Following the killings of Hezbollah’s Fuad Shukr and Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh, Israel and the Middle East are poised and waiting for the next move. The two killings represent a significant humiliation for the Iran-led regional axis, which until this point had been projecting a sense of achievement and satisfaction.
Is Israel prepared to up the ante to the point of regional war?
The October 7 massacres and the subsequent war may not have come at the express order or at the precise time wanted by the regime in Tehran. But events have proceeded largely in a way satisfactory to it. Israel appeared to be isolating itself diplomatically, unable to deliver a deathblow to Hamas in Gaza and caught in a contradiction between its twin aims of freeing hostages and destroying the Islamist entity in Gaza. All this seemed to confirm that the Iranian strategy of seeding proxy armies on the Jewish state’s borders and then using them to bleed Israel to death was working.
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