Killing Raed Saad: How Israel aims to collapse Gaza's ceasefire

Amidst a fragile and repeatedly violated ceasefire, the recent Israeli killing of Raed Saad, deputy chief of Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades, is not the decisive blow of a war nearing its end.

It is, rather, a calculated act of sabotage - a clear and present signal that the current Israeli government views a sustained peace not as a victory, but as a threat.

By examining the timing, the history, and the stark admissions of Israel’s own experts, a chilling objective comes into focus: the assassination was engineered not to dismantle Hamas, but to collapse the ceasefire itself, creating the pretext for a return to the catastrophic violence that has already claimed tens of thousands of lives, and foreclosing any path towards political resolution.

In early 2024, The New Arab asked a senior American official what it would take for Israel to end the war in Gaza. “If Netanyahu comes out holding Sinwar’s head in one hand and [Ismail] Haniyeh’s in the other, that would be the victory image he needs to stop,” they said.

Not long after, Israel assassinated Haniyeh, killed Sinwar in combat, and targeted multiple other high-profile leaders; yet the war, defined as a genocide by the United Nations, did not stop, nor did those assassinations collapse Hamas.

So why does Israel continue to target Hamas leaders? And why kill Raed Saad while a ceasefire is in place?

Who was Raed Saad?

Israel had tried to assassinate Saad, also known as ‘Abu Muath’, repeatedly since 2006. During the war, the Israelis made at least six attempts on his life, including one where they carpet bombed an entire residential block in Gaza, killing over 20 civilians.

Israel claimed to have arrested him on two separate occasions, using this objective as a pretext to justify besieging, raiding, and eventually burning al-Shifa hospital to the ground.

Saad, 53, was one of the founding fathers of Hamas’ local production of improvised weapons. He was imprisoned by Israel for 15 months and by the Palestinian Authority (PA) for four years.

In 2005, he became the commander of the Gaza Brigade in Hamas’ armed wing and a member of the top military council. He then went on to head the Al-Qassam Brigades’ operations until 2021, before eventually assuming a role as head of military production and preparation.

Saad was the fifth name on a public list of Israeli assassination targets in 2018, where he was accused of improving the precision and range of Hamas’s improvised rockets. He also co-founded the Al-Qassam Brigades’ military academy.

After the assassination of Mohammed Deif in 2024 and his successor, Mohammed Sinwar, in 2025, Saad became the deputy head of Hamas’ military wing under his long-time comrade Ezz Al-Din al-Haddad.

Saad was certainly an important figure, but his loss alone would not break Hamas. His knowledge has been widely disseminated within the group, and his successors are many.

Furthermore, Hamas had already accepted decommissioning its arsenal of weapons and has shown determined restraint in the face of over 825 Israeli violations of the ceasefire, including the killing of more than 400 Palestinians.

Targeted assassinations don't work

In 2004, Israeli geostrategist Arnon Soffer predicted that “when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today… We will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”

Israel has been doing exactly this since 7 October 2023. But assassinating almost all of Hamas’s top political and military leadership in Gaza has failed to cause the collapse of the movement or defeat its will to fight Israel’s occupation.

Israel knows full well that targeted assassinations are ineffective. It has tried the ‘decapitation method’ before against the leadership of Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) during Operation Wrath of God following the Munich massacre. Israel has also used assassinations against Hamas’s founders and leaders during the First and Second Intifadas, as well as during military assaults on Gaza over the past two decades.

There is even a significant body of literature that points to the failure of this tactic, including a 2008 comprehensive study by the RAND corporation that found military force only defeated 7% of the 268 sampled non-state armed actors, while 43% were dismantled through political processes and peace agreements.

Tamir Morag, Israel's Channel 14 correspondent, admitted that "even after the assassination of Raed Saad, and even if Izz al-Din al-Haddad, the number one commander in the Qassam Brigades, is assassinated, this does not mean the end of Hamas in Gaza, and we shouldn't deceive ourselves.”

He added, “The organisation still has a large leadership reserve, even if it consists of less well-known names. There are also thousands of armed men and a great deal of military equipment.”

Israel, therefore, is under no illusion that the assassination of Saad and other leaders before him would deliver a crushing blow to Palestinian armed resistance. Rather, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows that targeted killings risk provoking a retaliation, and that is precisely what he wants: to collapse the ceasefire.

It’s a win-win for Israel. If Hamas responds to Saad’s assassination, the Israeli government will claim Hamas collapsed the ceasefire and resume its war on Gaza. If Hamas doesn’t respond, Netanyahu will sell his political base the idea that Hamas has been deterred and defeated and that his targeted killing policy works. Israel could then escalate assassinations, despite the ceasefire, until the group eventually responds.

