




Smoke billows from burning tires behind an Israeli army vehicle in Hebron on July 31, 2024, following a demonstration by Palestinians denouncing the killing of Haniyeh. (AFP)

“In the past, decapitation hasn’t worked — not with Hamas, nor with Hezbollah, nor Iran,” he said. “Or, at least, it has disrupted rather than interrupted.”

Israel, he added, “undoubtedly knows that. But it’s also thought for two decades that ‘mowing the grass’ is the best way to manage the conflict.”

That policy of simply keeping a lid on the problem “is now over — it collapsed on Oct. 7, 2023.

“So, the game now is destruction — of Hamas’ offensive capabilities and its ability to function as a significant political actor within the occupied Palestinian territories.

“That doesn’t mean killing the idea; that’s not possible. It means killing the capability. That’s why a ceasefire is a long way off.

“Spectacular assassinations are now part of a wider strategy of dismantling tunnels, command and control functions, logistics, and so on. That’s the only context in which they make sense.”

It is, however, a very dangerous game, with the killings of Haniyeh and Deif in Tehran and Beirut condemned by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres last week as “a dangerous escalation.”




Yemenis wave flags and lift placards of Hezbollah senior commander Fuad Shukr and Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh during a rally in the Houthi-controlled capital Sanaa on August 2, 2024. (AFP)

Instead of Israel rampaging around the region on a killing spree — let alone assassinating Hamas’ Qatar-based negotiators, such as Haniyeh — “all efforts should instead be leading to a ceasefire in Gaza, the release of all Israeli hostages, a massive increase of humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza and a return to calm in Lebanon and across the Blue Line,” said Guterres.

“This endless cycle,” he added, “needs to stop.”

In an interview with a British newspaper over the weekend, Amjad Iraqi, an associate fellow with Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa program, warned that Israel’s increasingly audacious killings were indeed edging the region dangerously close to a regional war.

“People are not understanding the gravity of what this is,” he told the Independent.

“There is a kind of egotistical, unstable dance that all these actors are making with missiles and with people’s lives, while trying to explain it as calibrated responses.”

Only a ceasefire could cool things down, but as things stand, “we are at a very, very dangerous point.”




Muslims pray during the final prayers for Ismail Haniyeh at his funeral in the Qatari capital Doha on August 2, 2024. (AFP)

The reality of imminent escalation, said Burcu Ozcelik, senior research fellow for Middle East security at the Royal United Services Institute, “means that the ‘day after’ and the path to statehood seems even farther away now, with all sides focusing on the military outcome of the here and now, at the expense of immense civilian suffering and a viable political solution.”

For its part, Hamas, “to project resilience and the resolve of its leadership despite the assassination of Haniyeh, is trying to pivot quickly to appoint a new political bureau chief.”

A consultative process is under way “and, until a decision is made, such as the appointment of Khaled Mashal, for example, ceasefire negotiations cannot realistically recommence.”

As it has done many times before, in other words, Hamas will quickly grow a new limb to replace one that has been amputated.

But “a more urgent obstacle to restarting talks is that Hamas cannot be authorized to re-enter a diplomatic phase until Iran declares that the regime and its proxies have sufficiently retaliated against Israel for the series of high-profile assassinations, with much speculation around when that might happen.”




Mourners offer their condolences to senior Hamas official Khaled Mashaal (L) during the funeral of Ismail Haniyeh, in the Qatari capital Doha on August 2, 2024. (AFP)

The killing of Haniyeh has, she believes, “cornered Hamas into a dilemma that will determine how the organization evolves over time.

“On the one hand, the loss of a recognizable political leader will trigger radicalization among some Hamas supporters and embolden hardliners among the military faction such as Yahya Sinwar, his brother and their inner circle.

“On the other, with Hamas fighters suffering losses inside Gaza and its military infrastructure downgraded, Hamas will be looking for a lull in the fighting to recoup and plan ahead.

“But for Hamas, this is a long game, and it is far from over — key figures inside and outside Gaza will continue to struggle to consolidate Hamas and its victory narrative and position it for a role in post-war Gaza.”




