The Middle East is at its most dangerous point since the start of the war in Gaza 10 months ago. Two so-called targeted assassinations – one in Beirut, openly acknowledged by Israel, and another in Tehran, about which it remains silent, but which bears all its traces – have in a matter of hours turned the escalation in the region – including the outbreak of an open war – from a possibility feared by the international community into an option just around the corner. The first, on Tuesday, was that of Fuad Shukr, considered the number two of Hezbollah, which was confirmed late on Wednesday, when his body was recovered from the rubble. It was retaliation for the most lethal attack by the Lebanese militia in the low-intensity war it is waging with Israel, in an apparent error that it does not acknowledge and in which it took the lives of 12 minors.
A day later, Hamas political leader Ismail Haniya was assassinated in Tehran. Israel has not claimed responsibility, although its defence minister, Yoav Gallant, warned in November that “the days of all Hamas leaders are numbered”. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, promises “harsh punishment” and Hezbollah warns that its fighters’ “determination and tenacity” will increase. On Wednesday, Israel closed its airspace in the north, American and British airlines Delta, United Airlines and British Airways cancelled flights to the country and Washington urged its citizens not to travel to Lebanon.
Israeli military correspondents are already predicting two foreseeable consequences: Hamas will try to carry out attacks in the West Bank (which have been repeated over the last 10 months, both because of the effectiveness of military repression and because of a strategic decision) and Hezbollah will increase the range of its missiles. Until now, they have focused on northern Israel and the Golan Heights, a Syrian territory occupied since the Six-Day War in 1967. The expectation is a “phased revenge” that may include attacks from Yemen, the country that Israel bombed for the first time this month, in “one of the most distant operations of the Israeli Air Force” in its history, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted in a speech to the nation late on Wednesday. An explosive drone launched by the Houthi militia had previously killed one person in Tel Aviv. It was the symbolic crossing of two new red lines that a year ago would have been considered political fiction.
“Difficult days lie ahead,” Netanyahu admitted in his statement, in which he boasted about the murder of Shukr and his handling of the crisis. “For months, not a week has passed when we are not told, here and abroad: ‘The war is over.’ […] “I did not bow to those voices then, nor will I do so now. All the achievements we have obtained are because we did not give up. It has not been easy. I have had to reject many pressures,” he said.
USA, absent
All this while the world power with the greatest capacity for influence, the United States, is absent and immersed in its own electoral frenzy. On the one hand, with a president (Joe Biden) ousted by his own party and trapped in his pro-Israeli inertia. On the other, with the favourite in the November elections, Donald Trump, who is in favour of letting Netanyahu “finish the job” and who accused Biden in the calamitous debate of behaving like a “weak Palestinian”.
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Several reasons make this a particularly delicate week. One is the hierarchy. Haniya is the most senior leader to be killed by Israel since the war in Gaza began and, more generally, in two decades. The same with Hezbollah: Israel has never aimed so high since the assassination of Imad Mughniye by the Mossad, its foreign intelligence agency, and the CIA in Damascus in 2008.
Another thing, it’s raining on wet ground. Iran and Israel already opted to end their unprecedented confrontation in April in a draw. It was when Tehran launched the first attack in its history from its territory against the Jewish State, but with all the precautions so that it had more of a message than a real threat. It was when Biden was still making his voice heard to prevent a war in the Middle East in the middle of an election year. And, above all, before a new humiliation for Iran.
The assassinations of Haniya and Shukr show Israel’s ability to overcome consecutive defences (very little has emerged of the attack, only that it was a guided missile) in the heart of its Shiite enemies’ strongholds. One is Dahiya, the suburb of Beirut decorated with yellow Hezbollah flags, celebrations of the 7 October attack and photos of Mughniye and Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanese party-militia. The other is Tehran, with the added affront of killing a guest at the ceremony of the new president, Masud Pezeshkian.
“Both operations demonstrate how excellent the precise intelligence was and how capable Israeli intelligence was in penetrating Hezbollah and the security layers in Tehran. But do they mark a turning point? I doubt it. They only increase the danger of a regional war. Israel has no strategy or exit plan and is motivated by tactical measures,” lamented Yossi Melman, an analyst for the daily on Wednesday. Haaretzspecialized in intelligence matters and author of the essay Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret WarsMelman insists that targeted killings (contrary to international law) only make sense as a means, but Israel has turned them into an end in themselves with no strategic benefit.
Trita Parsi, the Iranian-American analyst who founded the National Iranian-American Council and author of an essay on Barack Obama’s diplomacy towards Tehran, has outlined on social network X the advantages that Netanyahu gains from Haniya’s disappearance. The Islamist political leader had been directly participating in the ceasefire negotiations, taking advantage of the fact that he lived between Qatar and Turkey and could travel. The assassination, the analyst believes, now gives Netanyahu “weeks, if not months” without progress in the dialogue, which was already quite stagnant. The prime minister knows that the end of the war would force him to face the polls again, but this time with the polls against him and three indictments in the courts. And that the new Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, has hinted that she will be less accommodating with him than Biden.
Parsi also believes that the assassination ends the possibility of a rapprochement between Washington and Tehran, for which the reformist Pezeshkian campaigned, by dragging the White House into a large-scale regional war that it neither wants nor needs. And it corners Harris, creating a context in which the alliance against a common strategic enemy would swallow up the differences with Netanyahu over Gaza.
These are the mud left by 10 months of dust in which Netanyahu seems to be embarking on a kind of headlong flight towards the “total victory” in Gaza that he promised and that not even his own people seem to know very well what it consists of. Nasrallah (whose assassination has been requested in recent days by several Israeli ministers) has been insisting that he will cease his attacks against the Jewish State as soon as it does the same in Gaza. But the ceasefire that has been mediated for months by the US, Egypt and Qatar always ends up stumbling over the same stone: Netanyahu’s refusal to accept Hamas’s main demand in exchange for the handover of all the hostages: the end of the war.
Miscalculation
The passage of time has increased, by sheer statistics, the chances of a miscalculation or a missed shot that would break the delicate balance on which the daily clashes between Israel and Hezbollah have been sustained. That is what happened last Saturday. A projectile, for which Hezbollah does not claim responsibility, but which all indications are that it launched towards a nearby military base and missed, killed 12 Druze children and teenagers as they were playing football in the town of Majdal Shams, in the Golan Heights. “Hezbollah has crossed all the red lines,” said Foreign Minister Israel Katz at the time. The response was the murder of Shukr.
The other murder, that of Haniya, nevertheless opens up a more hopeful possibility. Netanyahu needs a winning narrative, a way out with which to face the early elections that a majority of the citizens are demanding and whose convening is only a matter of time. A “victory photo”, as it is known in Hebrew political jargon.
Israel has not obtained the most coveted head (that of Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahia Sinwar), but it has probably killed (not confirmed) the number two and number three of the Islamist movement in the Strip and, since Wednesday, its two main political leaders in exile: Haniya and Saleh al Aruri, in January in Beirut. A balance that, added to another bloody “victory photo” (the nearly 40,000 dead in a Gaza turned into rubble), can allow it to present Hamas as decapitated and, in other words, the attack of October 7 as justly avenged.
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