Iran assassinating Israeli businessmen: What is the game plan? - analysis

• Author: YONAH JEREMY BOB
• Published date: 04 October 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

In the last 15 months, Iran has accused Israel of assassinating its chief nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, assisting the US to assassinate Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani and sabotaging at least three nuclear facilities, among other possible attacks.

Tehran has responded by trying to use proxies on Israel's borders to attack Israel, by using proxies to try to attack Israeli diplomatic officials in India in January and with numerous attacks on Israeli-owned vessels at sea.

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All of these methods by which the Islamic Republic tries to retaliate against Israel may be continuing, but the ayatollahs seem to have found another weak link where they can bleed Israel, or at least Israelis.

In some ways, if Iran was trying to assassinate high-profile Israeli businessmen in Cyprus, this could be seen as not that different from going after Israeli diplomatic officials in India.

Of course, there is some difference between going after private Israeli citizens overseas and official representatives of the state.

On the flip side, there has been some speculation that certain private Israelis who were targeted, like Teddy Sagi, may also be part of Israeli clandestine contacts with Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia.

This also would not be the first time that Iran, or its proxy Hezbollah, would have tried to attack or surveil Israelis in Cyprus.

In 2012, Hossam Yaakoub, a Lebanese-born Swedish citizen, was caught tracking Israelis in Cyprus. He was convicted after confessing he was an agent of Hezbollah.

All of this happened around the same time that Iranian plots to target Israelis were uncovered in Thailand, India, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Kenya.

Shortly after Yaakoub was arrested, Iran and Hezbollah succeeded in killing five Israeli tourists in Bulgaria.

There have been plenty of earlier rounds of Iranian-Hezbollah attacks on Jews overseas going back decades.

Iran picks these targets because it is too weak to take on the Jewish state directly.

Even in the cybersphere, when Iran initiated a cyberattack against Israel's water infrastructure in the spring of 2020, Jerusalem responded with a far-more devastating...