How come Israel don't use Mossad to take out all of the Hamas leadership similar to what they did after Munich? Would this not be better than bombing stuff into oblivion?
How come Israel don't use Mossad to take out all of the Hamas leadership similar to what they did after Munich? Would this not be better than bombing stuff into oblivion?
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I don't think this one has a clear cut answer.
In other words, it'll come down to opinions rather than facts or truths.
There's at least three likely possibilities, in my opinion.
First is that hamas is decentralized well enough that taking out leadership only is kinda pointless.
Second, the goals of the current actions aren't solely about hamas, and taking out leaders would weaken the goals as they appear.
Third, mossad may not be able to achieve the goal, and failing would be too risky considering how much pressure is already building against israel. If they try to assassinate people in other countries, and they fail, that's going to make more enemies than they already have, despite those countries themselves already being less than friendly to Israel.
I suspect that the matter was considered, but discarded quickly. It just wouldn't achieve anything useful for them, despite the purported goal of destroying hamas.
Now, there's also the chances that the real goal is purely to destroy Palestine, and take full ownership of the land. That's a distinct possibility, imo. If that's the real underlying goal, doing anything to take down hamas before that's achieved would not happen.
I don't think that anyone can trust what a world leader engaged in a military action of any kind, so taking the stated goals as truth is a bad idea. But they could be, and if that's the case, then using assassination as a tool would weaken their position. It's kinda frowned on.
You missed the key issue: Excuse for the extermination of Palestinians.
Further to that third point as well, there's probably also a question simply of opportunity. You could take the Munich situation as evidence of capability, but it may also have been opportunity plus capability. Intelligence seems like it's a pretty difficult game and perhaps the successes in operation bayonet had to do with fortunate and unlikely intelligence scoops that they have not luckedh upon this time around and can't rely upon as a strategy. Also, while I don't know much about the post-Munich assassinations, it sounds like they went on for over twenty years, didn't really take out many of the actually important, directly involved individuals and a lot of the people they would have logically wanted to target successfully went in to hiding out of their reach so if the strategic goal is to behead the organisation that carried out attacks as a defensive strategy to weaken their capacity to do it again, 20 years just to take out relatively minor unimportant figures isn't really going to work.
That said, it also looks, as many have stated, like "taking out Hamas" is more a convenient political smokescreen for a much more sinister goal so a very successful intelligence operation that rapidly took out all their leadership at once would actually run counter to their true objectives in this scenario.