Israel’s war with Iran has made something brutally clear: assassination is one of the ways the Israeli state now projects power. In June 2025, Reuters reported that Israeli officials said their 12-day air war had killed more than 30 senior Iranian security chiefs and 11 nuclear scientists. In March 2026, additional killings of senior Iranian figures, including Ali Larijani, Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib, and Basij commander Gholamreza Soleimani, were conducted. Targeted assassinations are not new for Israel. Before that, various Palestinian operatives, as well as Arab, European, and Iranian scientists and engineers, were targeted. No other state, be it  Russia, North Korea, or Gaddafi’s Libya, can demonstrate a comparable record. This is terror of a specific kind: the systematic, deliberate elimination of named individuals for political effect, conducted across sovereign borders and now largely in the open.

The preferred Western vocabulary obscures that reality. “Targeted killing” sounds clinical, constrained, even regrettably technical. It belongs to the language of management, of a hunting party in which the hunter enjoys an overwhelming advantage over the hunted. Yet the selective killing of senior military, scientific, and political figures on foreign soil is never merely technical. It is communicative violence. It tells an adversary’s elites that they will be hunted down and killed regardless, and that only total capitulation can save them from obliteration. It demonstrates reach and evokes dread.

The international legal framework on terrorism is not a settled field. It is a politically contested terrain, and the contest is instructive. No universally agreed definition of terrorism exists in international law, and the failure to achieve one is not accidental. A central reason is that many states, particularly powerful ones, have resisted definitions capacious enough to encompass state conduct. The UN Security Council’s Resolution 1566 (2004), often cited as a working definition, limits its scope to acts committed by persons and groups, implicitly placing states outside the frame. The UN General Assembly’s decades-long attempt to draft a Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism has stalled precisely on the question of whether state military actions should be excluded from the definition. That exclusion, in other words, is not a conceptual conclusion; it is a political outcome. States have written themselves out of the category they created.

If we accept the dominant legal framework at face value, then by definitional fiat, no state can commit terrorism, which is a tautology, and a politically convenient one. Another approach is to ask what terrorism does, rather than simply who performs it. Functionally, terrorism involves the deliberate use of violence not only to eliminate a specific threat but........

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