What happened
Yassin founded Hamas in 1987 and remained its ideological figurehead even after a 1996 stroke left him almost entirely paralysed; by 2004 his day-to-day operational role was widely understood, including by Israeli intelligence assessments, to be limited compared to Hamas's military wing commanders, whom Israel had also been targeting. Sharon's government nonetheless approved the strike as part of a broader targeted-killing campaign against Hamas leadership following a wave of suicide bombings, arguing Yassin's symbolic and religious authority over the organisation made him a legitimate target regardless of his physical incapacity.
Then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan condemned the killing as an extrajudicial execution and warned it would fuel further violence rather than deter it — a warning that proved accurate in the short term, as Hamas vowed retaliation and violence continued through the following months. The strike is recorded here alongside the broader targeted-killing campaign of this period (which also killed Yassin's successor, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, weeks later) because it illustrates a recurring feature of Israel's counter-terrorism approach across multiple governments: extrajudicial killing of Hamas's political and religious leadership, without any judicial process, as a matter of stated policy rather than exceptional emergency measure.