On Jan. 19, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) killed Ahmad Saad, an Islamic Jihad operative, in an airstrike on the Gaza Strip. In a statement released after the attack, the IDF claimed that Saad was directly responsible for last week’s rocket fire targeting the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, and that he also participated in the firing of rockets at Israel during Operation Pillar of Defense in November 2012. The statement read: “The IDF operated to eliminate an imminent threat to the lives of Israeli civilians." Ever since Operation Pillar of Defense and the understandings with Hamas — mediated by Egypt — which led to a cease-fire, aerial eliminations have been a relatively rare occurrence. Three active terrorists were killed in such attacks after the attempt to fire rockets at Israel.
Very few Israelis are aware of the fact that at the start of the second intifada the defense establishment was given a limited and conditional approval to what the media called “eliminations” and what the IDF termed “targeted [preventive] killings.” Elyakim Rubinstein, who was state attorney general at the time, only allowed these operations to take place as a last resort, after it was definitively proven that the person targeted was a “ticking time bomb,” and on condition that there was no doubt that he was on his way to launch a terrorist attack and there was no other way to stop him. Then and only then was it permissible to launch the “elimination,” the term that most of the Israeli media used for such operations.
