Israel is killing the people who could end its wars

Academic and senior political analyst specializing in Iran and Middle East Politics.

In international politics, it is often assumed that wars end when the fighting becomes unbearable and the parties turn to diplomacy. But diplomacy requires interlocutors — figures with the standing to negotiate and the authority to deliver. Remove them, and a war loses not only its potential mediators but the very possibility of a settlement.

This is worth keeping in mind after a striking recent assessment. In early September 2026, Sir John Sawers, the former head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service, told The Financial Times that Israel had deliberately killed Ali Larijani. In his reading, Larijani was targeted not because he ran Iran’s war effort, but because he was among the few Iranian figures capable of reaching a deal both sides could accept.

Coming from a career intelligence officer rather than an advocate, the judgement invites a larger question: does the killing of Larijani belong to a pattern in which Israel removes, at moments of possible negotiation, the very people through whom a war might have been ended?

Consider what such killings actually produce. Assassinating the head of a government or an army opens a vacuum that others rush to fill. Assassinating a designated negotiator opens a narrower and more damaging one: a vacuum of moderation.

The successor to a killed negotiator is rarely more flexible than the person removed. More often, he is harder, because the hardliners are the ones who survive and inherit. The channel loses its author, and the hardening that follows is then read, on both sides, as proof that diplomacy was never possible in the first place. The tactic becomes self-fulfilling: it does not merely interrupt a negotiation; it manufactures the evidence that negotiation was futile.

The precedent is old. In September 1948, Count Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations mediator for Palestine, was assassinated in Jerusalem by members of Lehi, the Zionist underground whose leaders included the future Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir. Bernadotte had been shuttling between the parties with truce and partition proposals. His killers regarded any compromise as betrayal.

The same logic reappeared in November 2020, when Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the leading figure in Iran’s nuclear programme, was killed near Tehran in an operation widely attributed to Israel. The timing — weeks after Joe Biden was elected president of the United States, having committed to reviving the 2015 nuclear agreement — led many to read it less as counterproliferation than as an obstacle deliberately placed in the path of diplomacy.