India must now embrace Israel’s ‘Operation Wrath of God’

The problem with “Operation Sindoor,” as India calls its missile strikes on Pakistani terror camps, is that New Delhi gave the terrorists two weeks to prepare and hide.

By Michael Rubin, Middle East Forum

In 1972, Palestinian Black September terrorists attacked the Munich Olympics compound, taking hostage 11 Israeli athletes and coaches.

A subsequent German rescue attempt turned into a bloodbath, killing all the hostages. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir swore neither to forgive nor forget.

While Western diplomats always seek to move on and to prioritize quiet over justice, Meir understood that the best deterrent to terrorism was to hunt down the terror masters in Rome, Paris, and Beirut.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other international diplomats today scramble to prevent escalation of conflict between India and Pakistan.

On May 6, 2025, India targeted numerous terror training camps in Pakistan to avenge the April 22, 2025, massacre at Pahalgam, a popular tourist area in India’s Jammu and Kashmir state.

Indians are no strangers to terrorism, but events at Pahalgam shocked them.

Pakistani terrorists affiliated with an offshoot of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks and the murder of Americans, infiltrated the valley, demanded Indian men recite a certain verse of the Quran and, if they could not, the terrorists executed them in front of their families.

More than two dozen died before the terrorists retreated across the line-of-control that marks the border between Indian Kashmir and the Pakistan-occupied portion of the state.

It was India’s equivalent of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel and the Nova music festival.

Diplomats and pundits, of course, worry that de-escalation is necessary lest the conflict degenerate into an escalatory cycle that culminates in a nuclear exchange. That is fair, though there should be no moral equivalence between terror sponsors like Pakistan and terror victims like India.

Even when the guns fall silent and the immediate crisis passes, what India must do now is take inspiration from Israel’s “Operation Wrath of God.”

It must send operatives into Pakistan and to any location where participants in the Pahalgam massacres may be, as well as those responsible for the funding, training, or support of Lashkar-e-Taiba may travel or hide to exact individual justice by killing them.

This will be true not only for those in Islamabad or Rawalpindi, but also any who retreat into cities like Jalalabad or Kandahar in Afghanistan. Pakistani generals or intelligence operatives who visit London, Moscow, or Beijing should have no immunity.

Certainly, Pakistani officials will complain, bluster, and threaten, but they deserve no recourse. Nor can Pakistan truly respond or retaliate in response to any such assassinations if India declines to claim responsibility.

Plausible deniability can work in India’s favor. If Pakistan proceeds to avenge the deaths of those complicit in terror, Islamabad will implicitly acknowledge that it was behind the massacre of Hindus in Kashmir.

The problem with “Operation Sindoor,” as India calls its missile strikes on Pakistani terror camps, is that New Delhi gave the terrorists two weeks to prepare and hide.

Just as President Bill Clinton’s delayed 1998 strike on the Taliban intelligence ministry after Al Qaeda’s East Africa embassy bombings meant he killed the cleaning crew rather than those with any operational relationship to Al Qaeda, so too did Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s delay give top Pakistani terrorists an ability to escape immediate justice.

The ball is now in Pakistan’s court if it stands down or escalates but, whatever Islamabad chooses, it should understand those involved in Pahalgam will be dead men walking, waking up every morning knowing that today may be the day they will have a bullet fired into their skulls. India needs its own “Wrath of God.”