Through nearly 10 months of intense war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Israel has fought a parallel, slower-paced conflict with Hamas’ allies across the Middle East in which all sides have risked major escalation but ultimately avoided dragging the region into a bigger, multi-front war.

The attacks on two of Israel’s leading foes Tuesday and Wednesday have created one of the biggest challenges to that equilibrium since the fighting began in October.

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Israel Targeted Influential Hezbollah Leader

Israel’s Tuesday night strike on Fuad Shukr, a senior Hezbollah commander in Beirut, was the first time during this war that Israel has targeted such an influential Hezbollah leader in Lebanon’s capital. Hours later, the killing in Iran of Hamas’ political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was considered the most brazen breach of Iran’s defenses since October.

Taken together, the seniority of the targets, the sensitive location of the strikes and their near simultaneity were viewed as a particularly provocative escalation that has left the region fearing an even bigger response from Iran and its regional proxies, including Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq. The scale of that reaction could determine whether the low-level regional battle between Israel and the Iranian alliance tips into a full-scale, all-out conflict.

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Some analysts said the killing of Haniyeh, Hamas’ top negotiator, also made a cease-fire deal in Gaza less likely in the immediate future. Israelis hoped that the killing of such an influential leader would eventually help break Hamas’ resolve, making the group more willing to compromise in the long term. But others said the organization was unlikely to be seriously affected by Haniyeh’s death.

Despite his title as Hamas’ political leader, Haniyeh is replaceable, said Joost Hiltermann, the Middle East and North Africa program director for the International Crisis Group.

“Hamas will survive,” he said. “They have plenty of other leaders.”

Analysts also said that both Iran and Hezbollah had reasons to respond in ways that make all-out war less likely. For Iran, the attack on its soil was embarrassing but not catastrophic because it targeted a foreign guest rather than senior Iranian officials, according to Andreas Krieg, an expert on the Middle East at King’s College, London.

“I don’t think necessarily that the Iranians’ strategic calculus has changed,” Krieg said.

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“Iran will have to respond in some way,” he said. “But it’s not a turning point.”

Hezbollah Faces Pressure to React

Hezbollah faces more pressure to react than Iran because the strike on Beirut hit one of its own commanders, rather than one of its allies, according to Michael Stephens, a nonresident expert on the Middle East at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a Philadelphia-based research organization. But it is by no means clear that Haniyeh’s death in Iran will change Hezbollah’s calculations in Lebanon, Stephens said.

“We need to be very clear and very careful about how we conflate the two issues,” Stephens said. “Over the past nine months, Hezbollah has repeatedly shown that what happens to Hamas is not related to Hezbollah’s strategic imperatives. That doesn’t mean there won’t be conflict. I just think the route to getting there is more complex than it seems.”

Past experiences show that de-escalation is still possible. In January, Israeli strikes killed a senior Hamas leader in Hezbollah’s stronghold in Beirut, leading to fears that Hezbollah would mount a particularly fierce response on Hamas’ behalf. Days later, Hezbollah instead chose what was construed as a largely symbolic response, firing a barrage of rockets at an Israeli army base that caused little damaged.

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After Israel killed several Iranian commanders in Syria in April, Iran responded with one of the biggest barrages of cruise and ballistic missiles in military history. After a symbolic Israeli counterstrike, the two sides then chose to step back from the brink.

The double assassination could also provide a way out of the war altogether by allowing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to claim a symbolic victory, giving him space to back down in Gaza and perhaps agree to a cease-fire.

But Netanyahu may still avoid doing so if he believes a truce would collapse his government; his ruling coalition relies on far-right lawmakers who have threatened to quit the alliance if the war ends without Hamas’ defeat.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Patrick Kingsley/Diego Ibarra Sánchez
c.2024 The New York Times Company