L

ast week, the shadow war between Hamas and Israel burst into the open.

Two days after Islamic Jihad published a video showing senior Israeli army commanders in their sniper sights along the Gaza border, a Hamas official was gunned down in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Israel has strenuously denied involvement in the killing, suggesting instead it was an internal Palestinian matter. The Malaysian government pointed to “foreign agents,” and the international press repeated Palestinian claims that the Mossad was behind the operation.

The target, Fadi al-Batash, 35, was an electrical engineer who had been living in Malaysia for seven years. Born and raised in Gaza, al-Batah was an engineering whiz, a preacher at a local mosque, and a member of the Hamas team working to make its drones and rockets more deadly. Al-Batash had been working as a lecturer at a private Malaysian college.

Malaysia, a large, developed Muslim country, has diplomatic ties with every nation in the world except Israel. Kuala Lumpur is a hotbed of Hamas activity, receiving regular visits by senior Hamas members. Even the son of Hamas’s foreign representative, Osama Hamdan, currently resides in Malaysia.

The defense establishment has reported that Hamas looks for recruits among the large number of Palestinians who travel to Malaysia for study. The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center published an article three years ago reporting that Hamas was training activists in Malaysia to launch a high-profile attack using paragliders.

If the Mossad is indeed behind the assassination, it is but the latest in a string of killings that have shaped the clandestine, behind-the-scenes war between Israel and its Gaza enemy. About a year and a half ago, gunmen targeted Muhammad al-Zawahri, an aviation engineer, in Tunisia. After his death, Hamas announced that a-Zawari had been a member of Hamas’s military wing involved in the development of unmanned aircraft and submarines.

Others reportedly targeted by the Mossad include Hezbollah archterrorist Imad Mughniyah, who was killed in Damascus in 2008; Hassan al-Laqqis, head of Hezbollah’s technological operations, killed in Beirut in 2013; Muhammad al-Mabhouh, head of Hamas’s weapons-smuggling operations, killed in Dubai in 2010; and Samir Kuntar, the Druze terrorist who transferred to Hezbollah after his release as part of an Israeli prisoner exchange deal, and was killed during a 2015 Syrian air raid.

In all the above scenarios, the Palestinians unanimously blamed Israel, although Jerusalem never wavered from its policy of deliberate ambiguity, declining to assume responsibility but making it clear that it retains the right to fight terror at home and far from its borders.

(Excerpted from Mishpacha, Issue 707)