There is some good news and some bad news about the assassination of Hamas deputy leader Ra'ad Sa'ad on Saturday.
As for the good news, first, Sa'ad was the last living Hamas official who masterminded the October 7 invasion.
Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, Mohammed Sinwar, Marwan Issa, Ahmed Randur, Rafael Salama, and Razi Abu Taama were already all dead, most of them already more than a year ago.
Khalil al-Hayya is still alive in Qatar, where he just missed being assassinated on September 9, but not a single Hamas mastermind of October 7 is alive any longer in Gaza, closing that chapter in terms of retribution and in terms of a message to any future hostile leaders who might think they would survive attacking Israel in such a way.
Sa'ad, the talented killer
Second, removing Sa'ad is another setback for Hamas’s killing talent.
Izz al-Din al-Haddad is Hamas’s current number one leader and is formidable in his own right.
But some observers have said that Sa'ad was actually smarter, more creative, and a better planner than Haddad.
Some even credit him with being the tactical author of the October 7 invasion plan, even if the main commander of the plan was Deif, and if the inspiration behind a plan of that size was Yahya Sinwar.
Of course, he will be replaced, as every Hamas senior and mid-level commander has been.
After a two-year war, there is no shortage of Gazans ready to join Hamas to get their own personal revenge against Israel.
But the next official down will probably not be as talented and creative, which has already been a problem for Hamas given that they have lost nearly all of their top 20-30 pre-war leaders.
Third, Israel seems to have “gotten away” with killing Sa'ad without a massive Hamas response.
This shows that two months after the ceasefire, Israel’s leverage as compared to Hamas’s has only increased in terms of the remaining issues that the parties are debating about post-war Gaza.
In pre-war Gaza, killing Hamas’s number two undoubtedly would have led to thousands of rockets being fired on Israel.
Hamas no longer has more than a few rockets here and there, and if it fired on the Jewish state now, it would likely get hit between 10 and 50 times for every rocket it fired, with none of its rockets hitting anything of value.
There is still some bad news.
The bad news is that simply killing Sa'ad is unlikely to get Hamas to disarm and to change its approach to international efforts to displace its control of Gaza.
It may still be open to an international body running Gaza’s civilian functions in a technical sense, and it may still be open to some symbolic giving up or storing of weapons.
But even killing Sa'ad gives Hamas no real major new motivation to give up actual control of Gaza or to actually give up its guns.
To accomplish that, Israel, the US, the West, and moderate Sunni countries must start the slow and painful process of injecting international peacekeepers and civilian managers into the enclave to begin the process of undermining Hamas’s legitimacy on an everyday basis in the eyes of Gazans.
Delaying deploying the International Stabilization Force and the Gaza International Transitional Authority for months of endless negotiations about who will send how many troops and exactly what limits there will be on their authorities has been a disaster in allowing Hamas to reconsolidate nearly uncontested power over the Gazan population.
After delaying these processes since January 2024, when the IDF and the Biden administration first recommended starting to transition portions of Gaza to a post-war era of mixed international-Palestinian Authority control, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to seem to intentionally delay real progress on these issues to be able to then claim, after the act, that there is no alternative to the IDF continuing to fight and bomb Hamas.
In the meantime, no one knows how history might have played out differently or how it could play out differently now if Netanyahu would allow international efforts to play out in displacing Hamas in Gaza, both in terms of keeping public order and politically.
It might have failed anyway, as Netanyahu has predicted.
The PA has been incompetent against Hamas, and the Gazan terror group might cunningly undermine any efforts by international third parties to lay the groundwork for replacing it over time.
But Hamas has been terrified anytime progress has been made in a political replacement for it, even more terrified than when another one of its leaders gets blown up.
Israel might want to try harder to do that which terrifies Hamas the most.