This is a dynamic that Gazans have grown accustomed to over the past two decades: ceasefire deals fully honoured by Palestinian factions are violated by Israel to provoke a reaction, which is then used to justify a more violent response.

Killing Palestinian 'peace offensives'

The timing of Saad’s death is not coincidental. US President Donald Trump is about to announce Phase Two of his Gaza plan, which Israel has been doing everything possible to thwart.

“Chaos works to Netanyahu’s advantage,” a senior Arab official told The New Arab, adding that the Israeli prime minister is desperate to foil the US plan in order to claim that Israel needs to fully occupy Gaza and retake the western half, where the entire population is currently concentrated.

Israel has done everything possible to push the ceasefire into virtual obsolescence, from keeping the Rafah crossing shut to restricting the amount of aid entering Gaza to less than 40% of the agreed number.

It has also expanded the deadly ‘Yellow Line’, restricted the entry of construction material and tents, increased airstrikes on Gaza, and squeezed the population into less than 32% of the pre-war territory.

However, Hamas hasn’t retaliated against these Israeli violations, and, in some cases, has over-delivered on its ceasefire commitments. For instance, Israel expected the group to find about 20-22 of the 28 bodies it held in Gaza, but Hamas delivered 27 bodies, including that of Lieutenant Hadar Goldin.

For Israel, this is a dangerous predicament akin to a “Peace Offensive”, in which Palestinians become politically moderate enough that Israel could be forced to make concessions. A senior Palestinian politician told The New Arab that “Hamas has been unreasonably reasonable” in its willingness to compromise since the ceasefire started.

Historically, Israel has used fierce military pressure against Palestinians to thwart each one of those “peace offensives,” undermine Palestinian moderates, and strengthen hardliners "to halt the [Palestinians’] rise to political respectability,” as put by Israeli strategist Avner Yaniv.

Manipulating the power of balance inside Hamas

Israel did not only assassinate Raed Saad because of his senior status inside the group, but also because of his move towards political moderation. Saad and his senior commander, Izz al-Din al-Haddad, are the two leaders who gave a green light to Hamas’s negotiating team to accept Trump’s plan, according to multiple sources inside the group.

The two top Al-Qassam leaders are close to Khalil al-Hayya and Khaled Meshaal. Saad even backed Sinwar’s rival Nizar Awadallah in the movement’s 2021 election. Haddad and Saad have ensured the smooth implementation of the ceasefire on the ground despite Israel’s violations and protests from hardline factions within Hamas against how the ceasefire has turned into a situation of ‘no peace, no war’.

By killing Saad, Israel is now only one step away from possibly collapsing the Trump deal. If it manages to assassinate Haddad, his yet undetermined replacement could come from a faction in the group that believes resuming an escalation is the only way to put Gaza back on the world’s agenda and regain international attention.

Israel has consistently targeted any Palestinian leader who offered to compromise. When Hamas accepted the Biden ceasefire in July 2024, Israel immediately assassinated the group’s top negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh.

A knowledgeable Palestinian source told The New Arab that Haniyeh had even met with then-CIA chief Bill Burns in Egypt and discussed decommissioning Hamas into a political group.

Even Sinwar, whom Israel killed in October 2024, was - according to multiple sources inside Hamas - “the most compromising leader in the negotiations,” as he felt a personal responsibility for Israel’s genocide in the enclave, having himself planned and authorised the 7 October attack.

Israel similarly assassinated Ahmed Jabari, the Al-Qassam Brigades’ top leader in Gaza, as soon as he was about to sign a permanent ceasefire in 2012. When a long-term ceasefire was proposed by the group’s founder, Ahmed Yassin, in 2004, Israel assassinated him two months later.

Israeli officials would later admit they could have made peace with Hamas under Yassin. Likewise, when Hamas’s then political leader Khaled Meshal proposed a 10-30 year ceasefire, Israel immediately responded by attempting to assassinate him in Jordan.

The assassination of Raed Saad, therefore, fits into a decades-old Israeli playbook: to meet Palestinian political moderation with extreme violence, ensuring that no leadership capable of delivering a compromise survives, and that no "peace offensive" is allowed to gain momentum.

It is a strategy designed to perpetuate a cycle where the only permissible Palestinian response is either retaliatory violence, which justifies further escalation, or suffocating submission.

Muhammad Shehada is a Palestinian writer and analyst from Gaza and the EU Affairs Manager at Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

Follow him on Twitter: @muhammadshehad2

Edited by Charlie Hoyle