Ending the Blood Soaked Career of Saleh Aruri
Deputy head of Hamas killed in Beirut while meeting with other Hamas Leaders
The new year is upon us. We find ourselves in a new world, transformed by the events of October 7. There is a great deal going on all over the Middle East which threatens to turn the Israel Hamas conflict into a wider war, drawing in the United States and other western nations. The biggest threat of a second front for Israel comes from Hezbollah which has an enormous military machine entrenched in southern Lebanon. Meanwhile ongoing attacks on shipping in the Red Sea threaten to draw the United States and other western countries into the fighting.
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Assassination of Hamas Deputy Commander
Today is the 90th day of the war that Hamas started on October 7. Israel started the day on high alert for a response from the north to the assassination of Hamas deputy commander Saleh Arouri on Tuesday, and to the killing yesterday of three Hezbollah members in southern Lebanon. This later attack came while Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah spoke for hours in a much touted address in Beirut. Like his past speeches, this one contained lots of blood-curdling threats of possible consequences to Israel, but no clarity on what, if anything, Hezbollah would do. After a day, the answer so far appears to be nothing that they weren’t doing already.
The address by Nasrallah was a response to the targeted killing on Tuesday of Hamas deputy leader Saleh Arouri. According to this report, Arouri was killed in a precise attack by guided missiles that struck an office in Beirut where he was holding a meeting with other Hamas officials. Nasrallah described the killing of Arouri as a “major dangerous crime which could not go unanswered”. The office where the Hamas leader was killed was in the heart of the southern Beirut suburb of Dahiyah, a Hezbollah stronghold.
I24 News reported on the importance to Hamas of Saleh al-Aruri. He was overall deputy leader of Hamas, second to Ismail Haniyah who lived until recently in Qatar. Arouri was the chief of the Hamas military wing, which he had helped to found, according to i24. According to this biography in Wikipedia, he was responsible for organizing Hamas military activities “in the West Bank.” He was also reputedly the Hamas leader who built the relationship with Hezbollah and obtained large amounts of money from Iran.
Saleh Arouri is seen as the chief architect of the October 7 atrocities which triggered the current war. In his role as the military leader, he bore responsibility for the many deadly attacks carried out by Hamas over the years. He claimed responsibility for the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenaged boys, which triggered Israel’s last major ground incursion into Gaza in 2014. Like IRGC head Qasem Soleimani, who was killed on January 3, 2021 by an American drone, Arouri was a charismatic figure who was being groomed for an even more powerful role in the future. Like Soleimani he will be difficult for the enemy to replace.
Image: Saleh al-Aruri
By Council.gov.ru, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=143464226
News of the Day
Yesterday, while marking the third anniversary of Soleimani’s death, Iran was struck by a devastating terror attack at the memorial ceremony held at Soleimani’s grave. While the Iranian regime blamed the attack on Israel, the attack was unlike anything Israel would do, deliberately targeting hundreds of civilians. Today ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, which exposes the weakness of the Iranian regime in the face of internal opposition, even as Iranian proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen are taking actions all over the region, trying to pressure western nations, particularly the Americans, to stop backing Israel’s war in Gaza.
With three months of war behind us, it’s time to ask how Israel is doing. The details of what’s happening on the ground are lost in the fog of war, except when the IDF decides to publicize them. The overall picture seems to show that Israel has mostly finished taking control of northern Gaza and is reporting important gains and the killing of significant Hamas leaders daily in Khan Younis. It is no doubt in Israel’s best interests that the details of ongoing fighting are not publicized, given the continuing threat from Hamas forces hiding below ground. The need to gain control of the tunnels acts to slow the progress of the IDF in taking ground.
Today the IDF reported the death in Gaza of a senior leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Mandouh Lulu. In this article in Times of Israel, he is described as “a central figure in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, initiating and leading numerous terror attacks and assaults from Gaza against the State of Israel, routinely and during the war.” Meanwhile the UN Security Council passed a resolution calling for an end to the disruption of shipping in the Red Sea, which has been conducted by the Houthi forces in Yemen. As the day ends, the possibility of direct US military action against the Houthi bases in Yemen showed that in spite of the best efforts of the Biden administration, the US might be about to be drawn into the war.
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Appearance in Zoom Discussion at the Real Story
I was excited over the New Years weekend to be invited to a conversation with Terry Glavin, a well known Canadian Journalist, and with Fred Litwin, an author living in Ottawa and my very good friend. Terry kindly wanted to check in with us on how we were doing, in the face of the horrific attack in Israel and the upsurge in antisemitism here in Canada. The conversation includes some frank discussion of the grim realities of the current war as well as some ruminations on the overall state of western civilization. You can find a link to our discussion in this article on Terry’s Substack, The Real Story.
Many thanks to you, the readers of Canadian Zionist Forum for your continued attention and support.
That is quite the Who's Who of the middle east terrorist leaders - thank you.