Killing the Hamas murderer

* The Proportionate Killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh - Michael J. Totten
Hamas senior military commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was a terrorist commander on a mission to acquire Iranian weapons for use against civilians. He was a combatant. Unlike his victims, he was fair game. In Dubai, he was taken out quietly without harming any of the civilians around him. If only Israel could fight all its battles this way. It would be the cleanest and least-deadly war in the history of warfare.
It's always better to take out a high-level target in person whenever possible than with a blockbuster bomb from a distance. I can't help but wonder if those griping about the recent hit in Dubai care less about the lives of real human beings than the latest excuse to bash Israel. If the Arab-Israeli conflict will continue - and it will continue - civilians on both sides should prefer that combatants be taken off the board quietly while everyone else goes about their daily business in peace. (Commentary)

Observations:

Israel's Right to Self-Defense - Gerald M. Steinberg (Wall Street Journal)

* The headlines and video images allegedly showing Israeli spies in Dubai are titillating, but they mask the serious issues involved in the death of Hamas terrorist Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. This case is the latest example of the failure of the international legal system and the UN to provide a remedy to mass terror.
* Al-Mabhouh was a cold-blooded murderer. In an interview just last year on Al Jazeera he boasted about kidnapping and then killing two Israeli soldiers. He was also a major figure in arranging arms shipments from Iran to Gaza. Al-Mabhouh shared responsibility for the thousands of rocket attacks fired at civilians in Sderot and other Israeli towns, which resulted in last year's war in Gaza.
* But international law provides no means for stopping terrorists like al-Mabhouh. Cases involving Muslim terrorists, supported by Iran, would never be pursued by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, or raised in the framework of the UN. Al-Mabhouh violated the human rights of untold Israeli civilians, but the UN's Human Rights Council has no interest in Israeli complaints.
* The bitter reality is that for Israel, international legal frameworks provide no protection and no hope of justice. Instead, these frameworks are used to exploit the rhetoric of human rights and morality to attack Israel.
* Unlike U.S. Predator strikes on jihadi terrorists in the Afghan-Pakistan border region which hardly raise an eyebrow in the West these days, there was no "collateral damage" in Dubai. No innocent civilians were hurt, no buildings were damaged. Justice was done, and al-Mabhouh's preparations for the next war ended quietly.

The writer is a professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University and heads NGO Monitor.