An Indonesian protester holds up a placard with the image of Ismail Haniyeh during a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Surabaya on August 6, 2024. (AFP)

Ahron Bregman agrees that the killing of Haniyeh “might lead to a regional war in which Iran and Hezbollah could become involved. If the latter happens, it will play straight into the hands of Hamas’ leader, Yahya Sinwar, whose dream has always been that his Oct. 7 attack on Israel triggers a regional war.”

The assassination will also “put on ice any hostage deal, as both leaders, Netanyahu and Sinwar, are not interested in such a deal at the moment.

“For Netanyahu, a deal could spell the end of his coalition government. As for Sinwar, he will wait to see if the assassination at the heart of Tehran, which humiliated Iran, could lead to a regional war.”




Yahia Sinwar addresses supporters during a rally in Gaza City, on April 14, 2023. (AFP)

It is true, Bregman added, that “in recent months, Israel has managed to assassinate many of the Hamas leaders. Sinwar is quite on his own now, and I’m sure he’s got very few of the old guard to consult with.

“But Hamas is bigger and larger than any leader or leaders. When this war is over, there will still be Hamas — battered, leaner, but still standing and able to send rockets into Israel.

“The assassinations are tactical victories for Israel, but there is nothing strategic in it, not even in the possible killing of Sinwar himself.”




Members of the Palestinian Joint Action Committee sit during a symbolic funeral for Ismail Haniyeh, in Beirut, on August 2, 2024. (AFP)

Ultimately, the cost of Israel’s campaign of assassinations could be borne by Israelis and Palestinians alike.

The details of the operation to kill Al-Mabhouh in Dubai in 2010 emerged in the book “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” published by Israeli historian and investigative journalist Ronen Bergman in 2018.

Bergman concluded that, because Israel’s intelligence community had always “provided Israel’s leaders sooner or later with operational responses to every focused problem they were asked to solve,” that very success had “fostered the illusion among most of the nation’s leaders that covert operations could be a strategic and not just a tactical tool — that they could be used in place of real diplomacy to end the geographic, ethnic, religious, and national disputes in which Israel is mired.”

As a result, Israel’s leaders “have elevated and sanctified the tactical method of combating terror and existential threats at the expense of the true vision, statesmanship, and genuine desire to reach a political solution that is necessary for peace to be attained.”

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Canada to pull children of diplomats out of Israel, Canadian Press reports

Canada to pull children of diplomats out of Israel, Canadian Press reports
Updated 5 sec ago
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Canada to pull children of diplomats out of Israel, Canadian Press reports

Canada to pull children of diplomats out of Israel, Canadian Press reports
  • Global Affairs Canada said it has approved the temporary relocation of the diplomats’ children and their guardians to a safe third country
  • Canada on Saturday warned citizens to avoid all travel to Israel, citing the ongoing regional conflict and unpredictable security situation

The Canadian government said on Wednesday it has decided to pull the children and guardians of its diplomats out of Israel, amid fears of a widened conflict in the Middle East, the Canadian Press reported.
Israel’s tensions with Iran and Hezbollah have fanned fears of a broader conflict in a region already on edge amid Israel’s assault on Gaza which has killed tens of thousands and caused a humanitarian crisis, including widespread hunger.
There has been an increased risk of escalation into a broader Middle East war after the killings of Palestinian Islamist group Hamas’ leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran and of Hezbollah military commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut drew threats of retaliation against Israel.
Global Affairs Canada, in a statement cited in the Canadian Press, said it has approved the temporary relocation of the diplomats’ children and their guardians to a safe third country. It added that diplomats stationed in Ramallah in the West Bank and in Beirut do not have dependents living with them.
Canada on Saturday warned citizens to avoid all travel to Israel, citing the ongoing regional conflict and unpredictable security situation. It also urges its citizens to not travel to Gaza and the West Bank.
The embassies in Tel Aviv and Beirut and the representative office to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank “all remain fully operational and continue to provide essential services to Canadians,” the Canadian government said in the statement cited by the Canadian Press.
The latest bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered on Oct. 7 when Palestinian Islamist group Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
The Gaza health ministry says that since then Israel’s military assault on the Hamas-governed enclave has killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians while also displacing nearly the entire population of 2.3 million and leading to genocide accusations that Israel denies.

