Will the Assassination of a Hamas Leader Escalate the Risk of a Wider War?
The two main mediators in Gaza cease-fire talks warned Wednesday that the assassination of a top Hamas leader in Iran could plunge the Middle East even deeper into chaos by sparking a new escalation in the violence.
The Gulf nation of Qatar, one of the mediators, said that the attack could upend peace negotiations. And Egypt’s foreign ministry condemned the strike as a “dangerous escalation” and warned against “fueling conflict in the region,” suggesting that Israel was uninterested in pursuing regional calm.
Still, the decision of whether to intensify the war into an all-out conflagration lies in the hands of a few decision makers in Iran, Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, according to analysts who said the most recent developments did not change those players’ fundamental desire to keep the conflict contained.
Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas political chief who was killed in Tehran, had been living in exile in Qatar for years along with other political leaders of the Gaza-based Palestinian militant group. Iran-backed Hamas blamed Israel for killing him, but Israel has so far declined to comment. He was visiting Iran for the inauguration of the country’s new president.
Just hours before, on Tuesday evening, Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese militia that is also allied with Iran, may have lost a prominent figure of its own to an Israeli strike on a Beirut suburb. Israel said it had killed Fuad Shukr, a senior commander who Israel said was responsible for the attack on the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights on Saturday that killed 12 children and teenagers, though Hezbollah said only that he was at the site of the strike.
Qatar’s foreign ministry warned that the strike, on top of Israel’s ongoing military offensive in Gaza, “could lead the region to slip into chaos.”
The statement echoed the fears of people across the Middle East that the war would not only drag on, but also metastasize into an even bigger and bloodier one.
Israel has been battling Iran-backed groups on several fronts over the past 10 months, including Hamas in Gaza to the south and Hezbollah in Lebanon across the northern border. Earlier this month, Israeli fighter jets bombed a port in Yemen controlled by the Houthi militia in retaliation for a drone attack that hit Tel Aviv. Iran-linked militias in Iraq have also occasionally joined in attacks on Israel.
Time and again, analysts and U.S. officials say, the warring parties have had chances to strike in a way that would set off a larger war but always chose a more limited option that enabled them to claim they had retaliated effectively without drawing an outsized response.
“All sides over the last 10 months had reason to full-out escalate, and they didn’t, which suggests the calculus hasn’t changed and isn’t changing,” said Andreas Krieg, a Middle East security expert at King’s College London. “Deterrence on both sides somehow works.”
This round may be no different.
Though Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen or Iran-backed militias in Iraq might all launch attacks at Israeli or Israel-linked targets to avenge the most recent attacks, analysts said, the assassinations may not be reason enough for them to mount a full-blown response.
Despite his title as Hamas’s political leader, Mr. Haniyeh is replaceable as a leader, said Joost Hiltermann, the Middle East and North Africa program director for the International Crisis Group.
Iran might be embarrassed that the assassination took place on its soil, at the inauguration of its new president. But Haniyeh was not Iranian, making his death less of a slap to Iran than the killings of senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps officers at the Iranian Embassy in Damascus earlier this year, Mr. Hiltermann said.
“Hamas will survive. They have plenty of other leaders,” he said, adding that things were unlikely to escalate “as long as the Iranian overall interest isn’t harmed, and it really isn’t by Haniyeh’s loss.”
In fact, Mr. Hiltermann and Mr. Krieg said, the assassination could provide a way out of the war altogether by allowing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to claim a signal victory, giving him space to back down in Gaza and perhaps agree to a cease-fire.
But that will only happen if Mr. Netanyahu wants to find a way out, which the analysts said was far from sure given his need to work with the hawkish political factions that shore up his governing coalition.
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