One of the main players in mending relations with Iran was the senior Hamas commander slain in Beirut
According to analysts, Iran, which has supplied and funded Hamas, and other Hamas officials will take note of the death of Hamas commander Saleh al-Arouri in a purported drone attack in Beirut.
Al-Arouri was a crucial player who had assisted in mending Hamas’ ties with Iran and was targeted by Israel even before the current war started. He was the commander of Hamas’ military branch in the West Bank and the deputy head of the organization’s political council. He and six other members of the group perished on Tuesday as a result of a drone attack that struck his residence in a southern Beirut suburb.
Arouri was a very significant individual, both in terms of general leadership and his support for violence, according to Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think tank. “There’s no single cog in this group without whom the whole thing falls apart,” Levitt stated.
Levitt served as the State Department’s counterterrorism adviser in addition to serving as the Treasury Department’s deputy assistant secretary for intelligence and analysis from 2005 to 2007.
The terrorist group Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon, Hamas, and Lebanese officials all claimed responsibility for the attack against Israel. Officials from Israel declined to comment.
Hezbollah is sponsored by the Iranian government, so Israel should be prepared for reprisal, but Levitt said the organization probably decided that taking out al-Arouri was worth the risk.
“They killed more than just a faceless Hamas leader standing in front of the camera. .. “They removed someone crucial to operations,” he said.
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, has promised retaliation for any Israeli attack on Palestinian authorities in Lebanon.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s advisor Mark Regev told NBC News that Israel has not claimed credit for the strike.
Regev stated that the strike was a “surgical” blow on Hamas rather than an attack on Lebanon, although he would neither confirm nor deny whether Israel had authorized it.
“The killing of Al-Arouri is a warning to Hamas as well as to Iran. Al-Arouri was reputed to have a tight relationship with the Tehrani leadership, according to Colin Clarke, director of research at the Soufan Centre, a charity in the United States that focuses on international security matters.
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It also indicates that Israel would look for and destroy Hamas leadership wherever it may be found, not just in Gaza but also in the surrounding area and beyond. Other top Hamas leaders are being warned about this, he claimed.
Growing up in the occupied West Bank, Al-Arouri had been active in Hamas for decades. Since the conflict started in October, he had run a combined war room with Iran and was viewed as a challenger to Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza, according to Levitt.
Iran, which supported Bashar al-Assad’s administration, and Hamas, which supported Sunni rebels opposing it, became estranged as a result of the Syrian civil war. However, according to analysts, al-Arouri tried to reconcile with Tehran.
Israel has a track record of tracking down its adversaries, including the leaders of Hamas. Along with other Hamas officials, Netanyahu had hinted in August that al-Arouri was a possible target, claiming that the leader “knows very well why he and his friends are in hiding.”
In an interview with a Lebanese media source the day before, al-Arouri had issued a warning that the actions of the Israeli government would result in a “multifront” confrontation.
“Those who want to carry out targeted killings are aware that a multifront conflict is imminent. Israel would suffer a great defeat when we get there, Al-Arouri stated to the Lebanese news outlet Al Mayadeen.
Al-Arouri was identified by the Justice Department in a 2003 federal racketeering case as a top Hamas figure with access to tens of thousands of cash for terrorist activities, although he was not charged as a co-conspirator.
Israeli officials held him multiple times, most notably in 2007. However, in 2011, he was let free together with over a thousand Palestinian captives in return for an Israeli soldier taken prisoner by Hamas in 2006.
Through its Rewards for Justice program, the State Department offered a $5 million prize in 2018 for information about al-Arouri. The Quds Force chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Qassem Soleimani, was allegedly his collaborator, according to the State Department at the time. In January 2020, Soleimani lost his life in an American drone attack in Iraq.
According to the State Department, Al-Arouri also said in 2014 that Hamas had taken credit for an operation that resulted in the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens, among them is Naftali Fraenkel, an American-Israeli dual citizen.
