Failure to halt the war in Gaza lies at the heart of the latest lethal savagery in the Middle East. The assassination in Tehran of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, will be celebrated in Israel as just revenge for the 7 October atrocities. But Islamist hardliners in Iran and militant groups across the Arab world will see it as further proof of their belief that the state of Israel is a menace that must be destroyed at all costs.
And so the hatred, the violence and the misery will continue unchecked, and will in all probability worsen and spread. Just because this homicidal cycle is familiar does not mean it cannot accelerate. Few parts of the Middle East – Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan – have escaped the toxic fallout of the Gaza conflict. In Washington DC and Britain, domestic politics are roiled by the fury and the grief. The UN’s impotence is daily, humiliatingly exposed. No one is immune to this poison.
It would have been preferable if Haniyeh, in common with Hamas leaders based in Gaza, had faced trial at the international criminal court (ICC) – and been made to answer for his crimes. That now cannot happen. Instead, Israel has once again sought “justice” through extrajudicial murder. Only in April, a covert Israeli strike on Iran’s consulate in Damascus killed a top Iran Revolutionary Guards Corps general – and brought the region to the brink of all-out war. There have been numerous similar killings.
The man overseeing these assassinations, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister and chief architect of the continuing genocidal campaign against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, should be forced to answer for his crimes, too. The ICC’s chief prosecutor is trying to ensure that happens, despite US opposition. But there is little sign it will. More likely, given the example he sets, is that Netanyahu will himself be targeted by assassins.
Tuesday’s almost simultaneous, reported killing of a senior Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukur, in an Israeli airstrike in south Beirut, will help ensure the Middle East’s downward spiral into destruction continues to accelerate. Once again, the Israel-Hamas war is the driving factor. The attack was in retaliation for an alleged Hezbollah missile strike in the occupied Golan Heights last weekend that killed 12 young people.
Yet the main reason Hezbollah is firing missiles into Israeli-held territory now is Gaza. The organisation’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has been relatively restrained since 7 October, given the huge military resources at his disposal. Nasrallah says cross-border attacks will stop when there is a ceasefire in Gaza. Killing Haniyeh, a senior Hamas decision-maker and negotiator, makes such a ceasefire even less likely, at least in the short term. Killing Shukur is another dangerous provocation.
It is also worth pointing out, amid the frequently overwhelming welter of daily horrors, that two children were killed and 74 people injured in the Beirut airstrike, according to Lebanese officials. But then again, Israeli forces have been killing Gaza’s children with impunity for months. The UN puts the total at 15,000 dead. Two more deaths barely register (except with parents and families).