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In the space of just over 24 hours, Israel said three top leaders in militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas were confirmed killed in Gaza and the heart of the Lebanese and Iranian capitals.
For 10 months, the region has been entrenched in some of the bloodiest violence we have seen in recent times. Everything escalated when news broke on Wednesday of the Israeli-claimed killing of Hezbollah military commander Fuad Shukr in south Beirut and then the assassination of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, which was also blamed on Israel. On Thursday, Israel confirmed it killed the commander of Hamas’s military wing, Mohammed Deif – the architect of the 7 October bloody attack on southern Israel – in an airstrike on Khan Younis, Gaza earlier in July.
The announcement of these killings – so close to each other – pushes the region towards a terrifying and murky precipice. Iran’s supreme leader and Hamas vowed revenge against Israel. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned there are “challenging days ahead”.
The United Nations secretary general and Qatar called it a “dangerous escalation.” Japan’s deputy UN representative Shino Mitsuko said the region was “on the brink of all-out war”.
Considering the Middle East’s current state – from Israel’s unprecedented razing of Gaza to the empty ghost towns of northern Israel, from the charred remains of bombed south Lebanon to the recent history of drones and missiles flying across Yemen, Syria, Iran, and Iraq – we are already in the grips of a wider conflict.
“It seems everyone is waiting for an official declaration of regional war. People are not understanding the gravity of what this is,” says Amjad Iraqi, a senior editor at left-wing publication +972 Magazine and an associate fellow with Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa programme.
“We have been in the midst of it already, even if it’s a lower-level war of attrition.
“There is a kind of egotistical, unstable dance that all these actors are making with missiles and with people’s lives, while trying to explain it as calibrated responses.”
Everything hinges on a ceasefire for Gaza, Mr Iraqi adds. “We are at a very very dangerous point.”
Amos Harel, an Israeli journalist and non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings think tank, says that while there is “the old cliche” that no side is interested in a regional escalation, “it is an upward spiral” and could become inevitable.
“It continues, and there’s so much space for miscalculation and disasters. It gets even harder to stop.”
On Wednesday, Israel confirmed an Israeli airstrike killed Shukr, who had a $5m US bounty on his head for his role in Hezbollah’s 1983 attack in Beirut, which killed 241 US service personnel.
Just a few hours later, Israel was accused of killing Haniyeh, probably the most internationally recognisable leader of Hamas, in a dawn raid in the Iranian capital a day after he attended the inauguration of Iran’s new president Masoud Pezeshkian. Israel has so far declined to comment on the killing.
Then on Thursday, Israel said their intelligence assessment confirmed that Mohammed Deif had been killed in a 13 July Israeli airstrikes on south Gaza. Israel said Deif, the commander of Hamas’s Qassam Brigades, initiated, planned and executed the 7 October massacre in Israel, during which Hamas killed around 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostage. Since then, Palestinian health officials say Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has killed more than 39,000 people, the majority of them women and children.
Haniyeh, who for the last few years had been based in Qatar, was known as a pragmatist compared to hardline Gaza-based leaders like Deif. He was also part of the Palestinian negotiators for a ceasefire, which just a week ago had looked promising. A truce is essential for civilians in Gaza, where famine stalks the population as well as Israel’s weapons that have killed tens of thousands of people. Desperate families of the Israeli hostages still held in Gaza have also been pushing for a prisoner swap ceasefire deal to bring their loved ones home.
The talks for a much-needed truce are another casualty of the assassinations. “How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?” asked Qatari prime minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani in an unusually blunt message on X/Twitter.
Rather than serving a strategic purpose, analyst Amjad Iraqi believes the killing of Haniyeh – who, in exile in Doha may not have even been party to the organisation of Hamas’s 7 October attacks – sends a political message to Hamas and Iran (which is contending with this embarrassing security fiasco) as well as the Israeli public.
“Even though Israel’s war is decimating much of Gaza, by most standards, this is not a hard success against Hamas. Hamas is obviously taking a huge beating with the massive destruction of infrastructure but lately, the Israeli army is finding itself in a bit of a quagmire,” he says. News of multiple assassinations, including one deep inside Tehran, may serve to curry favour with Israelis back home.
Israeli dissent and the calls for a ceasefire have been largely directed at Mr Netanyahu – who has been accused of putting his personal interests first with a never-ending war that could save his political career.
“He was always quite cautious about using military force. But this is another Netanyahu,” warns Harel. “After these last few years of constant elections [and] this crazy alliance that he has with the radical right, it’s much harder to trust his motives.
“Most people are suspicious. It is no longer only a question of Israel’s security or strategic interests".
