Tel Aviv, Hodeidah, Majdal Shams, Baghdad, Beirut and now Tehran. Although the parties involved are loath to acknowledge that the war in Gaza is metastasising into a regional conflict, the last two weeks of airstrikes and targeted killings across the Middle East suggest the risk is becoming more acute.
In southern Beirut on Wednesday, rubble lay piled up at the foot of a collapsed building that had been struck by three Israeli missiles just hours before. The sound of heavy machinery filled the air, aiding the civil defence members searching for people trapped under debris as Hezbollah fighters clothed in black watched from impromptu roadblocks.
Rescue workers were looking for, among others, Fuad Shukur, the powerful Lebanese group’s top military commander and the target of the attack in the Haret Hreik neighbourhood on Tuesday evening. Hezbollah confirmed his death on Wednesday and said the group’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, would speak at Shukur’s funeral on Thursday.
Seventy-four people were injured in the strike on Beirut, mostly from windows and debris from surrounding buildings. Four were killed, including two children, according to the Lebanese ministry of health.
“We are used to martyrs and civilians dying,” said Joumana, a 40-year-old from Haret Hreik. “We take pride in the martyrs, as if he was a groom we were clapping for. We are not scared of anything, Israel, nothing scares us; not even America scares us.”
People in Lebanon have been bracing for Israeli retaliation since an airstrike Israel blamed on the Iran-backed Shia militia killed 12 young people playing football in the Golan Heights on Saturday.
But while Tuesday night’s massive explosion in Beirut signalled the waiting was over, further escalation appears likely: Nasrallah reportedly sent a message to Israel through US mediators that strikes on the Lebanese capital would cross a red line, and trigger an attack on Tel Aviv.
Just hours after escalating tensions with Hezbollah with the alleged assassination of Shukur, Israel took the regional brinkmanship to an unanticipated new level. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards announced early on Wednesday that Hamas’s Qatar-based politburo chief, Ismail Haniyeh, had been assassinated overnight during a visit to the Iranian capital, Tehran.
Details of the targeted killing are unclear, but Iranian media reported that Haniyeh was killed by an airborne projectile fired from outside the country that hit his safe house in a northern neighbourhood of Tehran, probably scuppering the already faltering ceasefire talks in the Gaza war.
Israel has a track record of daring assassination operations targeting its enemies around the world, although it never claims responsibility. But Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has directly blamed Israel for the attack, and Iran and Hamas have vowed to make Israel “regret” killing Haniyeh.
The decades-old shadow war between Israel and Iran burst into the open for the first time in April, when Tehran launched more than 300 drones and missiles towards Israel in a carefully calibrated response to the killing of a senior Revolutionary Guards commander in the Syrian capital of Damascus.
Its reaction this time – to the killing of a much more important figure, and on Iranian soil – is likely to be stronger, and could draw its proxies from across the Middle East, including Hezbollah, deeper into the conflict.
Israel and Hezbollah have traded tit-for-tat cross-border attacks since the Lebanese militia began firing on Israel “in solidarity” with the Palestinians a day after Hamas’s 7 October attack. Overshadowed by the death and destruction in the Gaza Strip, the conflict has nonetheless steadily ratcheted up, killing dozens of civilians and forcing tens of thousands of people on both sides of the blue line to flee their homes.
Even as the war entered uncharted territory on Wednesday, there was satisfaction in several sections of the media and political establishment in Israel at the assassinations in Lebanon and Iran.
One senior EU official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: “Although Israel didn’t claim the Haniyeh assassination, it is seen as a demonstration of Israel’s determination to destroy Hamas to the point of making it irrelevant as a military threat and to take it out of the political calculations for the ‘day after’ in Gaza and in the Palestinian arena.
“Together with Fuad Shukur’s killing and last week’s raid on Hodeidah port in Yemen, all this is a clear warning to Tehran and its proxies that Israel is not afraid to hit them further if they continue to challenge it. This increases the risks of very dangerous escalation but it also pushes the global powers to intensify their efforts in pressuring all sides involved in the conflict with the aim to avoid all-out war.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reiterated after the attack on Shukur that Israel was not seeking a wider war, but was “ready for all eventualities”. Meanwhile, the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, told reporters that the US was “doing things to take the temperature down” but would come to Israel’s defence if it was attacked.
Events of the last 24 hours have left Khamenei and Nasrallah looking increasingly vulnerable which, conversely, could strengthen Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran’s resolve.
At the funeral procession for six-year-old Amira and 10-year-old Hassan Fadallalh in Beirut on Wednesday afternoon, residents said they were not cowed by the Israeli strike the night before. Prayers were interrupted by angry chants of “death to America” and “death to Israel”. Others told the Guardian they expected a strong response from Hezbollah, and that they were ready to pay the price for whatever further retaliation came from Israel.
“We really trust the wisdom of our leadership and the resistance movement with our lives and safety,” said Aya, a 38-year old teacher and friend of the family. “We’re resilient, we have the needed steadfastness to stay here. No one would think of leaving.”
