'Israeli Assassinations In Iran Will Continue'

'Much will depend on the position of the United States.'
'It will have to be seen to what extent the US will be more interested in achieving some form of a deal and to what extent Israel will be allowed to continue to carry out both airstrikes and the killing of Iranian officials.'

As Donald Trump paused his planned attack on Iran's electrical installation and announced that talks had commenced with the Iranians, Israeli aircraft hunted down Dr Saeed Shamkadhri in a targeted airstrike in Tehran.

The professor -- who had links with Iran's nuclear programme -- was not the only casualty; his family perished too. As did, according to one account on X, 50 others who lived in the same building as the professor did.

A day prior, speaking to the media in Arad, which had been attacked by a barrage of Iranian missiles, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would continue to target Iranian leaders and nuclear scientists.

So potent was the Israeli threat that on Wednesday morning media reports said the US had secured a guarantee that Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf -- two figures likely to be involved in negotiations with the Americans -- would not be harmed by the Israelis for five days.

By all accounts, about 50 prominent Iranians have been slain by the Israelis since the war began on the morning of February 28. Ayatollah Khamenei on day one of the war; Ali Larijani, the second most important figure in the Islamic regime some days later; defence and intelligence ministers, military commanders, scientists... and yet the Islamic regime has not collapsed as the conflict enters its first month on Saturday.

So what is Israel's game here? How long will Mossad and the Israel Defense Forces go after the Iranians?

Luca Trenta, an associate professor at Swansea University in the UK, is an authority on State-sponsored assassinations. "If anything the assassinations have strengthened the Iranian regime that looked very much on the ropes until a few months ago," Dr Luca tells Nikhil Lakshman/Rediff in a Zoom interview.

Why hasn't the Iranian regime collapsed despite Israel assassinating about so many figures of varying importance?

Probably because it is a fairly decentralised regime and they might have been preparing for something like this for quite some time. It is a regime that is very entrenched, it is very established. The regime is not solely its leadership, it's much broader than that.

So it was always unlikely that the regime would have collapsed out of a decapitation strike from the air. Regime change has never really happened just from the air. Even the US intelligence community had warned the Trump administration that this was unlikely to happen.

Do you think that the Iranians were naive in assuming that they wouldn't become targets for the Israelis after the war commenced?
We know how deep the Israelis had penetrated the Islamic superstructure.
So was it carelessness that led to so many Iranian leaders being picked up?

I'm not necessarily sure it was carelessness. Yes, Israel has proven to have penetrated Iran.

And certainly the early news stories suggested that there were a lot of signal intelligence as well as potentially human intelligence on the ground used in the operation. They (the Iranians) might have been a bit naive in congregating so many leaders in the same place and risking a much broader decapitation that they would have had if the leadership was more dispersed. But at the same time -- based on a Reuters story on the 24th of March -- we now know that the decapitation did not happen after the war started.

Actually the timing of the strikes was due to intelligence on the congregation of these Iranian leaders. So it's not like the war started and Iran didn't take any measures. The war started with the decapitation of the leaders.

So I don't think it was necessarily naive on the Iranian part.

How do you think the Israelis have achieved such success in penetrating the Islamic regime?

It might have been that Israel has always had exceptional intelligence capabilities. We've seen it not only against the Iranian regime but more broadly against various enemies and in various forms of covert operations, for example, the tampering of supply and supply chains.

You might recall a couple of years ago there was the episode of the pagers that all exploded at the same time in Lebanon. Later on we saw bombs explode in Tehran. So this must be a long term operation being conducted by Israeli intelligence, in terms of establishing front companies, having signal intelligence on its enemies, and clearly having penetrated with human intelligence its enemies and their networks.

'The United States might have bigger interest than those of Israel'

How long do you think the Israelis will continue to assassinate Iranian figures? Benjamin Netanyahu mentioned on Monday that the Israelis assassinated a nuclear scientist.

I think they are likely to continue but much will depend on the position of the United States. Israel, while it is clearly a regional hegemon, does still rely on support from the United States.

So it will have to be seen to what extent the United States will be more interested in achieving some form of a deal and to what extent Israel will be allowed to continue to carry out both airstrikes in general and operations that we are seeing now in Lebanon and also the killing of Iranian officials.

Netanyahu also said the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) will decide when the war will end.

It's possible, but also I find it somewhat difficult.

I think Israel was instrumental in getting the United States to fully participate in the war. The Trump administration has demonstrated that it is willing to let Israel to do whatever it wants in the region. In other words, there has been a certain amount of leeway that the US has given Israel both historically and recently, but it might not necessarily be endless.

The war might damage US relations with rich actors in the region. The United States might have bigger interest than those of Israel. So, the extent to which the US will continue to follow Israel might depend on the reaction of regional actors (including Saudi Arabia) and of the international community.

