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5 August 2024

Experts react: Two top Hamas and Hezbollah leaders have been killed. What’s next for Israel, Iran, and the war in Gaza?

Atlantic Council experts

Israel widened its range of targets. Will it lead to a wider regional war? On Wednesday, a strike killed Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh while he was visiting Tehran for the Iranian presidential inauguration. Haniyeh’s death, and resulting threats of harsh responses against Israel from Iran and its proxies, comes one day after Israel claimed that it killed top Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukur in Beirut in retaliation for an alleged Hezbollah attack that killed twelve children in the Israel-controlled Golan Heights town of Majdal Shams. What will these two apparent assassinations mean for the broader regional conflict in the Middle East? And how might Haniyeh’s death and the response from the Axis of Resistance affect Israel-Hamas ceasefire negotiations? Our experts delve into the possibilities below.

With the parties eager to avoid a wider war, the primary danger remains miscalculation

It was a bad day to be an Iranian proxy. From Tehran’s perspective, the significance wasn’t only the importance of the targets—Hamas’s Haniyeh, Lebanese Hezbollah’s Shukur, and Kataib Hezbollah’s drone bases—but the locations, the near simultaneous timing, and what they demonstrate about the reach of Israel and the United States.

Israel was able to find, fix, and finish Shukur in Beirut, in a building close to Hezbollah’s Shura Council. It was able to do the same (presumably, as Jerusalem hasn’t confirmed this action) to Haniyeh in Tehran, at his state-provided residence while he was visiting to attend the inauguration of Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian. And the US strikes in Iraq, the first since February, took place south of Baghdad against a key element of the Iranian-backed umbrella organization Islamic Resistance in Iraq, which has taken credit for attacks on US forces and on Israel.

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