Israel kills Hamas commander in Lebanon, strikes Gaza as region teeters on brink of wider war

Hussein Ibish:

Well, we don’t know.

And what’s really interesting is that time is lost, in the sense that one would have expected something faster if it were a direct retaliation. The reason you haven’t seen anything is probably the dilemma between Iran and its Hezbollah ally in Lebanon, which also lost its top military chief of staff, Fuad Shukr, in another Israeli assassination.

This is probably a bigger loss for Hezbollah than Haniyeh was for Iran, because Haniyeh was just a kind of figurehead, and the Iran-Hamas alliance is a bit fragile.

But both sides are going to have to retaliate, because Iran was truly humiliated by the way Israel exposed its infiltration of Iranian intelligence by beating Haniyeh in a safe house in Tehran.

The reason they’ve both held back, in all likelihood, is that they face the dilemma of wanting to be seen to be fighting back and restoring deterrence and showing their continued strength without giving Israel either the reason or the excuse – it could be either, right, depending on which Israelis you’re talking about – to go even further, because it’s still true that neither Iran nor Hezbollah wants a regional war with Israel.

It’s not in their interest at all. They’ve gotten caught up in their own bad policies and their own mistakes in a series of bloodbaths against Israel, where Israel now has the advantage of a kind of escalation dominance, you could say. You know, they’re the ones who always get things done.

And it’s a difficult thing for Iran and Hezbollah to retaliate without giving Israel another opportunity, an excuse or a need, depending on how you analyze it, to push things further into a regional war that they don’t want.