In late November, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had given Israeli intelligence agency Mossad the green light “to act against the heads of Hamas wherever they are.” It was an indirect acknowledgment that Israel’s retribution campaign for the attack it suffered on Oct. 7 last year will likely involve assassinations abroad, since Hamas’s leadership isn’t based only in the Gaza Strip.
In late November, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had given Israeli intelligence agency Mossad the green light “to act against the heads of Hamas wherever they are.” It was an indirect acknowledgment that Israel’s retribution campaign for the attack it suffered on Oct. 7 last year will likely involve assassinations abroad, since Hamas’s leadership isn’t based only in the Gaza Strip.
Israeli officials have since become more forthright about the implication. Ronen Bar, the head of interior Israeli intelligence service Shin Bet, said Israel will “assassinate the top Hamas people in Qatar and Turkey.”
“They are all dead men walking,” Jonathan Conricus, a former spokesperson of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), told Foreign Policy when asked about Hamas’s leadership.
Israel is clearly committed to its search for Hamas’s leaders across the region, even at the risk of expanding the conflict. On Jan. 2, six members of Hamas were killed in a drone strike in Beirut, Lebanon. Among those dead was Saleh al-Arouri, the deputy chief of Hamas’s political bureau and the first top-rung leader of the group to be killed since more than a thousand Israelis were slain on Oct. 7. Al-Arouri was one of the founders of the group’s armed wing and its de facto ambassador to Iran and Hezbollah, and he was suspected of routing funds and weapons to fighters in Gaza.
But even as Israeli authorities announce their intention to continue such international assassinations, they are aware that the path to achieving that goal is riddled with challenges. They know that it is easier to execute covert operations and assassinations in crisis-ridden or war-ravaged nations such as Lebanon and Syria compared to other countries hosting Hamas leaders—including a major military power, Turkey, and energy giant Qatar, both of which are also U.S. allies. Foreign Policy’s conversations with several former security officials in Israel indicate Mossad has been tasked with developing starkly different plans for each nation hosting Hamas.
Sarit Zehavi, the founder of an Israeli think tank called Alma Research and Education Center, said that every covert operation needs accurate intelligence and an operational opportunity. But it must also take into consideration “the relationship between Israel and the country where the target is.” Any operation in Turkey or Qatar will be “more complicated,” she said, when compared to Lebanon or Iran.
A few weeks ago, Turkish authorities arrested 15 people on charges of spying for Mossad. Turkish officials told the local press that Mossad had recruited agents on social media; paid them with cryptocurrency; and tasked them with identifying, monitoring, and eventually kidnapping foreign nationals in Turkey— presumably referring to Palestinians supposedly linked to Hamas.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan—who recently accused Netanyahu of acting like Adolf Hitler, referencing the high death toll of more than 20,000 people dead in Gaza since the war began—warned Israel of “serious consequences” if any Hamas members were killed while in Turkey.
Since Erdogan came to power in 2003, Turkey has provided stable diplomatic support to Hamas, and while it doesn’t go as far as offering an apartment to the senior leaders to live in, it does offer them diplomatic support and venues to hold meetings. Erdogan, Hamas, and their co-ideologues subscribe to the Muslim Brotherhood’s worldview—that politics in Muslim-majority nations should be rooted in Islam.
There is also huge domestic support for Palestinians in Turkish society. Back in 2010, when Turkey sent a flotilla of boats carrying aid to the Gaza Strip to break through the Israeli maritime blockade, 10 Turkish citizens were killed by Israeli forces. In response, Turkey downgraded diplomatic ties with Israel. Those ties were only beginning to recover when the current war unfolded.
Israelis are mindful of Turkish sensitivities. Former officials said that unless Erdogan begins to host Hamas’s leaders en masse, Israel will not carry out assassinations inside Turkey. They said that Israel will instead wait for those inside Turkey to fly out while calling on the United States to encourage Turkey to ban Hamas from entering its territory.
“Israel won’t carry out any assassinations in Turkey—it’s a formidable military power, a NATO member, and can give us a serious headache,” Eran Lerman, Israel’s former deputy national security advisor, told Foreign Policy over the phone. “In the past, it has helped us foil Iranian attempts to kill Israelis on Turkish soil, and there are channels of communication between our [intelligence] services and theirs.”
