Israel keeps killing potential peace brokers — SkimNews
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- Sir John Sawers, the former head of Britain's foreign intelligence service, told the Financial Times in early September 2026 that Israel deliberately killed Ali Larijani — not for running Iran's war effort, but because he was among the few Iranian figures capable of brokering a deal both sides could accept.
- Ali Larijani had been Iran's nuclear negotiator two decades earlier, defended the 2015 nuclear deal as speaker of parliament, and became Iran's effective decision-maker after Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed on the war's opening day; he was assassinated in March 2026.
- Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the leading figure in Iran's nuclear programme, was killed near Tehran in November 2020 — weeks after Joe Biden won the US presidency on a platform of reviving the 2015 nuclear deal.
- Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas's political bureau head and lead negotiator in Gaza ceasefire talks, was assassinated by Israel in July 2024 while diplomacy was still underway; authority passed to Yahya Sinwar and the negotiating track never recovered, with Nasrallah killed weeks later.
- Abbas al-Musawi, Hezbollah's secretary-general, was killed by Israel in February 1992; his successor Hassan Nasrallah built the group into "the most capable non-state armed force in the region" over three decades — a harder figure filling the vacuum.
- Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator for Palestine, was assassinated in Jerusalem in September 1948 by members of Lehi — whose leaders included future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir — while shuttling truce and partition proposals.
- The article argues Israel's preferred outcome is Iran's systemic collapse rather than negotiated accommodation, and notes that despite the devastation Israel and the US have inflicted, Tehran has not raised the white flag.
Why it matters: Every replacement Israel has installed has been harder than the figure removed: Nasrallah replaced al-Musawi, Sinwar replaced Haniyeh, and Larijani's death eliminates the one Iranian whom Western diplomats described as tough but pragmatic — foreclosing the channel through which any American off-ramp might have been negotiated.
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