Warnings about a region-wide escalation engulfing the entire Middle East have been circulating since the first fraught days after the 7 October Hamas terrorist atrocities. The most dangerous flashpoint is generally believed to be Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, where lethal clashes between the powerful Shia militia Hezbollah and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have greatly intensified in recent days.
Sporadic Israeli airstrikes inside Syria, repeated limited attacks by Islamist militants on US bases in Iraq and US reprisal raids – such as that ordered by the president, Joe Biden, on Tuesday – fuel the narrative of an approaching, broader conflagration. Drone and missile attacks on Red Sea shipping by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, explicitly launched in support of Hamas and the Palestinians, are adding to the angst.
Yet, so far at least, the much prophesied regional explosion has not occurred. There are two principal reasons for this. One is that Israel’s war cabinet, led by the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, having reportedly initially contemplated simultaneous assaults on Hamas and Hezbollah after 7 October, was dissuaded by US pressure. Since then, Israel’s official position has been that the destruction of Hamas in Gaza is its foremost priority.
The second reason stems from a calculation by Iran’s hardline conservative leadership that its interests are best served by keeping the war at arm’s length. Hamas, Hezbollah and the Syrian, Iraqi and Yemeni groups are all Iran’s proxies, armed, equipped, trained and, despite denials, often directed by Tehran and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). They, not Iranians, do the fighting. In this way, Iran wages war on Israel – but indirectly and, up to a point, deniably.
The immediate problem is that the strength of these two key factors, jointly encouraging mutual restraint, is degrading. Put more crudely, as the war approaches its fourth month, the gloves are coming off on both sides. This perception may explain the latest, frantic intervention by Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, who – echoing the UN general assembly – demanded a “lasting ceasefire” in Gaza in talks with Netanyahu this week.
It also helps explain growing US, British and German emphasis on de-escalating, pausing and containing the Gaza mayhem. This is ostensibly prompted by concerns about more than 21,000 Palestinian deaths, as counted by Hamas, and what the UN decries as a humanitarian disaster. Yet western leaders, supposedly powerless to stop it, know the IDF’s relentless, criminally indiscriminate, self-defeating Gaza killing spree has become an unbearable daily provocation to Israel’s foes. The consequent looming spectre of a far-ranging regional explosion, not photos of dead and maimed Palestinian children, is what truly moves them.
Israel’s presumed targeted assassination earlier this week of Sayyed Razi Mousavi, a senior IRGC commander in Syria, crossed one of the invisible red lines that have so far allowed Israel and Iran to avoid head-to-head confrontation. Mousavi was a big fish, in charge of coordinating Iran’s dealings with Hezbollah and the Syrian regime. Iran has vowed to exact terrible retribution on Israel. But the killing sent another message, too.
“Mousavi’s death is viewed in the region as an Israeli signal that Iran can’t continue enjoying immunity while promoting and funding anti-Israel terror by its agents. It also brings us closer to the possibility of an escalation with Hezbollah, and even with Iran, on the northern border,” wrote Haaretz analyst Amos Harel. Under intense fire from Hezbollah, Israel’s patience was wearing thin, he suggested. Benny Gantz, a senior war cabinet member, hinted Israel might soon invade Lebanon if the situation did not improve.
Evidently, self-restraint and hands-off proxy warfare can only go so far. For its part, Tehran may be experiencing difficulty in holding back the Islamist militants it has succoured. Yemen’s Houthis, for example, undeterred by the creation of a US-led international taskforce, have since stepped up maritime attacks. At least 50 drones and ballistic missiles have been aimed directly at Israel. It looks like a case of rogues going rogue.
Meanwhile, Israel’s leadership has taken to describing itself as already engaged in a “multi-front” war – a claim pointing towards rapid real-time escalation. Yoav Gallant, the defence minister, told the Knesset this week that Israel was “coming under attack from seven theatres: Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], Iraq, Yemen and Iran”. Israel was fighting back across the board, he said.
Of these seven “conflict zones”, the Blue Line separating Israel and Lebanon is presently the most volatile, teetering – in the view of many in Jerusalem – on the brink of all-out war. “More and more people are accepting the idea that war with Hezbollah, maybe soon, is unavoidable,” an un-named minister from Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party told Haaretz.
There’s another reason for believing escalation is now a very real danger: the far-from-fanciful consideration that a desperate, cornered, discredited and unpopular Netanyahu may welcome the prospect of Israel caught in a quasi-permanent state of war against all-comers. All-out conflict, depicted as existential in nature, would help silence his critics, stiffen the will and cohesion of his coalition government and deflect calls for his resignation and early elections.
More than this, a wider war without end, with Israel purposefully taking on Tehran’s proxies, could open a path to the fulfilment of Netanyahu’s oft-stated, oft-threatened ambition: to directly confront the Iranian regime itself and force a final settling of accounts with Israel’s most dangerous foe – a fateful showdown for which he once demanded, and very nearly got, Donald Trump’s help.
War without end could mean, in short, that Netanyahu survives while countless others doubtless would not. If he gets his way, Gaza may be just the beginning.
Simon Tisdall is a foreign affairs commentator. He has been a foreign leader writer, foreign editor and US editor for the Guardian
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