A senior Hamas official said the resistance group is unfazed by Israel’s recent threats to assassinate its leaders and that making them reveals the regime’s political and military crises.
Taher al-Nunu, the advisor to the head of Hamas’s political bureau Ismail Haniyeh, told Lebanon’s Arabic-language al-Mayadeen television news network on Sunday night that such “idle threats” would never intimidate Hamas.
“The threats to murder Hamas leaders are clearly indicative of the political and military quagmire that the Zionist occupation is facing” following the Gaza onslaught, he said.
Nunu added that the Israeli regime is hit hard by grave crises due to the heroic steadfastness and resilience of the Palestinians in Gaza.
Israeli plans to kill top-brass Hamas members around the world are in “flagrant violation” of the allied countries’ sovereignty and will pose serious threats to the national security of those states, he said.
“The leaders of the usurping regime must be prosecuted and put on trial for such excessive level of arrogance and indiscretion,” Nunu added.
American daily newspaper The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed Israeli officials, reported on Thursday that the regime’s top spy agencies, including Mossad, are working on plans to assassinate Hamas leaders living in Lebanon, Turkey, Qatar, and other Persian Gulf countries, once they shift away from fighting the group in Gaza.
They have got orders from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to do so, it said.
“The question now for Israeli leaders isn’t about whether to try to kill Hamas leaders elsewhere in the world, but where—and how, the officials said,” wrote the newspaper.
The report claimed that there had been calls to immediately assassinate Khaled Mashaal, one of the top Hamas leaders, after the Palestinian resistance group launched the Al-Aqsa Storm Operation against the regime on October 7.
Israel’s prime minister hinted at the regime’s plans for assassinations abroad in an address in late November, when he said that he had “instructed the Mossad to act against the heads of Hamas wherever they are”.
Israel has a long history of conducting assassination operations outside its borders in violation of international law, sovereignty of other countries, and human rights.
Israel’s minister of military affairs Yoav Gallant also threatened Hamas leaders back then, saying, “The struggle is worldwide.”
The Israeli aggression in Gaza has so far killed at least 15,523 Palestinians, most of them women and children. Another 41,316 people have been wounded as well.
