Tel Aviv, Feb 10 (IANS) The killing of Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi, son of late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, ultimately reflects a Mediterranean region drifting away from political solutions toward managed disorder, where elections are indefinitely postponed, assassinations become corrective tools, and external actors adapt rather than resist, a report said on Tuesday.
It added that this does not represent just a collapse but a far more dangerous shift towards normalisation.
Writing for ‘Times of Israel’, Sergio Restelli, an Italian political advisor, author and geopolitical expert, warned that if legitimacy becomes optional and violence is tolerated as governance in the Mediterranean region, the Libyan assassination could become a regional precedent — in Lebanon, in the Sahel and in the fragile coastal states already under strain.
“The assassination of Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi should not be read as a purely Libyan event. It is a Mediterranean one. His killing marks another step in the slow militarisation of the sea’s southern shore — where political alternatives are eliminated, governance collapses into force, and the Mediterranean becomes less a shared space than a contested frontier. For over a decade, Europe has treated Libya as a problem to be contained. Saif al-Islam’s death suggests containment has failed,” Restelli stated.
“Libya sits astride the central Mediterranean’s most sensitive fault lines: energy corridors, migration routes, arms smuggling networks, and naval choke points linking Europe to North Africa and the Sahel. Any political shift inside Libya reverberates outward — and assassinations reverberate the loudest,” he added.
According to the opinion piece, Saif al-Islam represented a third political pole in Libya, distinct from the internationally recognised but fragmented authorities in Tripoli and the militarised administration built by Libyan Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar in the east.
The removal of Saif al-Islam, it said, shrinks Libya’s political spectrum and deepens a dangerous trend: “the consolidation of authority through coercion rather than consent. For the Mediterranean basin, this is not stability. It is stagnation under arms.”
The report highlighted that Haftar’s rise reflects a broader Mediterranean pattern, where an authoritarian leader fills institutional vacuums, while external actors tolerate — or discreetly support— the power shifts in exchange for short-term predictability.
“But predictability enforced by militias is brittle. Ports become leverage points. Oil terminals turn into bargaining chips. Coastlines become semi-privatised zones where migration control, energy security, and weapons trafficking blur into the same shadow economy,” it stated.
“Saif al-Islam’s existence complicated this model. His potential electoral legitimacy threatened to undercut Haftar’s claim that only military dominance could unify Libya. His assassination removes that complication — and strengthens the logic that power in the Mediterranean’s south is earned through force, not ballots,” it further noted.
–IANS
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