Hamas leader’s assassination sheds light on a long history of alleged Israeli attacks in Iran

Explosions in secretive underground nuclear facilities. Cyber attacks. Top scientists poisoned. Natural gas pipelines sabotaged. All these and more have been blamed on Israel in its shadow war with Iran.

And the latest accusation, that Israel is behind the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, only expands that list.

Israel has allegedly carried out highly secretive and deadly attacks on Iranian soil repeatedly over the years, though the country rarely takes responsibility. Most have been aimed at the country’s nuclear program.

Here is a look at that history of alleged attacks:

Years of alleged covert operations

Prior to this week, the most prominent assassination blamed on Israeli was in November 2020, when a top Iranian military nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was killed by a remote-controlled machine gun while traveling in a car outside Tehran.

Not all of Israel’s suspected attacks have targeted people. One of the first attacks against Iran attributed to Israel was the Stuxnet computer virus, discovered in 2010 and widely believed to be a joint U.S.-Israeli creation. The virus disrupted and destroyed Iranian centrifuges. Iran also accused Israel of sabotaging major natural gas pipelines earlier this year.

In 2018, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel had obtained tens of thousands of pages of data showing that Iran had covered up its nuclear program before signing a deal with world powers in 2015. He didn’t say how Israel obtained the information, but an ex-Mossad chief confirmed that it was obtained by more than a dozen non-Israeli agents from safes in Tehran in 2018. Iran says the nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

Alleged Israeli attacks against Iran’s nuclear program stepped up significantly in 2020, after the disintegration of the 2015 nuclear deal meant to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons, explained Meir Litvak, the director of the Alliance Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University.

In the past four years, Iran said Israel attacked multiple nuclear sites deep in central Iran. Some of the attacks Iran directly or indirectly accused Israel of carrying out include destroying nuclear facilities with explosive drones in Isfahan and setting off at least two explosions at an underground nuclear facility in Natanz. Iran accused Israel of poisoning two nuclear scientists in different cities within three days of each other in 2022, though circumstances remain unclear.

The shadow war between the two countries burst into the open earlier this year, when Iran launched an unprecedented missile and drone attack against Israeli territory after an airstrike blamed on Israel killed two Iranian generals in Syria.

‘An exquisite intelligence capability’

Haniyeh’s brazen assassination in Tehran this week, just hours after Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian’s swearing-in ceremony, had little to do with Iran’s nuclear program. And if Israel was behind it, it would represent an opportunity to target two major enemies at the same time: Iran and Hamas.

Litvak said that Israel may have made the decision to target Haniyeh in Iran because it did not want to carry out an assassination in Qatar or Egypt, two of Israel’s major partners hosting the Gaza cease-fire negotiations. The assassination carried the double meaning of eliminating the most senior Hamas leader while also sending an important message to Iran.

“They knew which specific apartment and where he was, and it shows that something is really rotten in the Iranian security system,” Litvak said.

Norman T. Roule, who served as the United States’ National Intelligence Manager for Iran at the office of the Director of National Intelligence from 2008 to 2017, added that killings like Haniyeh’s show “an exquisite intelligence capability” that allows pinpoint strikes on security-conscious targets to be carried out without civilian casualties.

Hamas said that Haniyeh was killed by a missile, but Roule said it wasn’t publicly known if the weapon was launched from inside or outside Iran. However the operation was carried out, it’s likely it required significant cooperation with people on the ground in Iran.

People inside Iran who are disaffected with the government provides Israel with a pool of potential cooperators in operations against the Islamic Republic, said Meir Javedanfar, who teaches Iranian politics at Israel’s Reichman University.

Iran weighs retaliation

Details of such operations are highly guarded secrets, and are regarded by the Israeli security establishment as essential for the country’s survival.

“Israelis see Iran and its allies as the most serious strategic threat against the state of Israel and the Jewish people since the fall of the Nazi regime,” said Javedanfar, who was born in Iran and emigrated to Israel as a teenager in 1987.

The strike Wednesday highlighted significant failings in Iran’s air defense network, said Roule, now a senior adviser with the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies,

Given the “severe humiliation of Iran’s defenses,” Roule said, Iran now is likely trapped between the need to retaliate and the desire to maintain internal stability during a time of economic and political transition. It’s a delicate period that is only compounded by fights between Iranian proxies on one side and Israel and its allies such as the U.S. on the other.

“If you’re Iran you have a real challenge in front of you,” he continued. “This is a package issue. You don’t have one problem.”

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Weissenstein reported from New York.