who stood to benefit the most from his murder?

but I'm trying to avoid this seeming like a pointed question.

As with all things in that region there is no easy answer and we may never know.

But then there are many things about I/P that don't make much sense. Revenge is often a very unsensible policy, and yet it remains popular on both sides, for example.

that I was missing.

Thanks. I haven't looked all that deeply into the story, so I didn't know if there was some logical explanation I had missed.

I tend to think he was offed, and I tend to think there was an element of revenge, but that is pure speculation.

Getting rid of him would make sense from a settler point of view, for example, Abbas has been a much weaker opponent in many ways, but then the settler point of view does not make much sense itself, it goes nowhere, and it's been a bumpy downhill ride for Israel since they put an end to all that Oslo "nonsense".

The results of the tests on Yassir's body should be interesting, but I doubt that will put the subject to rest either.

Edit: to be fair, he was not a healthy fellow, and it would be perfectly understandable if he had keeled over for any number of medical reasons.

There are factions just like in any government; for that matter, Mossad was a big part of the formation of Hamas because part of the Israeli government would rather face a pan-Islamist movement than a nationalist movement.

(That said, I'd look at Hamas before I looked at Mossad, personally.)