He was with Arab leaders when Mohammed Deif was in the IDF’s sights, so he had no choice but to say no.
As Israel seeks to “decapitate” Hamas by killing or capturing its leaders, a former Israeli prime minister told me he had to pass up an opportunity to do so in 2007.
On June 25 of that year, Ehud Olmert recalled in a phone interview, he took a call from his top security official who said Israel had located a house in Gaza where Mohammed Deif, Hamas’s military commander, and 10 other top Hamas leaders were meeting. “An Israeli F-16 fighter jet was in the air with 1,000 kilos of explosives and missiles,” Mr. Olmert said. “All I had to do was OK the hit.”
Mr. Olmert had to say no. He was in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, with Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, King Abdullah of Jordan and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. They had assembled at Mubarak’s invitation to discuss the latest crisis and threat to the peace process: Hamas’s seizure of the Gaza Strip 10 days earlier. Having narrowly won an election in 2006, Hamas decided to stop sharing power with the Palestinian Authority and staged a coup. Some 160 Palestinians were killed and more than 700 wounded.
Knowing that Hamas rejected Egypt’s and Jordan’s peace agreements with Israel, Mubarak called the emergency summit to drum up support for the beleaguered Mr. Abbas and keep the peace process alive. Israel, which had withdrawn unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, faced a militant Islamist power that vowed its total destruction on its doorstep. Mr. Olmert would have ordered the strike had he been at home in Jerusalem. But he felt it was imperative for Israel to work with the Arab leaders to contain Hamas and support Mr. Abbas.
“So I couldn’t allow the strike,” he said. If he had done so, “it would have been interpreted as a plot in which all three Arab leaders were involved.” It “would have been a death sentence for all of them.” Mr. Olmert remembered the October 1981 assassination of Mubarak’s predecessor, Anwar Sadat, who made peace with Israel. Mubarak would have remembered too. He was in the stands in a military parade alongside Sadat when the president was killed.
Mr. Deif is believed to have masterminded the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks with Yahya Sinwar. Mr. Sinwar would have survived the 2007 raid; he was in an Israel prison at the time. But in 2011 Israel released him and 1,026 other prisoners in exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier Hamas took hostage in 2006. According to Israeli press reports, the Israel Defense Forces know where Mr. Sinwar is but can’t hit him because he has surrounded himself with hostages.
Before leaving office in 2009, Mr. Olmert struggled to make peace with the Palestinians. In 2008 he offered to cede almost 90% of the West Bank to establish a demilitarized Palestinian state. Mr. Olmert now calls this “the greatest opportunity for peace the Palestinians ever had.” Mr. Abbas said no.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Judith Miller is a contributing editor of City Journal and adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow her on Twitter here.
Photo by Thaer Ganaim/PPO via Getty Images