Qatar’s lesson: You don’t eliminate an enemy by bombing their path to retreat

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If the Israeli bombing of Qatar on Tuesday had succeeded in assassinating Khalil al-Hayya, the current leader of Hamas in Gaza, few would have mourned. That includes the Palestinians of Gaza, almost two thirds of whom oppose Hamas.

But even if he and the other leaders had been killed when missiles struck the luxurious Doha compound housing Hamas’s senior leadership and peace-negotiating team, it would not have made life safer for Israelis or less horrific for Palestinians. In fact, it probably would have deepened and prolonged a conflict that could have been resolved 18 months ago and whose drift away from its initial goals has already become a humanitarian disaster of historic proportions.

And it did not succeed. It killed uninvolved Qataris, family members and injured bystanders. It may have also killed the possibility of having a fairly neutral space in which to conduct ceasefire talks. And it may have ended the current talks altogether, just as they were said to be close to a possible ceasefire and hostage-release deal.

That fact does not appear coincidental. Mossad head David Barnea was reportedly ardently opposed to the strike, telling the Israeli cabinet at a meeting beforehand: “You can’t eliminate senior Hamas officials abroad while negotiations are still ongoing with them,” according to the Jerusalem Post. He was overruled by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his closest allies.

He is one of several senior Israeli officials who were against the strike. In the view of many, it was not a tactic by which to end the war and resolve the hostage crisis, but part of a larger strategy to prolong the conflict and to turn it against the Palestinian population of Gaza, preventing the possibility of a de facto surrender by Hamas.

Mr. Barnea and his colleagues would have been well aware that a decapitation strike – that is, the assassination of an enemy’s top leaders – is a tactic that rarely ends or de-escalates conflicts and far more often has the opposite effect, entrenching an enemy, hardening its resolve and creating leadership vacuums that are soon filled with less reachable and more radical figures.

That’s the conclusion of a decade of scholarship into the subject. The most comprehensive study, 2019’s Leadership Decapitation by Georgia Tech professor Jenna Jordan, analyzed 1,276 leadership-targeting incidents, and found that Islamist groups were three times more likely than others to rebound more strongly after losing top leaders. Against older, religion-based, bureaucratized extremist groups with service-provision arms and external patrons – Hamas in particular fits this profile – decapitation is at best a tactical disruption and at worst a catalyst for further radicalization.

And this was plainly a strike not against a military hierarchy but against a negotiating channel. This is a strategy repeatedly deployed by Mr. Netanyahu: to undermine talks as they are approaching a resolution, preventing any compromise agreement from being reached – presumably because stability and hard-won regional balance are political anathema to a vastly unpopular Israeli leader who thrives on headline-grabbing gestures, however tragically ineffective.

That was the case with his 12 days of air attacks on Iran in June: They resulted in a hardened, emboldened Islamic-authoritarian regime in Tehran, set any possible nuclear-arms program back by only months at most, but effectively ended the nuclear-peace talks with the United States and Europe, which had a plausible chance of achieving the monitored nuclear peace achieved with the 2015 agreement.

Response to Israel’s Doha attack under discussion with regional partners, Qatar’s Prime Minister says

Likewise, Israel’s technically impressive September, 2024, mass attack on Lebanon’s Hezbollah leaders and fighters, in which sabotaged pagers and phones were used to literally blow their hands off. An analysis by defence expert Bilal Y. Saab for the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs concluded that “the group’s ideological hubris and lack of strategic autonomy from Iran” explain Hezbollah’s subsequent decline more than any military defeat.

There is also a strategic paradox. Mr. Netanyahu has said over and over since October, 2023, that his goal is to “eliminate” Hamas. He could have attained that goal, in the sense that most people understand it, in the spring of 2024. That was when international mediators felt strongly that a negotiated end to Hamas’s rule of Gaza, the return of hostages and the securing of borders through a path to mutual statehood was attainable.

He put an end to those talks, and continued to pursue a definition of “elimination” that seems to involve trying to kill every member of the terror group – an impossible, whack-a-mole quest that appears to have turned the entire Palestinian population into de facto targets for reprisal.

But the only sustainable pathway to “elimination” runs through a political endgame that leaves neither Hamas nor perpetual military occupation governing Gaza. Unfortunately, the forums that lead to that outcome are now targets themselves.