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.

It was Rubinstein who claimed in 2001 that the term “elimination” does an injustice to Israel, and that they should be called “targeted killings.” In a lecture he delivered in 2001, he said, “In the absence of any other option, and on the basis of reliable information that certain ongoing activities almost certainly pose a threat, and given the responsibility to defend the citizens of the country, there are instances in which it is necessary to prevent attacks by attacking the enemy, with the mandatory prerequisite that such attacks follow all the legal guidelines of the military advocate-general’s office. Targeted killings should not be used as a means of exacting vengeance for a terrorist attack that has already taken place, but only as a necessary action intended to prevent the next attack.”

At the time, the military advocate-general released similar guidelines. Over the years, however, the IDF had difficulty finding other effective means of preventing terrorist and rocket attacks into Israel, so the guidelines were gradually relaxed. Eliminations became the defense establishment’s primary response, and in some cases they were not only intended to prevent attacks against Israel but they were also used to settle accounts and exact punishment for attacks that had already happened or as a more general pre-emptive measure against future attacks.