THE TARGETED KILLING OF Hassan Mahdawi, a high-ranking member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and the commander of the Quds Force in Syria and Lebanon, was carried out by Israel on April 1, 2024. The actual assassination was based on precise operational intelligence, while Israel’s assessment of Iran’s response was wrong.
On the day of the attack, a building
adjacent to the Iranian Embassy in the Syrian capital of Damascus was
attacked with rockets. The attack killed seven IRGC members: General
Muhammad Reza Zahedi, also known as Hassan Mahdawi, his deputy, and five
additional officers. Mahdawi is the most senior Iranian commander to be
killed since the assassination of IRGC Quds Force Commander Qasem
Soleimani by the United States in 2020.
Mahdawi had close ties with Hezbollah. He
maintained a close relationship with Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan
Nasrallah and was perceived by Israel to be directly coordinating the
military attacks on Israel from Lebanon and Syria. In Tehran’s
collective memory, Israel’s history of attacks against it includes
numerous strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, assassinations of scientists
within Iran, and actions against Iranian proxies in Syria, Lebanon,
Iraq, and Yemen. Traditionally, these attacks have been invariably met
with attacks by Iran’s proxies in the region.
This time, it was different. Iran
recognized Mahdawi’s assassination as a direct attack on Iran that it
could not tolerate, and had to respond to differently. Just days
following Mahdawi’s assassination, Iran attacked Israel. According to
the Israel Defense Forces, 99 percent of the more than 330 weapons fired
at Israel (including at least 185 drones and 110 surface-to-surface
missiles) were intercepted, mostly over the territory of countries
adjacent to Israel. Iran’s attack on Israel was unprecedented. It was
launched directly from Iranian territory in contrast to prior cases,
when Iran has used its proxies, supposedly leaving its hands clean.
Israel could not tolerate such a blatant
infringement on its sovereignty. After Israeli officials vowed a
response to the Iranian attack, the Jewish State counter-attacked,
causing minor damage to the Eighth Shekari Air Base in northwest
Esfahan, a dozen kilometers from the Natanz nuclear facility. It was a
calculated response designed to deliver a message to Iran that Israel
could and would respond to an attack. Following Israel’s counterattack,
the tensions between Iran and Israel have subsided for the time being.
While the attack on General Mahdawi was
based on excellent operational intelligence, it became evident that the
Israeli assessment regarding a possible Iranian response was erroneous.
The Israeli assessment was that the Iranian response would be similar to
what occurred in the past —namely limited attacks by Hezbollah on
northern Israel and attacks on the Golan heights by Iranian proxies in
Syria. Israel simply did not anticipate a direct Iranian attack on
Israel from Iranian territory.
It seems that Israeli senior analysts
were entangled in a conception of Iran’s past behavior and anticipated
that Tehran’s response would be similar to prior cases, namely utilizing
Iran’s proxies. Israel did not pay enough attention to the difference
between Mahdawi’s assassination and previous attacks against Iran. This
time, the attack targeted the Iranian embassy in Damascus and the target
was a very senior official, who was close to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei.
It appears that Israel’s assessment of
the Iranian response to Mahdawi’s assassination was a strategic failure.
It appears more likely that the Israeli War Cabinet was provided with
an incorrect assessment by the nation’s intelligence community, and less
likely that it was provided with an incorrect assessment, which it then
decided to ignore. There is concern in Israel that the intelligence
assessment was once again wrong, after the colossal failure to
anticipate the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas.
***Dr. Avner Barnea is research fellow at the National Security Studies Center of the University of Haifa in Israel. He served as a senior officer in the Israel Security Agency (ISA). He is the author of We Never Expected That: A Comparative Study of Failures in National and Business Intelligence (Lexington Books, 2021).