**A history of assassination reveals how ‘targeted killings’ became an extension of state power
In November 2012, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) took to Twitter – as it was then – to announce it had killed Ahmed al-Jabari, chief of the al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing in Gaza.
The announcement, with a hotlink to a grainy video of the air strike on al-Jabari’s car, marked the opening of another IDF incursion into Gaza. As historians Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca L. Stein noted in their book Digital Militarism, it made Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense “the first military campaign to be declared via Twitter”.
What was also striking about the announcement was the pride and brazenness with which the IDF celebrated what it had done. Barely a decade earlier, Israel, along with the United States, the United Kingdom and the European powers, would have stonewalled questions about responsibility for the attack or retained a dogged stance of plausible deniability. Governments didn’t assassinate people – that was for political fanatics and religious extremists.
Things had changed. And how. In the same year, President Barack Obama instructed John Brennan, his assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism, to make an unambiguous public statement of the US’s policy regarding the use of drone strikes to target named enemies of the US. In an address to the Wilson Center, Brennan announced:
in full accordance with the law, and in order to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States and save American lives, the United States Government conducts targeted strikes against specific al-Qaida terrorists.
That the Americans, and a number of their allies, had been killing – or trying to kill – their enemies was, Brennan observed, “the world’s worse-kept secret”. It was time for the “charade” to end, to call a spade a spade – or more pertinently, to call a targeted killing an assassination.
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*Associate Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University
Published: February 17, 2026 5.25am AEDT
Source – The Conversation, re-published under Creative Commons Licence.
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