 


Tunisian president sacks PM amid growing discontent over recurring water and electricity crisis

Tunisian president sacks PM amid growing discontent over recurring water and electricity crisis
Updated 08 August 2024
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Tunisian president sacks PM amid growing discontent over recurring water and electricity crisis

Tunisian president sacks PM amid growing discontent over recurring water and electricity crisis
  • Hachani's dismissal comes exactly a year after he was tapped to replace Najla Bouden

TUNIS: Tunisian President Kais Saied sacked Prime Minister Ahmed Hachani and appointed Social Affairs Minister Kamel Maddouri as his replacement, the Tunisian presidency said in a statement late on Wednesday.
Hachani was named as Tunisia’s prime minister in August last year. A few hours before he was dismissed, Hachani said in a video message that the government had made progress on a number of issues despite global challenges, including securing the country’s food and energy needs.

Hachani's dismissal comes exactly a year after Saied appointed him to replace Najla Bouden as prime minister.

The dismissal comes amid popular discontent with the recurring water and electricity outage crisis in many parts of the country. While the government says that Tunisia is suffering from a continuous drought that has led to a quota system in water distribution, Saied sees the water cuts as a conspiracy ahead of presidential election and says that the dams are full.
The agriculture ministry says that the dam level is extremely critical and has reached 25 percent.
Saied announced his candidacy for the presidential elections in October amid widespread criticism from the opposition, human rights groups and candidates for restricting and intimidating competitors to pave the way for him to win a second term.


Fatalities in Israeli attack include head of Hezbollah’s anti-tank rocket unit

Fatalities in Israeli attack include head of Hezbollah’s anti-tank rocket unit
Updated 07 August 2024
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Fatalities in Israeli attack include head of Hezbollah’s anti-tank rocket unit

Fatalities in Israeli attack include head of Hezbollah’s anti-tank rocket unit
  • 2 killed, 7 injured, says Israeli army

BEIRUT: Two people were killed — one a civilian and the other, according to the Israeli army, the head of Iran-backed Hezbollah’s anti-tank rocket unit — and seven others injured on Wednesday in renewed Israeli hostilities in several towns in southern Lebanon.

An Israeli drone targeted a motorcycle in the town of Jouaiyya at noon, and a passing car was hit, injuring those inside.

The emergency operations center at the Ministry of Health reported that two people were killed, Hezbollah member Hassan Fares Jeshi and a civilian named Mohammed Hassan Shoumar, while four others were injured.

The Israeli army said: “Hassan Fares is the commander of Hezbollah’s anti-tank rocket unit.”

Israeli artillery shelling and air raids continued on border towns known for their loyalty to Hezbollah. These attacks hit the towns of Blida, Tayr Harfa, Khiam, Jebbayn, Chihine, Majdelyoun, Naqoura, Zibqin, Chaqra, Baraachit, Halta, Kounine, Mhaibib, and Kfarkela.

The emergency operations center said that “phosphorus artillery shelling targeted the town of Shebaa, causing a citizen to suffer from suffocation, requiring hospitalization.”

Hezbollah responded by targeting “the Raheb site and the Jal Al-Alam site with artillery shells, and the Malikiyah site with missile weapons.”

Israeli warplanes breached the sound barrier for the second successive day over Beirut.

The National News Agency in Lebanon reported that Israeli aircraft did the same in two waves over the cities of Sidon and Jezzine, and various parts in the south of the country, with activists on social media sharing footage of planes breaching Lebanese airspace.

Inhabitants of Beirut and dozens of towns in the Mount Lebanon region had experienced severe panic on Tuesday as Israeli warplanes broke the sound barrier at low altitude, causing a loud boom.

Border villages adjacent to the Blue Line in the western and central sectors suffered hours of tension later in the day with the Israeli army firing flares, while Hezbollah carried out nine operations against Israeli military sites.

Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech on Tuesday that a response to last week’s assassination of the group’s prominent military leader Fuad Shukr was “inevitable.”

The Israelis are also anticipating the response of Hezbollah and Iran to the assassination of Hamas’ political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran just hours after Shukr’s death in the southern suburbs of Beirut.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said: “The Israeli army is constantly developing its defensive and offensive capabilities.”

Meanwhile, leaflets were dropped on Wednesday in predominantly Druze regions, especially in the Choueifat area, bearing pictures of the children who were victims of the Majdal Shams attack in the occupied Golan, which killed 12 people. These carried the words: “We will avenge them, Hezbollah.”

