Late in 1947, following the Palestinians' rejection of the UN plan to partition Mandatory Palestine into two states – one of them a Jewish state, the other an Arab one – the Haganah, the precursor of the Israeli army, launched "Operation Zarzir." The operation, assigned to an elite force, targeted some 20 Palestinian political and military leaders, based mainly in Jerusalem and Jaffa. After the 1949 armistice to the Arab-Israeli War, the security of the State of Israel was threatened by Palestinian fedayeen, whose infiltration across the "Green Line" was orchestrated by Egypt and Jordan. In this proxy war, which took place a few months before the Suez Crisis, the Israeli intelligence services mounted a double operation to eliminate two targets responsible for these attacks, in Gaza and Amman. Israel later expanded on this type of operation to kill activists and Palestinian organizations' political and military leaders.

• September 17, 1948 - Folke Bernadotte - A Swedish diplomat, UN Mediator in Palestine, he was tasked with implementing the territorial partition between Israel and Palestine, assassinated along with French colonel André Sérot, head of the UN observers in Jerusalem, in an attack by the Zionist paramilitary group Lehi (the Stern Gang).
• July 11, 1956 - Mustafa Hafez - An Egyptian army colonel, he was tasked with overseeing Palestinian commando groups infiltrating Israel from the Egyptian-administered Gaza Strip. Killed by a letter bomb.
• July 11, 1956 - Salah Mustafa - An Egyptian military attache in Amman, he was tasked with overseeing Palestinian commando groups infiltrating from the West Bank, which was annexed by Jordan at the time, into Israel. Killed by a letter bomb.
• July 8, 1972 - Ghassan Kanafani - A Palestinian writer and politician, he was active in the Arab Nationalist Movement, for which he edited the newspaper Al-Hurriya from Beirut, before becoming the spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). On July 8, 1972,  he was assassinated, along with his niece, when a bomb planted in his car exploded.
• July 25, 1972 - Bassam Abu Sharif - A PFLP leader, then advisor to Yasser Arafat and press officer for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), he fell victim to a book bomb. He lost an eye, an ear and four fingers but escaped alive from the bombing, which was attributed to the Israeli services. He worked with Yasser Arafat on the Oslo peace accords, signed in 1993.

On September 5, 1972, on the 11th day of the Olympic Games held in Munich, Germany, the Black September Organization, a Palestinian commando group, broke into the Israeli delegation's lodgings, killing two athletes and taking nine others hostage. The hostage crisis lasted all day, ending in an assault by the German police and the deaths of all the hostages, five members of the commando group, and a West German policeman. With the backing of Labor Prime Minister Golda Meir, Israel launched "Operation Wrath of God," aimed at eliminating Black September members and Palestine Liberation Organization fighters who were suspected of being involved in the Munich attack. Over the next 20 years, Mossad units carrying out this mission killed a dozen Palestinians and citizens of Arab countries throughout Europe. In the Middle East in 1982, Israel invaded southern Lebanon, a country torn apart by civil war, where PLO leaders had taken refuge. In reaction to this invasion, Hezbollah, a Shiite movement supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran, was created. The movement's charismatic leader, Abbas al-Musawi, was killed by an Israeli helicopter missile strike, in 1992.

• Main targets of "Operation Wrath of God": October 16, 1972 - Abdel Wael Zwaiter - A PLO representative in Rome. December 8, 1972 - Mahmoud Hamshari - A Fatah and PLO representative in Paris. April 6, 1973 - Basil al-Kubaisi -An Iraqi academic, and PFLP member, who was assassinated in Paris. April 9, 1973 - Kamal Nasser; Muhammad Youssef al-Najjar and Kamal Adwan - Top-ranking Fatah leaders, assassinated in Beirut. June 28, 1973 - Mohamed Boudia - An Algerian independence activist, committed to the Palestinian cuase, killed in Paris. March 28, 1978 - Wadie Haddad -A co-founder of the PFLP, he was allegedly poisoned by Mossad while he was in East Germany. January 22, 1979 - Ali Hassan Salameh -The head of operations for the Black September organization, he was killed in Beirut. June 8, 1992 - Atef Bseiso -A senior Fatah leader.
• March 22, 1990 - Gerald Bull - A Canadian ballistics expert and former NASA and US Defense Department employee, in the 1980s he was hired by Saddam Hussein's regime to design and test a "supergun," which could reach both Tehran and Tel Aviv. He was shot dead outside his home in Brussels.
• February 16, 1992 - Abbas al-Musawi - The Secretary-General of Hezbollah from 1990 to 1992. He was killed by an Israeli helicopter strike on the motorcade in which he was travelling, in southern Lebanon. He was succeeded by Hassan Nasrallah.

