Planned hit or preventative move?

It’s still not clear whether the Israeli airstrike on the town of Mazraat Amal near Quneitra Sunday was a planned assassination or a hastily thrown-together operation.

On February 16, 1992, an Israeli Apache helicopter tracked the car of Hezbollah leader Abbas Moussawi and released a missile, killing him, his wife, his son, and four other people. It was Israel’s first assassination by helicopter.

The operation was not fully planned. It had begun as intelligence work and had morphed, hastily, into a targeted killing.

Something similar may have happened today.

“I don’t think this was a targeted killing,” says Professor Shlomo Shpiro, the head of the political studies department at Bar-Ilan University and a senior researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

Instead, he says, it appears to be a preventative move, meant to thwart a developing attack. “The Golan Heights is flammable enough without this sort of thing,” he said.

He suggested that the senior Hezbollah commanders may have been on an officer’s patrol, a pre-operation reconnaissance, and said the situation was akin to the Syrian fighter jet that crossed into Israeli air space — a threat too near and too grave to ignore.

— Mitch Ginsburg