As per the Wall Street Journal, Israeli spies are getting ready to kill Hamas leaders in Qatar, Turkey, and Lebanon.

After the conflict with the terrorist organization in Gaza ends, Israeli spies are getting ready to kill Hamas leaders who reside in Lebanon, Turkey, and Qatar, officials told the Wall Street Journal. According to reports, the operation was scheduled more than a month ago but was delayed to allow for hostage talks.

Following Hamas’ October 7 attack on the Jewish state, the Israeli intelligence services started formulating plans for the assassination campaign, according to an American newspaper that published an article on Thursday citing unnamed officials. There were reports that some wanted to launch the campaign right away, but they were told to hold off so that talks to release the approximately 240 hostages that Hamas was holding could continue.

The officials stated that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had approved the killings and that the question now is not if but when the campaign will start.

Although these kinds of operations are typically organized behind closed doors, the Israeli government has made it clear that it wants to eliminate Hamas agents outside of Gaza. Last month, Netanyahu said he had “instructed the Mossad to act against the heads of Hamas wherever they are,” before the officials leaked the story to the Wall Street Journal.

Like the American CIA, Mossad is Israel’s foreign intelligence and covert operations agency and reports directly to the prime minister’s office. It has a long history of carrying out assassinations on foreign soil, some of which have resulted in significant diplomatic incidents.

Mossad was credited with killing Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi officer and principal planner of the Holocaust, in 1960. However, despite having a long list of targets to eliminate, Mossad was unable to bring down many of the Nazis it pursued in the years following World War II. In the early 1960s, the agency began a letter-bombing campaign against former Nazi scientists who were employed by Egypt’s rocket program. However, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion cancelled the operation in 1963 after several targets escaped and at least five Egyptian workers lost their lives.

Mossad agents killed 18 people suspected of being involved in the massacre during a multi-decade covert operation that was started after Palestinian militants killed 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. A Moroccan waiter was among those slain in Norway; as a result of this incident, the Norwegian authorities arrested and sentenced five Israeli agents.

More recently, in 1997, Netanyahu gave Mossad the order to kill Khaled Mashal, a co-founder of Hamas, in Jordan. After one of the two assassination team members sprayed a toxin into Mashal’s ear, the group was apprehended, and Jordan retaliated by threatening to tear up its peace treaty with Israel. When Israeli agents brought an antidote to the poison and Netanyahu consented to free dozens of Palestinian prisoners, including Hamas co-founder and imam Ahmed Yassin, the diplomatic impasse was resolved.

In 2010, Mossad agents were also discovered using counterfeit Australian, British, and Irish passports for a planned assassination in Dubai.