In September 2000, a visit by Israeli Likud party leader and future Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem sparked clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces in the occupied territories. This sparked off the second Intifada. A wave of suicide bombings swept through Israel, coupled with attacks on the Israeli army and settlers, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israel reactivated its policy of eliminating Palestinian activists, ranging from those involved with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, to Fatah and the PFLP. These assassinations contributed to weakening the second Intifada. However, by stoking anger among Palestinians and attracting new recruits to armed groups, they also laid the groundwork for future attacks.

• November 9, 2000 - Hussein Abayat - A commander in Fatah's paramilitary group, Tanzim. He was struck by a helicopter while in a car on the outskirts of Bethlehem. It was the first targeted assassination of the second Intifada.
• August 27, 2001 - Mustafa Ali Zabri (Abu Ali Mustafa) - The PFLP's Secretary-General, he was killed by a missile that was fired at his office in Ramallah, West Bank.
• From 2002 to 2004, Israel eliminated the founders of Hamas: Salah Shehade, leader of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing  of the movement; Sheikh Ahmed Yassine, the movement's spiritual leader, killed in an Israeli strike as he was leaving a mosque in Gaza; Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, the main spokesman of Hamas, who had survived a similar attack in 2003.

In June 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the Iranian presidential election: He took a hardline diplomatic stance on the nuclear issue, reactivated uranium enrichment operations at the Isfahan plant, and stepped up verbal attacks on Israel, describing it as a state that should be "wiped off the map." From 2007, as the Iranian nuclear program entered its "industrial phase," according to Tehran, several Iranian scientists working in the nuclear sector were killed in targeted attacks, which Iran attributed to Israel or the US. In the Palestinian territories and Lebanon, targeted assassinations continued to eliminate activists from both Palestinian groups and Hezbollah.

• From January 2007 to November 2020, at least six Iranian scientists involved in Iran's nuclear program were killed, mainly in Tehran, under shady circumstances (radioactive poisoning, a magnetic bomb planted on a car by a motorbike rider, and ambush).
• February 12, 2008 - Imad Mughniyeh - A co-founder and military leader of Hezbollah, he was responsible for several terrorist attacks committed during the Lebanese civil war (including those against the US embassy and the American and French barracks in Beirut, in 1983). He was killed in a car bomb blast.
• November 14, 2012 - Ahmed Jabari - Hamas's second-in-command and operational leader of its military wing. After having escaped several assassination attempts by Israel, including one, in 2004, which claimed his son's life, he was killed in a strike on his car. This assassination was the first in a series of targeted attacks on high-ranking Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad leaders in Gaza, during Israel's "Operation Pillar of Defense."

Following the terrorist attack Hamas perpetrated on Israeli territory on October 7 2023 – 252 people have been reported to have been kidnapped and 1,170 killed – the Israeli government committed to eradicating the Palestinian Islamist movement, through elimination operations in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. With Hezbollah having opened up a front in northern Israel, in support of the Gazans, targeted strikes have also been aimed at the Lebanese Shiite movement's leaders, in an effort to induce it to halt its attacks and pull its troops back behind the Litani River, 16 kilometers away from Lebanon's border with Israel.

• January 2, 2024 - Saleh al-Arouri - The West Bank head of Hamas's political bureau, he was killed, along with two leaders of the movement's military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, in a drone strike on the southern outskirts of Beirut. This was the first time that the Lebanese capital had been targeted since the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.
• April 1, 2024 - Mohammad Reza Zahedi - An Iranian general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, he was the commander of the Quds Force in Syria and Lebanon. He was killed in a strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus that killed 11 people, which was attributed to Israel.
• July 13, 2024 - Mohammed Deif - The head of Hamas's military wing since 2002, he had announced the start of the group's operation against Israel on October 7, 2023. After having survived at least eight assassination attempts, he was killed by an Israeli strike in the Khan Yunis region, which killed 90 and left some 300 others wounded, according to the health ministry in the Gaza Strip. His death was announced by Israel, on August 1.
• July 31, 2024 - Ismail Haniyeh - The leader of Hamas since 2017, who had been in voluntary exile in Qatar since 2019, he was killed in an Israeli strike in the Iranian capital, where he had gone to attend the inauguration of the country's new president, Masoud Pezeshkian.
• September 20, 2024 - Ibrahim Akil - The head of Hezbollah's elite Radwan Force, who was wanted by the US for his involvement in the 1983 bloody anti-American bombings in Beirut. He was killed in a strike on the southern suburbs of Beirut, carried out by the Israeli army. The same strike killed 15 other members of the unit, including Ahmed Mahmoud Wahbi, a senior commander who, until the beginning of this year, had led the unit's military operations in support of Hamas.