The assassination of Hassan Nasrallah and how the West legitimized his assassination attempt

When Israeli forces assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an underground bunker in Beirut on September 27, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defiantly claimed responsibility for the murder. “Nasrallah was not a terrorist,” he boasted. “That was him The Terrorist.”

Similar defiant messages came from the White House. US President Joe Biden described the attack as “a measure of justice for its many victims”. Meanwhile, a State Department spokesman called his killing “a pure good.”

Neither Israel nor the US government lamented the fact that up to 300 civilians were killed in the attack. Perhaps they viewed them as acceptable “collateral damage.”

But while many world leaders condemned the escalation of violence in the region, reactions in condemning the attack itself were more muted. With the exception of Hezbollah's allies, most governments either remained silent or accepted the argument that the assassination was “just.”

Indeed, the reaction to Nasrallah's assassination suggests that Western governments have become increasingly comfortable with targeted killings, to the point that a brazen, admitted assassination attempt failed to elicit meaningful condemnation.

For Israel, “targeted killings” became official policy in the early 2000s as part of its efforts to counter the so-called “Al-Aqsa Intifada.” As recently as July 2001, Israel's claims that attacks against Palestinian militants did not constitute assassination were largely rejected even by U.S. officials, who described them as “extrajudicial killings.”

Israel was not deterred. As the Israeli authorities later admitted, they launched a concerted campaign to reshape international law. “If you do something long enough,” as one official put it, “the world will accept it.”

Targeted killings

After banning political assassinations in 1976 following a congressional investigation, the U.S. government began developing legal arguments in the 1980s that allowed terrorists to be attacked regardless of the ban. After 9/11, Washington's attitude changed again. The Bush administration viewed “targeted killing” as an important part of its “global war on terror.”

In 2002, the United States carried out the first successful drone strike outside an active hostilities area in Yemen. The attack killed Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, one of the terrorists responsible for the attack on the USS Cole, and an American citizen traveling with him.

The US government made only oblique reference to the attack, but US officials rejected the UN's criticism.

Targeted killings, particularly through drone strikes, increased radically during Obama's first term. More importantly, the Obama administration made more explicit efforts to justify drone strikes under international law.

From a political and strategic perspective, members of the government described targeted killings as “surgical.” They were presented as better than other forms of bombing and – definitely – better than conventional warfare.

On the legal side, successive U.S. administrations developed an expanded notion of self-defense and imminent danger, in part arguing that the U.S. could attack a terrorist even if the terrorist did not pose an imminent threat. The US government frequently referred to Israeli case law in its legal arguments.

These and other questionable interpretations of the laws of armed conflict and human rights have been used by the United States to effectively give itself (and its allies) the green light to target (suspected) terrorists in countries around the globe.

The Trump administration's assassination of Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani in January 2020 adapted these arguments for targeting a state official. Administration officials initially made claims of self-defense and the imminent threat of Soleimani to justify the attack. However, these were quickly dropped. American officials instead claimed that Soleimani had US blood on his hands, an argument that suggested revenge rather than self-defense.

And yet the attack sparked little international condemnation. In fact, a joint statement by the British, French and German governments two days after Soleimani's death simply condemned Iran's role in the violence in the region. The killing of Soleimani was not even mentioned.

These ideas persisted. In 2021, Joe Biden justified the withdrawal from Afghanistan in part on the availability of “beyond the horizon” capabilities to “act decisively and decisively when necessary.” A year later, the United States National Security Strategy hailed the assassination of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul in late October 2022 as a proof of concept.

Whose justice?

At this point, the US government had stopped engaging in detailed legal justifications. Instead, it would claim that “justice prevailed.” This was the same rhetoric used by Barack Obama in his speech announcing the death of 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden, in which he declared that “justice has been done.”

Although from a legal perspective both the killings of Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri were extremely controversial, the US saw no need to provide a justification under international law for either.

As the killing of Nasrallah shows, Israeli and US legitimization efforts have been so successful in normalizing killings that even when they acknowledge killings, they rarely engage in legal justifications. Instead, they simply talk about “justice.”

Two main dynamics have contributed to the normalization of assassinations and targeted killings.

First, there are more of them. In implementing their (covert) foreign policy, some countries now regularly resort to assassinations and targeted killings. They present them as “surgical” and better strategic alternatives to ground attacks and more extensive air strikes (although these also routinely occur alongside “targeted assassinations”).

Second, several states – notably Israel and the US – have been at the forefront of justifying their behavior as consistent with international law. The deadly legacy of this process is that an attack can now be openly described as an “assassination,” neither a “surgical operation” nor an alternative to ground warfare, without fear of international repercussions.