Israel has accused Hezbollah of shelling the soccer field in Majdal Shams, but Hezbollah strongly denies responsibility for the attack, while Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt has declared his support for the Iran-backed group.


Rights groups condemn Iran’s ‘abhorrent’ execution of protester

Rights groups condemn Iran’s ‘abhorrent’ execution of protester
Updated 07 August 2024
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Rights groups condemn Iran’s ‘abhorrent’ execution of protester

Rights groups condemn Iran’s ‘abhorrent’ execution of protester

PARIS: Iran faced condemnation from human rights groups Wednesday over its execution of a man convicted of killing a Revolutionary Guard in 2022 protests, with activists saying his confession had been obtained by torture.

Gholamreza Rasaei, in his mid-thirties, is the 10th man executed by Iran in connection with the months-long protests that erupted in September 2022 after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini. The Iranian Kurd had been arrested for an alleged breach of the country’s strict dress code for women.

Rasaei was executed in prison in the western city of Kermanshah on Tuesday after being convicted of killing the Guards colonel, according to the Mizan Online website of the Iranian judiciary.

Human rights groups have repeatedly accused Iran, which they say executes more people annually than any nation other than China, of using the death penalty against protesters without due legal process in a bid to intimidate their sympathizers.

Rasaei, a member of the Kurdish ethnic minority and follower of the Yarsan faith, was executed in secret with neither his family nor his lawyer given prior notice and his family then forced to bury his body in a remote area far from his home, Amnesty International said.

“Iranian authorities have carried out the abhorrent arbitrary execution in secret of a young man who was subjected to torture and other ill-treatment in detention, including sexual violence, and then sentenced to death after a sham trial,” said Amnesty’s deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa, Diana Eltahawy.

She said the execution was another instance of Iran using the death penalty as a “tool of political repression to instil fear among the population.”


Over 1,000 UK troops ready to evacuate nearly 16,000 Britons from Lebanon amid fears of war escalation

Over 1,000 UK troops ready to evacuate nearly 16,000 Britons from Lebanon amid fears of war escalation
Updated 07 August 2024
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Over 1,000 UK troops ready to evacuate nearly 16,000 Britons from Lebanon amid fears of war escalation

Over 1,000 UK troops ready to evacuate nearly 16,000 Britons from Lebanon amid fears of war escalation
  • Hundreds of troops have been put on alert in the UK and are ready for deployment to the region if necessary
  • Military personnel were in the process of being deployed to provide operational support to UK embassies in the region

BEIRUT: The UK government has kept more than 1,000 British troops on high alert and ready to evacuate nearly 16,000 Britons currently in Lebanon amid growing fears of an all-out war, the BBC reported on Wednesday.
In response to the UK Foreign Office’s warning that the Middle East situation could deteriorate rapidly, preparations are being made in case British citizens need to be evacuated from Beirut.
The Foreign Office renewed its call for Britons to leave Lebanon on Saturday, while confirming that preparations were underway to help with any necessary evacuation as hundreds of troops had been sent to Cyprus. The UK already has a significant military presence there.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy told the House of Commons last week that there were about 16,000 British nationals in Lebanon.
Meanwhile, hundreds of troops have been put on alert in the UK and are ready for deployment to the region if necessary.
According to Saturday’s Foreign Office statement, military personnel were in the process of being deployed to provide operational support to UK embassies in the region, although the number of troops involved was not mentioned.
Meanwhile, Sky News reported on Wednesday that hundreds of soldiers, Royal Marine commandos, sailors and aviators had already been moved forward to bolster a key Royal Air Force base in Cyprus, which would act as a hub in any evacuation mission.
RAF Typhoon fighter jets already stationed there were involved last April in a mission against an Iranian drone and missile attack on Israel.
A Royal Navy destroyer, HMS Duncan, and a landing ship, RFA Cardigan Bay, are already in the Eastern Mediterranean. RAF helicopters have also been placed on standby.
Tensions have been growing across the Middle East since the Hamas attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7.
Hostilities between Israel and its neighbors have escalated following the death of Hamas’ political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran last week, in an attack for which Iran blamed Israel.
Haniyeh’s assassination came hours after Israel killed Iran-backed Hezbollah’s senior commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut.
Iran and Hezbollah have vowed “severe” retaliation against Israel.