Yaakov Heruti (Hebrew: יעקב חרותי; 15 January 1927 – 28 July 2022)[1] was an Israeli lawyer, far-right activist and Zionist militant.
[2] He later became the leader of the group Kingdom of Israel, which bombed the Soviet embassy in Tel Aviv and carried out other acts of terrorism in the 1950s, for which he served a two-year prison term.
[3] Heruti was part of Lehi's technical department and specialized in making bombs, which were first employed against British personnel during the Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine.
[2] Heruti enrolled at London University law school as a cover and recruited a dozen accomplices from the ranks of right-wing Zionist groups like Betar and the Hebrew Legion.
[3] Lehi's leadership instructed Heruti to kill British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, who'd broken the Labour Party's promise to rescind the White Paper and establish a Jewish state immediately after the war, General Evelyn Barker, the former general officer commanding of the Palestine Command, and Roy Farran, a former PPF policeman who had been tried but acquitted for his role in the alleged murder of a teenage Lehi member.
In the 1950s, Heruti led a small militant group composed primarily of former Lehi members called Kingdom of Israel, also known as the Tzrifin Underground.
The group also targeted the Czechoslovakian Embassy and attempted to assassinate German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, and occasionally shot at Jordanian troops in Jerusalem.