Were you surprised that Israel is now readily acknowledging that it is killing nuclear scientists and Iranian authority figures?
Because there was a time when they were killing nuclear scientists but they never acknowledged that they killed these people. So what's changed?

This, I think, has been a clear escalation in the recent conflict. The openness both on the part of the United States to admit complicity in this assassination and on the part of Israel to claim and acknowledge these assassinations.

I think this has been a real novelty. And in my view a warning that we are entering a new era of open assassinations in which there is no respect for international norms. This is work I have been conducting with Dr Sophie Duroy (University of Essex).

The frequency of these assassination, the brazennes and openness of the perpetrators, as well as the silences and acceptance of the international community tell us that we are witnessing something new. The international community in this manner is creating a very permissive environment.

'Regime change and decapitation never worked from the air alone'

But these assassinations are not going to achieve what the Iranians and the Americans think they'll achieve: Regime change, the Iranian people rising against their rulers.

No, they haven't so far.

If anything they have strengthened the regime that looked very much on the ropes until a few months ago with the domestic protests, that required a very violent crackdown.

Israel and to a certain extent the United States have done assassinations before.

There have been several campaigns of decapitation both against foreign leaders and against non-State groups. These have very rarely worked and yet States keep doing them, with little strategic success but also with little international repercussions. It should also be noted that -- as mentioned -- regime change and decapitation never worked from the air alone.

Do you think that in your study of State sponsored assassinations, do you think that Israel and Putin's Russia are on par with the way that they eliminate their enemies?

I wouldn't say they are on par.

I think it's very difficult to compare them. They use assassination in a very different manner. Several States use assassination as methods to strengthen their own regime internally, to prevent threats from emerging, for example, from dissidents or separatist leaders.

Whereas Israel has tended to use assassination primarily as a method of counter-terrorism or as a method of eliminating those who could provide a strategic advantage to its enemies. And this is why scientists have been historically targeted -- those working for Iraq initially and more recently those working for Iran.

But historically even Israel was somewhat reluctant to target foreign leaders. This reluctance has disappeared with the strikes on Iran and its political leadership.

Does this means a change in the way Israel now uses assassinations?

It has been a change for Israel because in the past even Israel was somewhat reluctant in targeting political leaders. For example, according to investigative journalist Ronen Bergman, Israel for several decades refused to target Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organisation because they saw him too much as a political leader.

Other States in the past have targeted foreign leaders. The United States did. Russia did, when it was the Soviet Union. France did. I think the difference is not so much that these things are happening, but they are happening more openly and being considered more acceptable. That there is a muted reaction from the international community.

States are more willing to recognise that they are conducting assassination openly, in part, because they have less fear of repercussions.

Do you think that Israel's change in its philosophy of assassinations occurred after October 7, 2023?

It could be or it might be a matter of opportunity.

This was too good a target to miss perhaps. It will remain to be seen as to whether it is a radical change in philosophy or whether it was an opportunistic operation.

When they killed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, a guest of the Iranian regime in Tehran, in July 2024, that appeared to be a defining moment in Israel's campaign of assassinations.

Yeah, but that was not a State official, it was a leader of a non-State group. Whereas what we are seeing now is the open targeting of State officials, which in the past had not happened or it had happened more reluctantly, or it had not been acknowledged so openly.

It might well be that there was a change in posture after October 7th. But I think at this point we simply don't know whether it was a radical change in posture or whether it was a matter of simple tactics.

Israel has long held a strategy of 'mowing the lawn' -- that is regularly targeting its enemies, while working to keep security and international PR going. It seems that, after October 7th, as Amjad Iraqi has written in the London Review of Books, this strategy has been abandoned in favour of one of more expanded and more brutal violence.

Dr Trenta, where do you see the war going from here?

That's a very difficult question for me.

I'm not a particular expert on the war. One thing I would keep an eye on is the extent to which the war will start impacting the US and global economy. And the extent to which the emerging divergence between the US and Israel interest will expand.

If that were to be the case I think it would be a situation in which those that have been very close allies until this point might start seeing things somewhat differently.

Do you think that what the Israelis have done -- the targeted assassinations -- will encourage other countries to do likewise in the future?

It's always very difficult to answer the question about encouraging. Because one does not want to make the argument that other countries would do assassinations because Israel or the US are conducting assassinations.

What this openness and this brazenness have done certainly has deprived the United States and Israel of the moral high ground. And they have deprived the international community of the possibility of criticising others doing this without exposing a certain double standard. As in we are not raising our voices when Israel and the United States do it, but we only raise our voice when Russia or other countries do it.

• THE MIDDLE EAST CONFLICT

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff