By killing the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and a senior Hezbollah commander in Beirut, Israel has escalated the Gaza conflict into a wider regional war.
In the last two weeks, Israel has carried out air strikes in Iran, Lebanon and Yemen and has long been bombarding Syria.
The assassination of Haniyeh while he was in Tehran for the inauguration of the new president is a humiliation for Iran and a demonstration of its inability to deter Israeli attacks. In April, Israel and Iran came close to an all-out war, after an Israeli air strike killed three senior Iranian generals in the Iranian consulate in Damascus, provoking an exchange of missiles between the two countries.
By striking in Tehran and Beirut, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is indicating that he does not believe that either Iran or Hezbollah can retaliate effectively, or are willing to risk a full-scale war against Israel. But they may be reaching the point that the political cost of doing too little to deter Israel outweighs the destruction that a war would bring to them.
After Netanyahu’s visit to the US last week, where he addressed a joint section of Congress and received 52 standing ovations, he will be confident that he can ignore American calls for restraint without risking the supply of arms and ammunition necessary to prosecute the war.
It is still too early to know with what degree of force Iran and Hezbollah will retaliate. Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Tuesday that Israel had provided the grounds for “harsh punishment for itself” and it was Tehran’s duty to avenge the Hamas leader’s death as it had occurred in the capital of Iran. “We consider his revenge as our duty,” Khamenei said, adding that he was “a dear guest in our home”. At the same time, other senior Iranian officials said that Iran has no intention of escalating the conflict and claimed that Israel is falling deeper into a quagmire of its own making, while seeking to cover up its defeat in Gaza.
Israeli critics have long held that Netanyahu was not serious about negotiating a ceasefire in Gaza and the killing of Haniyeh would appear to confirm this, though some foreign diplomats suggest that it might enable Netanyahu to declare a famous victory over Hamas and bring the fighting to an end. This sounds over-optimistic because the war now has its own momentum, though it cannot be ruled out.
Qatar, which has been brokering talks aimed at halting the conflict in Gaza along with Egypt, condemned Haniyeh’s killing as a dangerous escalation. “Political assassinations and continued targeting of civilians in Gaza while talks continue leads us to ask, how can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?” asked Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani.
It will be difficult for Iran to avoid some form of retaliation to show that Israel will pay a price for the death of Haniyeh, but it is unlikely to be proportionate. Iran and its allies habitually claim that all successful Israeli military operations are Pyrrhic victories. In the very long-term history of the Middle East this may be true, but for the moment the military balance of power in the region has swung – at least temporarily – in favour of Israel.
For the US, the twin Israeli strikes in Beirut and Tehran underline its failure to stop the war in Gaza and prevent it spreading. After the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October, the White House argued that its strategy was “to hug Israel close” by giving it all the arms and ammunition and diplomatic support it wanted in order to have influence over Israel’s conduct of the war. But this approach, in so far that it was more than PR, has done nothing to restrain Israeli actions as the number of Palestinian dead in Gaza approaches 40,000.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken says the United States knew nothing about the killing of Haniyeh which he said made it all the more important to reach a deal to ease civilian suffering, free hostages held by Hamas and prevent the conflict from escalating. “This is something we were not aware of or involved in,” he said about the death of Haniyeh, but he will find few believers in the region where governments and people alike see the US as the essential facilitator of the Israeli war effort.
Joe Biden has revealed himself to be a committed ideological Zionist to a far greater degree than past US presidents, even when this does him political damage at home. In any case, as the US concentrates wholly on the presidential race, Netanyahu need not worry much about US interference. Blinken’s own view of the conflict sounds increasingly detached from the real world, as he claims to be doing everything to prevent escalation, though this escalation is visibly taking place all around him.
Just what shape Iranian and Hezbollah retaliation will take is impossible to predict, though the options are limited for both if they want to avoid a total war with Israel. They may, however, be coming to the conclusion that such a conflict is now unavoidable, and to strike harder than Israel expects. Israel could reduce southern Lebanon to ruins, but Hezbollah could inflict serious damage on northern Israel.
Diplomats may make their calculations about how these conflicts might be mitigated or brought to an end, but the multi-fronted conflicts in which Israel is now engaged will all produce ever deeper violence. Rami Khouri, a Palestinian commentator speaking on Al Jazeera, says “Israel is now a runaway killing machine” that he compares to an out-of-control Frankenstein.
Boiling hatred is engulfing the region, drowning out all rational calculations about war and peace.