“We would instead put heavy pressure on Turkey through our friends,” he added. “Turkey is a big country; it’s a big trading country,” he added, alluding to various levers that could be pulled to apply pressure.
Helin Sari Ertem, an associate professor of international relations at Istanbul Medeniyet University, agreed that economic ties between Israel and Turkey are significant and have braved previous upsets. And she added that Erdogan’s comments are mostly meant for domestic consumption, to assuage a pro-Palestinian public sentiment.
“Turkey follows a balanced policy” when it comes to Israel’s conflict with Hamas, she said, and in the end, it prioritizes its own concerns. “We have issues to sort out with the U.S., and the Jewish lobby in the U.S. is very strong,” Ertem added.
“We have F-16 discussions, and the dossier about Sweden’s NATO membership is still on the table,” she said, in reference to Turkey’s wish to buy American-made fighter jets and objections to Sweden’s entry in the defensive alliance.
“How can you ruin all this for supporting Hamas?” Ertem asked. “That would mean breaking ties with the West over Hamas. Turkey won’t drag itself in this quagmire. It has to protect relations with the U.S.”
Officials and experts suggest that despite a public war of words between Erdogan and Netanyahu, both countries are mindful of each other’s sensitivities.
While Erdogan wants to send a clear message that he won’t tolerate a violation of Turkey’s sovereignty, Ertem said that the Turkish authorities won’t be deaf to Israeli concerns over Hamas either. Israelis, on the other hand, may declare that they will find and kill Hamas’s leaders wherever they may be, but in the end, they may have to restrain themselves.
“Qataris are a different matter,” Lerman added. “They were financing Hamas—we have reason to believe they sent more money than we knew of.”
There is more openness to the idea of attacking Hamas targets in Qatar, which has been hosting Hamas leaders since 2012 and has been sending millions of dollars every year in aid to the Gaza Strip. Israelis believe the money didn’t just help the underprivileged in Gaza, but also bankrolled Hamas’s bureaucracy.
“If the probability to assassinate Hamas’s leaders in Lebanon and Iran is 90 percent, in Turkey it is 50 percent or less, because of several geopolitical considerations,” a former Israeli official in a position to make an informed assessment told Foreign Policy on the condition of anonymity. “But in Qatar, that probability goes up significantly as it becomes a hostile entity that harbors legitimate targets.”
“Our relations with them could change dramatically—from applying more pressure as we are doing now, to eliminating targets inside Qatar, that’s the other end of the spectrum,” the official added.
Qatar has played an essential role in the release of more than a hundred Israeli hostages thus far. But officials in Israel and the United States suspect Doha of playing a double game—backing Hamas while playing peacemaker. U.S. lawmakers have called on Qatar to use its leverage over the group to ensure the release of the remaining hostages. “Americans are pissed off,” U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst reportedly told Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani on a recent visit to Doha.
There have been other suggestions in Washington, including stripping Qatar of its major non-NATO ally status if it doesn’t expel or hand over Hamas’s leaders. According to a report in Politico that quoted three unnamed U.S, officials, Washington is planning to ask Qatar to expel Hamas once the hostage crisis is over.
Qatar is insistent that there are advantages of an open communication channel with Hamas and believes that it has some leverage as the country that hosts the largest U.S. base in the region and sits on the world’s third-largest natural gas reserves. But the pressure on Doha is expected to mount.
So far, Qatar has even denied reports that it has proposed the deportation of two top Hamas leaders from Gaza who masterminded the Oct. 7 attack in exchange for a permanent cease-fire. For now, Israel has decided to use its strong relations with the United States to build pressure on both Turkey and Qatar to oust Hamas’s leaders and essentially avoid a diplomatic incident with Israel while, in effect, allowing Mossad to take out the leaders elsewhere. Doha and Istanbul, too, are banking on their ties with the United States to keep Mossad at bay.
Shmuel Bar, a veteran of the Israeli intelligence community, said that if the Israeli government adopted U.S. preferences for a post-war Gaza—namely, the removal of all Israeli troops from the territory and the transfer of power to a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority—then it could get more room to act against Hamas.
“The best course of action for Israel today would be to adopt, lock, stock and barrel, the American paradigm for the day after,” he said. “That’s how we can lock them in, and that would give us more room to carry out operations against Hamas and against Hezbollah.”
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