As more details emerge about the Jan. 19 assassination of a senior Hamas operative in Dubai, it looks increasingly like a badly botched operation. When the Dubai police first announced that the hotel room of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh had been locked from the inside, I dismissed that as an unimportant detail - maybe a way to delay the discovery of his body. But it turns out that the assassins in fact wanted the Dubai police to believe that Mabhouh had died of natural causes, a heart attack. It certainly looked that way at first. He was found in bed, undressed, and his pants were folded on a chair. That impression, though, was upended when the autopsy showed traces of a paralyzing agent in his bloodstream. From what's been pieced together so far, it seems that Mabhouh was incapacitated and then smothered.

No one with any sense doubts it was Israel's Mossad that assassinated Mabhouh. While Israel has not admitted it, the nation has also not denied it. The killing was publicly applauded by Tzipi Livni, leader of Israel's opposition and herself a former Mossad agent. And it had all the hallmarks of a Mossad operation - motivation (Mabhouh was buying Iranian arms for Gaza), a large number of people believed to be on the assassination team (26 at the latest count) and a network that spans Europe and the U.S. (where two of the alleged assassins traveled to from Dubai).

If Mossad were indeed responsible, it would mean that blame for Mabhouh's assassination could be put at the doorstep of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel's Prime Minister has historically approved hits staged in countries with which Israel is not at war. Such details are unlikely to be made public anytime soon, but it does make you wonder what the deliberations might have been leading up to Mabhouh's assassination.