The implications of Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran will become clearer in the coming days, but it should finally bury one of the more absurd claims made by Israel’s critics—that there is no military solution to the problem posed by Hamas.

Sometimes this is phrased as: “Hamas is an idea, and you can’t kill an idea.” Sometimes we’re told those eliminated in targeted assassinations—and even battlefield routs—will be replaced by interchangeable cogs.

But the Haniyeh killing so defies that logic that it ought to prompt some reconsideration of this part of Israel’s strategy by its critics.

Start with why Haniyeh’s forced exit is such a game changer: He has been integral to the development of Hamas as an organization and a governing force.

Haniyeh was pulled into the inner circle of the group’s founder, Ahmed Yassin, in the late 1990s. Both Yassin and his deputy/successor were killed in 2004, quickly thinning out the ranks. In 2006, Haniyeh led Hamas’s slate of candidates in the Palestinian elections and won. Fatah head Mahmoud Abbas refused to recognize the terror group’s victory—this was after Haniyeh claimed Fatah had tried to assassinate him—and by early 2007 Gaza had become a civil war battleground.

A Saudi-brokered truce collapsed and the strip fell into anarchy. As COMMENTARY contributing editor Jonathan Schanzer wrote in his book Hamas vs. Fatah, “While Hamas and Fatah forces were killing one another, no one was policing the streets.” After Haniyeh and Hamas’s victory, public works projects were halted and infrastructure quickly degraded.

The disorder in Haniyeh’s early days opened the gate to Hamas’s “Talibanization” of the Gaza Strip. The fleeing of aid groups brought in under the Palestinian Authority left Hamas in total control of what came into the strip. Christian targets were repeatedly attacked by Islamist thugs. All of this violence and corruption brought Hamas into immediate tension with Gaza’s prominent clans.

Hamas’s brutal tactics—kidnappings, summary executions—ultimately won the day, ejecting Fatah from the strip. The form that Haniyeh’s Islamist terror machine took into the civil war soon solidified into Hamas’s day-to-day modus operandi. Schanzer: “As Hamas assumed control of the Gaza Strip, it began to govern through a combination of violence, authoritarianism, and Islamism. Ismael Haniyeh, the ascendant ruler of Gaza, officially denied accusations that Hamas intended to establish an Islamic emirate. However, as noted previously, Islamists had launched a string of attacks on Internet cafés and Christian institutions. By November, the British press reported that ‘only believers feel safe’ in Gaza and that ‘un-Islamic’ dress sometimes resulted in beatings.”

In 2017, Yahya Sinwar took the operational reins in Gaza and Haniyeh decamped to Qatar to lead Hamas’s politburo. This only further legitimized Haniyeh as the gatekeeper of Gaza to foreign ministries around the world. He lived in luxury and plotted Hamas’s expansion to the West Bank as Abbas aged, the Palestinian Authority atrophied, and Iran salivated at the thought of adding another beachhead to its proxies’ encirclement of Israel.

Haniyeh had thus been Abbas’s and the PA’s direct rival for nearly two decades by the time he was killed late Tuesday. He takes more than mere institutional memory with him; he was the midwife of Gaza as we know it, in some ways its architect (at the risk of giving him too much intellectual credit).

Moreover, Haniyeh can be replaced in name only. Hamas’s upper ranks have gotten a throttling from Israel over the past year—Haniyeh’s deputy, Saleh al-Arouri, was killed earlier in the war, leaving the Hamas leader without a clear successor.

One option to replace Haniyeh is former politburo head Khaled Meshaal, but he is on the outs with Iran and regional analysts seem to doubt Sinwar would support him. Whoever comes next will lack Haniyeh’s experience, knowledge and connections. In the worst-case scenario for Hamas, there might even be a leadership fight, splintering an already debilitated organization.

Israel’s campaign of targeted assassination since October 7 prepared the ground for this. After all, Haniyeh’s natural successor was taken out before the man he would succeed. Hamas put itself underground when this war started; Israel may yet ensure it stays there.

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